16 ms·

(mac)ostalgia – how Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Figma could look on Mac OS 9

409 points by dannyow 5y ago

kalleboo 5y ago
I miss when application software was allowed to have multiple windows.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I kind of like having one window per application. I already have 15 different applications open at the same time, I don’t need them to have 4 windows each.
  - kergonath 5y ago
    I am a bit ambivalent on this. Most of the small windows in the mock-ups would actually be palettes, not true windows. It also works much better in an application-centric OS such as MacOS compared to window-centric ones like Windows or most Linux DEs. Sure, the proliferation of floating palettes in the 2000s was a bit much, but on the other hand monolithic single-window apps for everything is terrible. Slack, for example, would be much better if we could different windows for calls, chats, and the channel list. As it stands now, we have either one window with conflicting functions, or a lot of repeated information taking up quite a lot of space. Ultimately, this is the result of cramming everything into one window because some OSes confuse windows for applications. It is grating to see this design pattern on macOS, which really does not work that way.
wraptile 5y ago
Why did it take us so long to get rid of these oversized scrollbars? I can't recall monitor quality of 90s/00s but surely the scrollbars didn't need to take 5% fo the real estate, right? Makes me wonder what sort of currently extremely common UI elements we'll look down on in the near future.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  It was common for mice not to have wheels. In fact, the mouse that came with the computer shown only had one big button. People needed to be able to actually click on the scroll bar to use it.
  - wraptile 5y ago
    ah, I forgot about that! Though still, it feels like this feature overstayed it's welcome by a decade or so.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    It's still common for trackpads not to have wheels. "Two-finger" scrolling is clunkier IME than just using tap-and-drag on a scrollbar widget.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- rhinoceraptor 5y ago
  They seem to be about the same size as scrollbars on Windows 10. Also I'd argue they're way more accessible than the tiny scrollbars that auto-hide on modern MacOS which are very difficult to click on.
andreasley 5y ago
Some interactive nostalgia is available here: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ "This is Mac OS 8, running in an Electron app pretending to be a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. Yes, it's the full thing."
- marstall 5y ago
  macintoshjs co-creator Christian Bauer's personal website is appropriately 90s-website-y and full of goodies (recommend the Japan travel pics particularly!) https://www.cebix.net https://www.cebix.net
crawl_soever 5y ago
Page requires js to see images and I didn't feel like making a noscript exception just to read text and see images so I guess I'm moving on. Please, support raw html fallback web!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Guess its a react or angular or vue app.
jonpalmisc 5y ago
Wow, this is incredible. Can’t imagine how much work this took. Seeing this makes me think about how many modern applications could learn a few things from the old Mac OS 8/9 Human Interface Guidelines. [0] [0] http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/HIGOS8Guidelines.pdf http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...
- tailspin2019 5y ago
  I almost didn’t scroll down and spot the video. What an amazing amount of effort…
  - pstadler 5y ago
    Overlooked it too. The mouse wiggling during app loading is subtle.
- jonpurdy 5y ago
  It’s amazing to me how much more usable those UIs are. Not to mention how much more performant they’d be than modern Electron garbage. But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    >we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore Wait you can't just call the respective APIs anymore? I thought the reason people don't use them is not because they aren't available but that 2 different codebases would have to be maintained hence things like Electron.
    - sjmulder 5y ago
      There's isn't a "the respective API" any more for Windows, it seems. Win32/ATL/Forms don't get the new widgets and design language (just a bit of lookalike styling). WPF, UWP, WinUI 2/3 are all bundled toolkits that mimic the Windows' fashion of the day to varying degrees.
jrmg 5y ago
This is amazing. And, wow, actual separate windows for things! I am constantly frustrated by Slack’s inability to show more than one conversation at a time.
- cknoxrun 5y ago
  Not the greatest UI, but you can show 2 conversations at the same time by command-clicking on a person/channel (or right clicking on a second person/channel and choose "Open in split view").
recursivedoubts 5y ago
incredible work (really) but this is obviously not a realistic user experience: I can tell what's clickable on the screen easily and things are generally too consistent and simply make too much sense I mean, neat concept, but really lacking in the user hostility that today's users demand
- bitwize 5y ago
  And without click-tracking telemetry, how can the software vendor measure engagement and optimize the user experience in a data-driven fashion?
