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Microsoft had a secret Windows XP theme that made it look like a Mac
- SammyNameTaken 6y agothis is likely some Microsoft's employee's uncredited work, like most windows components
- jeroenhd 6y agoIt's a theme from the Windows XP source code leak. Obviously it's going to be uncredited; it was never intended to be seen outside Microsoft. This was probably a developer messing with the theme engine to see what it could do and to test its limits.
- 101008 6y agoWindows XP original theme was the best. Not at a nostalgic level only (which of course affects me and my memory), but I felt it was so easy to use and so easy to find everything. Today, Windows 10 control panel is a mess.
- MereInterest 6y ago> Today, Windows 10 control panel is a mess. Oh gosh, yes. It gets a little bit better if you organize it alphabetically, but then it is alphabetical left to right, top to bottom. It's as if somebody intentionally designed it to be as difficult to scan through as possible.
- flomo 6y agoBy far the best feature of XP theming was you could turn it off and it looked just Windows 2000 :)
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoYeah, this was always my first step when I found myself forced to use Windows.
- dehrmann 6y ago> Today, Windows 10 control panel is a mess. Which one?
- pcdoodle 6y agoHaha! Reminds me of this: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/954/660/350.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/954/660/350...
- Jaruzel 6y agoThe Control Panel in Windows 10 is now legacy, with most things now under Settings. Eventually it'll go away I guess, but some apps still install their own little control panel applets. Either way, the best way to access everything you can do in Windows 10 is do it via the 'god mode' folder: 1. Create a new folder 2. Rename it to: GodMode.{ed7ba470-8e54-465e-825c-99712043e01c} 3. Open it The 'GodMode' part of the name, can be anything you like tbh.
- Stevvo 6y agoThe problem with the settings app is most things are not included in it.
- nix23 6y ago>with most things now under Settings Yeah that's the problem, it's not. Microsoft should really be more focused on usability, the whole "i wanna be touch-panel" is just stupid, MS you are a PC! Even Apple said that.
- colejohnson66 6y agoYou do get into a bit of a problem when you put Windows on a tablet such as the Surface line. I think that’s what Microsoft was trying to solve with Windows 8, but they failed very badly. They have fixed some things such as removing the Start Screen and putting back a Start Menu, but the fundamental problem of putting a desktop OS on a tablet (touch targets must be bigger than click targets) still exists. I don’t see them fixing it any time soon, but I’d love to be wrong.
- cpach 6y agoI’m not sure I agree about easy to use. But it was very peformant, even on modest hardware. My favorite though was Windows 2000. Very stable.
- em3rgent0rdr 6y agoIt would be have been great if the different OS's had similar surface look & feel, to facilitate people being able to use both. I fear intellectual property concerns at the time may have discouraged MS from making this public.
- Arainach 6y agoBeing close but not identical causes confusion and frustration. A radically different UI sets expectations that things don't work the same. A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric. It's similar to Linux window managers - things that try to copy Windows exactly inevitably cause frustration when certain behaviors (hovering over taskbar icons, dragging to edges) or keyboard shortcuts don't work like how you expect, while something significantly different like Gnome or i3 makes it obvious that you have to learn something differnet.
- wodenokoto 6y ago> A skin can't change the fact that Mac is document-centric and Windows is program-centric. I would have said that windows is window centric and macOS is application-centric. On windows you alt-tab between windows and on MacOS you alt-tab between applications and alt-~ between windows inside the currently selected application.
- jeroenhd 6y agoIs that where GNOME got their idiotic alt+tab behaviour from? I absolutely hate having to use two shortcuts in sequence to switch to a specific window. Thankfully it's easy to correct the shortcuts but I still don't get what person would want this behaviour.
- nsgi 6y agoThey could have just allowed users to create their own themes (without having to patch system files)
- trashburger 6y agoWindows Codename Whistler (beta codename for XP) actually contained a Watercolor theme that looked like a modernized version of the classic theme[0] that this seems to be based off of. That theme actually looked quite nice. [0]: https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler-Build-2296-106558116 https://www.deviantart.com/rainingskies/art/Windows-Whistler...
