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I miss the classic Mac OS. From time to time I turn on one of my classic Macs and use Mac OS 8 or 9 for a while, going down memory lane. While the classic Mac

I miss the classic Mac OS. From time to time I turn on one of my classic Macs and use Mac OS 8 or 9 for a while, going down memory lane. While the classic Mac OS was unstable due to its lack of both memory protection and preemptive multitasking, there's a certain simplicity to the interface, as well as a near-universal adherence to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines by most applications, that is unfortunately missing in today's desktop computing environments. Modern GUI software has a lot of "bling", but I feel that Apple got it right in the 1980s and 1990s, with less emphasis on slick, shiny designs and more emphasis on the substance of building usable interfaces. I wish more developers would learn from Apple's usability guidelines from the 1980s and 1990s.

Austin_Conlon 7y ago
1995 Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines: http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf.
pjmlp 7y ago
What I kind of miss, was how Apple was into better languages for OS development (Object Pascal, Hypercard, MCL, Dylan, NewtonScript). I guess that with Swift and Playgrounds, they are kind of back on track.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Playgrounds are still buggy, almost 6 years later. Even Swift has had weird regressions where previously fine code throws runtime errors in a recent Xcode.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    They might not be perfect, but they exist and provide a much better developer experience than the PDP-11 one.
- linguae 7y ago
  There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple. OpenDoc is one of the most interesting technologies to be developed during this time period. OpenDoc would have dramatically disrupted the desktop applications market; people would have bought component-based software instead of monolithic applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned (I suspect the main reason for this is because Apple desperately needed Microsoft's and Adobe's continued support for Mac OS back when Apple's situation looked precarious), something that I've pondered a lot recently is what would have happened had the free/open source software community had developed something like OpenDoc to build component-based applications for Linux, where the community could spend its time developing components, instead of imitating the Mac and Windows approaches of building large, monolithic applications, which unfortunately have resulted in a very long game of catchup (compare GIMP to Photoshop, or compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office).
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    I am with you on that, for a while I thought that either GNOME or KDE would win the desktop wars, providing on GNU/Linux the same desktop development experience of Macs, Amigas, BeOS, Windows, OS/2 with their respective component libraries. Instead the GNU/Linux wars replaced the UNIX wars, and while GNOME and KDE do strive to provide that experience, everyone is using Electron apps instead. The closest to that MacOS development experience turned out to be Android, where the actual kernel being used is irrelevant to user space.
  - leoc 7y ago
    > There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple. The situation seems to have been similar in Sun Microsystems around the same era: a number of different high-level language/runtime projects kicking around (eg. Self), and a generally deflating outcome. > While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned I don't know enough about OpenDoc to comment about the merits of what happened, but here are a few things. First, Jobs and Apple were pushing Rhapsody (Cocoa as a cross-platform API for applications) https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ when OpenDoc was cancelled. It's easy to see the cancellation as the ex-NeXTers killing anything that competed with the NeXT technology or just didn't particularly integrate with it. OTOH, OpenDoc was definitely seen as a big commercial and consumer-adoption flop before Jobs killed it. Finally, it has to be noted that OpenDoc's inspiration and competitor OLE is still around, perhaps underloved.
FraKtus 7y ago
I still miss QuickTime, it's not even closely replaced by AVFondation: it just supports a few codecs, cannot be extended by plugins, terrible support for video acquisition... sniff
kccqzy 7y ago
The early days of Mac OS X was like that as well; most third-party devs usually followed the HIG pretty closely. The early days of iPhone apps were similar. That was before designers became way too carried away designing something that's unique and recognizable for their own brands rather than for the unity of the platform. And then it spread to OS X.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  I keep hoping that “UI as branding” is just a trend and eventually goes out of fashion. UI/UX is overdue for a dose of utilitarianism.
  - amiga-workbench 7y ago
    Its one of the things I appreciated about Sailfish OS's UI lipstick. The system wide inclusion of the users colourscheme preference is so completely hostile to attempts to brand the interface. Meego also had a nice communications hub where all instant messengers would integrate centrally. The skype application was essentially just a plugin for this hub.
    - rescbr 7y ago
      Microsoft tried that with Windows Phone 7. I loved the utilitarian concept of plugins for hubs. The OS was king. Unfortunately iOS' everything is app concept won the market. Soon enough, apps will be the whole ecosystem and the operating system will just be a detail.
tyingq 7y ago
A/UX was a choice too, with memory protection and preemptive multitasking. There was a compatibility layer to run system7 binaries too.
jasomill 7y ago
Another thing I miss is the near-ubiquitous AppleScript support, at least in terms of major applications. As frustrating as AppleScript is as a programming language — speaking as someone who curses it on a near-weekly basis — it's still far easier to reliably automate applications using a reasonably well-defined object model than via UI automation, which is the only viable alternative for most current OS X applications. And for simple tasks, even a problematic common scripting language like AppleScript is preferable to needing to use a different scripting language for each application, even if these languages are, individually, superior.
machinecoffee 7y ago
I had a Mac Performa from the OS 7 days, and Inside Macintosh from the same time - but with the C API from what I remember, and used Metrowerks CodeWarrior as the development IDE. It was a great introduction to GUI programming, and CodeWarrior was a great IDE too. I noticed this from the first pascal code example: TEIdle(textH); {call TextEdit to make vertical bar blink} .. oh how spoiled we are today :-)

Austin_Conlon 7y ago

1995 Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines: http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf.

pjmlp 7y ago

What I kind of miss, was how Apple was into better languages for OS development (Object Pascal, Hypercard, MCL, Dylan, NewtonScript). I guess that with Swift and Playgrounds, they are kind of back on track.