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  And it's usable on 1024x786. I didn't by my big hires screen for that!
- anchpop 5y ago
  I don’t get the “I can’t tell what’s clickable” complaint. I just opened up spotify and it’s obvious what’s clickable and what isn’t. Same for gmail. I don’t remember having any issue learning how to use these either.
floam 5y ago
Stimulates a bit of an impulse I had as a teenager and wanting to experience that on my PC, or get into BeOS or QNX, based just on witnessing screenshots and something deeply striking my fancy. Before I got into Linux (which was before I got a Mac in 2006), I used WindowBlinds and LiteStep to do exactly that, and more. I used to really care more about certain trappings of my experience, and I didn't have any actual work to do. Now I settle for whatever in my 30s. Let's see, what is my first extant contribution to the Internet… oh yeah, I thought this was handsome. It was a theme for an explorer.exe shell replacement. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/ https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/ https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6-154.jpg https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6...
- floam 5y ago
  "542 lines of code" (a configuration file), "best viewed in tahoma size 7"... cringe. In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).
  - laputan_machine 5y ago
    For some reason when I was that age I loved tiny fonts, too. Actually a nice theme, I probably would have used it!
    - floam 5y ago
      I know my vision is still good, but there is no debate that my vision back then was a lot better. And focusing for tens of hours certainly wasn't any kind of effort.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Qnx was pretty unique. We no longer have any RTOS with a desktop GUI sadly
  - zozbot234 5y ago
classichasclass 5y ago
I enjoyed this, though the pull down menus at the top are shifted down a little further than the real thing and spaced a little far, and the labels on the desktop icons weren't quite that fat. Hey, when it comes to the uncanny valley, it's the little things. But the apps ring true. The splash screens are a nice touch.
srvmshr 5y ago
It might be an unpopular opinion (in general), but OS 9 was actually beautiful. The design elements might look clunky by today's standards, but they were quite self-explanatory & functional, as compared to current macOS flat designs. I am stating purely from an angle of being friendly to an absolute beginner (e.g. a kid). I was in middle school in 2001 when I saw a paint program (MacPaint?) on an oyester iBook - It was way more intuitive and engaging than Windows counterpart. I think late Classic Macintosh (v8.6-9) to early OSX (~10.8) had a very good aesthetic balance between form & function.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > being friendly to a beginner (e.g. a kid) My child seems to intuitively get modern UI design, and doesn't seem to need many affordances to understand what to interact with or not. I think people who say older designs are better for beginners may be applying some retrospective thinking.
  - chongli 5y ago
    Let's not underestimate neuroplasticity. Children can figure out almost anything. If you want a true test of UI intuitiveness then you ought to give the computer to an elderly parent or grandparent. Anecdotally, my 70-year-old father and several of my elderly uncles & aunts had a much easier time figuring out Classic Mac OS. Modern macOS and iOS are much more complicated. While they still use these systems, they do so in a much more superficial way and they tend to exhibit what (for lack of a better term) I would call a "fear response." That is, when attempting to do a novel task they refuse to experiment and instead resort to asking for help immediately. Classic Mac OS was much better designed to encourage experimentation and avoided surprising the user (in a negative way) as much as possible.
    - srvmshr 5y ago
      Here is a screenshot from my MBP which used to run 10.7 until two years ago :). I would anyday prefer these over the flatter icons. https://imgur.com/a/e6AEdwR https://imgur.com/a/e6AEdwR
29athrowaway 5y ago
This would not only look great, but run incredibly fast: Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc. On Linux you can still have a pretty old school desktop with some of these elements... but may not run well on HiDPI.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  MacOS 9 had vector TrueType fonts and text antialiasing. It was still blazing fast on a G4.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  There is a nice Win9x style theme for GTK+3 that works quite well IME. And the look is quite faithful to the original (with some minimal changes for, e.g. modern headerbars).
  - petepete 5y ago
    https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 - if anyone's wondering
- kaba0 5y ago
  > Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc. I don’t think that high-res icons, vector fonts, aliasing and composition meaningfully effect today’s hardware — we can and do have GPUs barely sweating on even much more demanding functionality and these are mostly parallelisable/easily cacheable things. If anything, they take up some GPU memory. What makes some of today’s apps resource hogs is the different abstraction level which can be useful (accessibility was absolutely not something important back then and even today it is not without lack), cross-platform, but often much more leaky than it could be.