- ab_testing 6y agoMakes me want to run xp again
- jsjohnst 6y agoYou’ll want to airgap it if you do... :)
- untog 6y agoI forgot about this! I ran this theme for many years, it was a great balance of understated (compared to the blue and green default) and visually appealing (classic theme is fine, but dull)
- bdcravens 6y agoI recall MSN software being similarly styled
- Ayesh 6y agoXP was the peak of desktop customizations. There were "theme packs", one of the most popular being a Vista Theme Pack. The teen in me, with a Nokia 6600 besides the computer, was in awe when a single installation of Vista Theme Pack and rebooting a couple times meant that everything on my 40GB HDD Pentium computer was changed from the login screen to icons, wallpaper, fonts, shell, file copy boxes, disk space meter, desktop CPU-o-meter dials to a whole modern look.
- factorialboy 6y agoMost Linux desktop environments disagree. :)
- nip180 6y agoAre you aware of the very large number of desktop environments and window managers available on *nix systems? “Skins” were popular in the windows ecosystem around XP, but it was far from the peak of customization.
- count 6y agoEnlightenment got me into linux, and when I discovered you couldn't run it on Windows, I discovered Litestep. And then spent so, so many hours of my life tweaking themes. Ahh, memories.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y agoIt was definitely the peak. I was heavily involved in several communities, and also ran plenty of other desktops environments, but XP had the largest following by far. The sheer number of websites devoted to skinning XP was astounding. Popular websites had thousands and thousands of themes. Winamp 3 was thriving too. It was most definitely peak customization.
- sudosysgen 6y agoEven with that scale, the capabilities and ahievements are nowehere near what can be done with a proper *nix DE.
- bdcravens 6y agoAround that time I was running Stardock WindowBlinds, which had quite a few OSX widgets and whatnot available.
- steve_adams_86 6y agoWow, Stardock. That brings back memories. Theming my computer was how I learned most of what I knew about graphic design and inadvertently lead to me becoming a developer. I loved those themes so much. What a fun way to kill time as a teenager.
- mrlambchop 6y ago1996 - Neil Banfield was working on windows blinds whilst on the same set of courses at the university we both went to. Sold to stardock soon after. Just looked it up and things are still going strong! A lot to be said for the OG windows hook APIs and whatever modern magic they are grabbing into these days.
- scottydelta 6y agoWindow XP was the reason I had to reset my PC almost every week for a summer because I would mess up the registry files trying to modify icons or startup screen or while trying to make it look like a mac because I couldn't afford a mac. XP was the era of theming!
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoI seem to remember my brother installing a Mac theme on our Windows XP system back in the day. This was followed shortly by installing MacOS on our PC.
- solarkraft 6y agoMac OS wasn't this ugly. Seriously: You can't just incorporate some design element and go "see, it looks like X". It won't. What most people making software seem to miss is that software look & feel isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ... /tangentially related rant
- anoncake 6y agoAs per the article, the theme was incomplete. Of course it was ugly.
- raverbashing 6y agoCorrect. This memo also applies to some Linux interfaces (usually one that begins with G and ends with ome)
- dr_hooo 6y agoI strongly disagree with your example: Gnome has one of the nicest and consistent designs besides MacOS
- raverbashing 6y agoIt's fine to disagree but my point is with this: > isn't the design of widgets, but also click behavior, layouts, click paths, description texts, animations, delay after a click ... Which I find troublesome with Gnome
- shawnz 6y agoYes, obviously the complete finished product of Mac OS looked better than this half-finished "programmer art" demonstration that never even shipped. What were you expecting?
- II2II 6y agoThe article suggests that it was being used to test theming. In other words, it was not intended to ship. It is probable that it would be shot down if anyone proposed shipping it. (Why elicit a lawsuit from a competitor over something trivial?) Given that, why would they go to the effort or recreating the whole visual appearance. The actual "feel" part was unlikely to be within the scope of the project.
- unnouinceput 6y agoQuote: "Microsoft was developing Windows XP during an era when there was fierce competition with Apple over desktop operating systems" I'm sorry, what? Talk about joke of the week. Apple never had desktop world bigger than 10% as market share. Not even today when it's at the highest peak ever, and in 2001 they were more like 1%. Sorry to burst your bubble Tom Warren, you do realize US is like 35 people out of 800. Asia market was and still is dominated by Microsoft when it comes to desktop.
- dboreham 6y agoPerhaps he means "in the Bay Area"?