Razengan 7y ago
Playgrounds are still buggy, almost 6 years later. Even Swift has had weird regressions where previously fine code throws runtime errors in a recent Xcode.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  They might not be perfect, but they exist and provide a much better developer experience than the PDP-11 one.
linguae 7y ago
There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple. OpenDoc is one of the most interesting technologies to be developed during this time period. OpenDoc would have dramatically disrupted the desktop applications market; people would have bought component-based software instead of monolithic applications such as Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned (I suspect the main reason for this is because Apple desperately needed Microsoft's and Adobe's continued support for Mac OS back when Apple's situation looked precarious), something that I've pondered a lot recently is what would have happened had the free/open source software community had developed something like OpenDoc to build component-based applications for Linux, where the community could spend its time developing components, instead of imitating the Mac and Windows approaches of building large, monolithic applications, which unfortunately have resulted in a very long game of catchup (compare GIMP to Photoshop, or compare LibreOffice to Microsoft Office).
- pjmlp 7y ago
  I am with you on that, for a while I thought that either GNOME or KDE would win the desktop wars, providing on GNU/Linux the same desktop development experience of Macs, Amigas, BeOS, Windows, OS/2 with their respective component libraries. Instead the GNU/Linux wars replaced the UNIX wars, and while GNOME and KDE do strive to provide that experience, everyone is using Electron apps instead. The closest to that MacOS development experience turned out to be Android, where the actual kernel being used is irrelevant to user space.
- leoc 7y ago
  > There were a lot of really cool technologies developed during the "interregnum" years between 1985 and 1997 at Apple. The situation seems to have been similar in Sun Microsystems around the same era: a number of different high-level language/runtime projects kicking around (eg. Self), and a generally deflating outcome. > While it was canned when Steve Jobs returned I don't know enough about OpenDoc to comment about the merits of what happened, but here are a few things. First, Jobs and Apple were pushing Rhapsody (Cocoa as a cross-platform API for applications) https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ https://arstechnica.com/staff/2008/04/rhapsody-and-blues/ when OpenDoc was cancelled. It's easy to see the cancellation as the ex-NeXTers killing anything that competed with the NeXT technology or just didn't particularly integrate with it. OTOH, OpenDoc was definitely seen as a big commercial and consumer-adoption flop before Jobs killed it. Finally, it has to be noted that OpenDoc's inspiration and competitor OLE is still around, perhaps underloved.

FraKtus 7y ago

I still miss QuickTime, it's not even closely replaced by AVFondation: it just supports a few codecs, cannot be extended by plugins, terrible support for video acquisition... sniff

kccqzy 7y ago

The early days of Mac OS X was like that as well; most third-party devs usually followed the HIG pretty closely. The early days of iPhone apps were similar. That was before designers became way too carried away designing something that's unique and recognizable for their own brands rather than for the unity of the platform. And then it spread to OS X.

kitsunesoba 7y ago
I keep hoping that “UI as branding” is just a trend and eventually goes out of fashion. UI/UX is overdue for a dose of utilitarianism.
- amiga-workbench 7y ago
  Its one of the things I appreciated about Sailfish OS's UI lipstick. The system wide inclusion of the users colourscheme preference is so completely hostile to attempts to brand the interface. Meego also had a nice communications hub where all instant messengers would integrate centrally. The skype application was essentially just a plugin for this hub.
  - rescbr 7y ago
    Microsoft tried that with Windows Phone 7. I loved the utilitarian concept of plugins for hubs. The OS was king. Unfortunately iOS' everything is app concept won the market. Soon enough, apps will be the whole ecosystem and the operating system will just be a detail.

tyingq 7y ago

A/UX was a choice too, with memory protection and preemptive multitasking. There was a compatibility layer to run system7 binaries too.

jasomill 7y ago

Another thing I miss is the near-ubiquitous AppleScript support, at least in terms of major applications. As frustrating as AppleScript is as a programming language — speaking as someone who curses it on a near-weekly basis — it's still far easier to reliably automate applications using a reasonably well-defined object model than via UI automation, which is the only viable alternative for most current OS X applications. And for simple tasks, even a problematic common scripting language like AppleScript is preferable to needing to use a different scripting language for each application, even if these languages are, individually, superior.

machinecoffee 7y ago

I had a Mac Performa from the OS 7 days, and Inside Macintosh from the same time - but with the C API from what I remember, and used Metrowerks CodeWarrior as the development IDE. It was a great introduction to GUI programming, and CodeWarrior was a great IDE too. I noticed this from the first pascal code example: TEIdle(textH); {call TextEdit to make vertical bar blink} .. oh how spoiled we are today :-)