smoldesu 5y ago
God... the classy Platinum look is peak MacOS to me. I was never super fond of Aqua, and the modern design ranges from "pretty usable" with Mojave to "I think this is an Ubuntu skin" with Big Sur. Platinum just feels... right, to me at least. It's aged pretty gracefully compared to the look of Windows 98, and manages to look equal parts fun and professional. The only real sticking points are the graphics used in the icons, if they were replaced with more appropriately lo-fi versions of the NeXTStep ones I think it would be a true Renaissance system.
chaostheory 5y ago
I’ve used OS 9 and earlier versions. It wasn’t until OSX did an Apple OS feel right GUI wise.
hanief 5y ago
Ironically, the website is broken when viewed on Safari. Just white blank page. :(
- rolha-capoeira 5y ago
  Same
- simion314 5y ago
  It would be great is the giant company that makes Safari could find a solution so any webdev could run Safari (and the betas too) on their machine to be able to test in it.
- evercast 5y ago
  Works perfectly fine for me. Safari 15.1 on Monterey. Same on iPad with iOS 15.
zrail 5y ago
I know at least one person who would pay _very good money_ for a version of Slack that opened channels in separate windows.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Yes. My main takeaway from this slideshow is that designers are control freaks that treat their applications like an art canvas instead of just letting the window manager manage the windows. In my opinion it is 100% better and I wish I could explode features out of various apps into separate windows all the time. Video conferencing is a really obvious one.
- martinald 5y ago
  Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is. It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis. It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    You know whats crazy? A few years back I had this Core i3 Haswell system and I installed Windows 7 with Office 2003 on it. The PC shipped with Windows 8 but I decided to go backwards. My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! It was such a pleasant experience I didn't feel again until I got my M1 mac. Even now the bloat is slowly beginning on even the m1 Mac. I think we need to find every developer/designer/project manager who introduces this software bloat and lock them on a remote island.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      > My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! That's not too far from the performance you can get from a plain Linux install and a lightweight DE (Xfce/LXDE). Though I'll grant you that Office 2003 is going to be a lot lighter than its modern free equivalent.
geogra4 5y ago
As someone who grew up on the classic Mac os this is astonishingly well done. Bravo
linguae 5y ago
As a big fan of the Platinum theme used in Mac OS 8 and 9, I absolutely love this!!! This is a fantastic demo of what modern applications would look like had they been designed under the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the Mac OS 9 era. If these weren't mockups and were actual redesigns of Spotify, Zoom, and Slack, I'd download them as soon as possible.
- UncleSlacky 5y ago
  You might like helloSystem: https://github.com/helloSystem/hello https://github.com/helloSystem/hello
BitAstronaut 5y ago
The Spotify design reminds me of Kazaa
- pembrook 5y ago
  Ironically, the original design of Spotify (before it launched in the US) actually looked like a ripoff of Limewire. I’m guessing this was on purpose to try and transition the P2P crowd over to streaming.
userbinator 5y ago
It's amazing how much more usable applications become when their UIs are consistent with the other UI of the platform. Unfortunately, marketing wants every product to "stand out" and thus (even before the Electron fad started) they develop custom controls and other annoying "uniqueness". The Zoom one reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe --- yes, videoconferencing was actually possible on the hardware of the time.
jen20 5y ago
I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  At least Slack has an API where you could potentialy build one yourself. I wish that were true for Teams…
  - grishka 5y ago
    Everything has an API if you're brave enough lol
- bbkane 5y ago
  You might like https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ . I haven't tried it, but it's a QT client for Slack/Discord
  - e_proxus 5y ago
    The problem is, it doesn’t look anything like the system UI either. Just because it is using a native toolkit doesn’t mean it automatically looks good or integrates well.
- rconti 5y ago
  I rarely used Windows, but I remember Trillian was one of the first applications I truly hated for exactly this reason.
  - grishka 5y ago
    It was always not uncommon for Windows apps to apply custom skins to their UIs.
    - 5y ago
justahuman74 5y ago
This visually looks so much easier to use than the modern versions
yehaaa 5y ago
This is cool. I must say that I prefer the OS9 version of Zoom with the detached windows.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  The crazy thing is that you can get at least two windows in Zoom. It's my favorite feature and the reason I prefer it over any of its competitors. However, it's for some reason hidden and handicapped. You need to turn it on and even then it will only work when you have two screens. IMO it should be enabled by default and work even if you only have a single screen. I use it every day, but usually have both windows on my main screen. It's especially invaluable when someone screenshares and you want to see people's faces at the same time.