- qz2 6y agoThat's about right. Here in the UK you were lucky to see a mac ever back then. A colleague bought the lamp style iMac unit in 2002 and we were quite frankly shocked at it. It was actually a pretty horrid machine compared to our windows 2000 PCs at the time.
- bonaldi 6y agoThink of it as "rivalry", perhaps. Think of a mass-market car company that outsells a luxury brands 5x or 10x but whose designers still swipe ideas from them.
- unnouinceput 6y agoRivalry? In 2001? When only 2 years earlier Billy boy had to buy Apple's shares to keep them afloat? I know Billy boy did that to get off the hook with US govt., not like he was any saint - but from that to "rivalry" is a tall order.
- jeromegv 6y agoYou seem to have a beef with Apple but regardless of the difficulties of the company in the 90s, it was still a hugely influential company that popularized GUI interfaces and for sure was well known by engineers and designers of other operating systems.
- demarq 6y agoIf I was a marketing person at Apple right now, I would MILK THIS NOW!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cpach 6y agoI don’t really understand why they did this though…? For inspiration…?
- RyJones 6y agoMy theory is someone needed to write tests for the theming system, and they had some fun.
- ziml77 6y agoProbably a dev having fun showing off what theming can do. I could see myself doing that if I needed an internal example of how much the themes could change.
- derefr 6y agoXP was a rewrite of the shell window decorations + controls system, to support drawing these as collections of bitmaps with fonts on top. Likely they were inspired to do this by the fact that macOS was doing things with buttons, modal backgrounds (pinstripe!), etc. that Windows couldn’t do at the time with its hardcoded GDI-draw-call based theming. Microsoft knew that they wanted the flexibility to be able to do what macOS was doing with theming. But they didn’t have a clear vision of what they were going to use it for. They likely built the theming engine first, and then handed it to their designers to actually come up with a visual identity. But the new theme engine needed to be tested while it was being built. And what better test, than to see if it can replicate all the things macOS can do that Windows, until then, could not? Probably they considered the theming engine “done” when it reached parity with macOS’s capabilities.
- specialist 6y agoMicrosoft has never understood that appearance (UI) is the last step. They've never been able to understand and therefore seriously address the stuff behind the veneer. Anecdata: The 2008 presentation by the guy in charge of the Office Ribbon best demonstrates their organizational blindness. TLDR: They only set out to better organize the complexity, and make it more pretty. They never considered making the underlying products more simple. One of my classmates worked on Word for ages. One of his subprojects was WordArt. Knowing of my interest in graphics, UI, CADD, he consulted with me. We talked about direct manipulation, affordances, UI flow, etc. Then he went dark. Later, he gave me a preview demo. He was so proud of WordArt. But it was terrible. I was actually angry. To my younger self's credit, I somehow kept my mouth shut and made complimentary grunts. My friend later went on to create EndNote, which wasn't terrible. One of my early bosses later went on oversee the login and authentication portions of Windows. Whatever that licensing registration step is called. For years. Having been trained as a real world architect (eg buildings, not software), he understood and accepted that he was just putting lipstick on a pig. But the pay was a lot better and he had family, mortgage for a nice house, shorter commute with a newer car. Real world architects don't expect to actually do the work they love and trained for.
- Shinotiy 6y agoI would love if we would stop analyzing every single detail in public. I wish HN would have a limited amount of articles, news paper have that already and if the internet is 'out' and i would need to be forced to do something else for the day. Its probably nice to think and discuss something that specific in desktop/computer historian fansub or so but that should be searched and discovered. I got so fed up with all the nvidia 30x0 rumors. It was a great launch but every peace of rumor was not adding anything to it.
- TheRealPomax 6y agoSounds like you want to make a new website. Or use something like lobsters, which has stricter quality control. If HN users upvote something enough, it's on the front page: HS shows you your HN-reading peers apparently like to talk about. Nothing more.
- cybert00th 6y agoDoes anyone remember Stardock's WindowBlinds from around the same time? I'm pretty sure it included a Mac theme in the installer? Or at the very least Stardock provided a place you could go to after installation to download more themes of which a Mac theme was one. I guess the point I'm trying to make is, I'm not entirely convinced this is the deal it's made out to be as there were other companies out there with the same or similar offerings.