vladstudio 5y ago
Now swap the components and do the same for Aqua interface, with translucency and 3D :-) Jokes aside, incredible job.
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I really loved OS 9. My first mac dual booted OS 9 and Mac OS X. This was around 2004-2005 I think.
floren 5y ago
A decent Platinum skin for, say, FVWM would really make my day. I seem to remember this sort of thing existing 20 years ago but can't find much any more.
cable2600 5y ago
I still have a G3 iMac Bondi Blue that runs Mac OS 9, my son plays some of the educational games on it. Stuff that doesn't work in OSX.
can16358p 5y ago
Love how the designs in Figma themselves also change to reflect that era's web designs.
GabbieReagan 5y ago
[dead]
2-718-281-828 5y ago
Mac OS UI is a great example for why one shouldn't "improve" software just for the sake for changing something. UI design peaked at Windows XP style. the design portraied here falls for my opinion in that category. As a user of xfce (on Linux Mint) which is basically Windows XP with different icons I am super happy. Apple actually came up with only a single valuable UI element and that is the three finger swipe to switch workspaces or display running applications. The rest is crap and I am flabbergasted at how Mac fanboys are willing to jump through hoops to justify and praise whatever Apple dumps on them. Working in IT they gave me an MBP (the edition w/o an Esc key) and now my second IPhone (13PM). I say with confidence that the only reason why Mac / IPhone is more popular than a TP (be it with Windows or Linux) / Android is simply b/c it is more expensive and a status symbol. That's it. A status symbol. Congratulations to Apple for conning even IT experts who are at the end of the day also just human beings with psychological weaknesses to be capitalized on.
- Duckton 5y ago
  Can you give some examples on why you think Windows XP is better than macOS and also how macOS is crap?
  - icelancer 5y ago
    Command vs. ALT/CTRL bindings are vastly superior in Windows. The MacOS method of using the Command button is different for the sake of being different, not for any actual productive reason. I had the first Macbook Retina and used it for years at a company where it made sense to do so; when I handed it in and left for my own startup life, I was open to either OS (couldn't use Linux as the daily driver since I my industry uses a lot of Windows-only programs), and Windows was just far more productive to use on a regular basis. The only thing I miss is Final Cut Pro, and Sublime Text to some degree (VS Code has been an adequate replacement).
    - bitigchi 5y ago
      LOL. Not at all. Mac keyboard shortcuts are explicitly more reachable than its Windows counterparts. Try reaching alt+f4 versus command+w/q. Also macOS incorporates more keyboard shortcuts than any other OS. You will need to elaborate more on this one.
russellbeattie 5y ago
Has anyone tried the Unreal Engine's "The Matrix Awakens" * tech demo on the PS5 or XBoxen? The settings menu looks like this. Another recent homage to the late 90s. 1. https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ
micheljansen 5y ago
Surprisingly I found myself not preferring the OS 9 versions nearly as much as I thought. I have always thought of the OS 9 UI and the late '90s to early 2000s as representing the peak of OS UI design before everything went skeuomorphic, but a lot of the general aesthetic of that time just doesn't seem to have aged that well. I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time, but there was also a LOT of visual clutter that we no longer need. There's much to say about modern design fads, but we have also come a long way. The author has certainly done a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era (the garish bevels on the Spotify app are spot on!), but I would love to see how the OS 9 UI would hold up in modern times, on a retina screen with more than 256 colours, modern anti-aliased typography and much more screen real estate.
- frereubu 5y ago
  "I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..." If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.
  - grishka 5y ago
    There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.
    - bitigchi 5y ago
      Where is it? Can you add a screenshot?
      - grishka 5y ago
Void_ 5y ago
I'd much rather use that version of Slack.
teekert 5y ago
Hmm my cursor disappears and from time to time flickers into existence on this page (FireFox 95.0.2 on Win 10).
Camillo 5y ago
The Figma redesign shows an MDI interface, which was simply never a thing on Mac. It would have had floating palettes, like Photoshop: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/683-adobe-photoshop-4-0 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/683-adobe-photoshop-4-0
marstall 5y ago
just ... wow
flenserboy 5y ago
Nicely done — but what would be even more interesting would be an attempt to see where Mac OS would have gone had a) Aqua not happened, and b) Had they resisted the trends in interfaces that most OSes have followed since. I'm genuinely curious to see where Mac OS (or Windows 2000, for that matter) might be today, especially from the perspective of usability, going their own, user- and content-focused, ways.

409 points by dannyow 5y ago

kalleboo 5y ago

I miss when application software was allowed to have multiple windows.

Aeolun 5y ago
I kind of like having one window per application. I already have 15 different applications open at the same time, I don’t need them to have 4 windows each.
- kergonath 5y ago
  I am a bit ambivalent on this. Most of the small windows in the mock-ups would actually be palettes, not true windows. It also works much better in an application-centric OS such as MacOS compared to window-centric ones like Windows or most Linux DEs. Sure, the proliferation of floating palettes in the 2000s was a bit much, but on the other hand monolithic single-window apps for everything is terrible. Slack, for example, would be much better if we could different windows for calls, chats, and the channel list. As it stands now, we have either one window with conflicting functions, or a lot of repeated information taking up quite a lot of space. Ultimately, this is the result of cramming everything into one window because some OSes confuse windows for applications. It is grating to see this design pattern on macOS, which really does not work that way.

wraptile 5y ago

Why did it take us so long to get rid of these oversized scrollbars? I can't recall monitor quality of 90s/00s but surely the scrollbars didn't need to take 5% fo the real estate, right? Makes me wonder what sort of currently extremely common UI elements we'll look down on in the near future.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
It was common for mice not to have wheels. In fact, the mouse that came with the computer shown only had one big button. People needed to be able to actually click on the scroll bar to use it.
- wraptile 5y ago
  ah, I forgot about that! Though still, it feels like this feature overstayed it's welcome by a decade or so.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  It's still common for trackpads not to have wheels. "Two-finger" scrolling is clunkier IME than just using tap-and-drag on a scrollbar widget.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
rhinoceraptor 5y ago
They seem to be about the same size as scrollbars on Windows 10. Also I'd argue they're way more accessible than the tiny scrollbars that auto-hide on modern MacOS which are very difficult to click on.

andreasley 5y ago

Some interactive nostalgia is available here: https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js/ "This is Mac OS 8, running in an Electron app pretending to be a 1991 Macintosh Quadra. Yes, it's the full thing."

marstall 5y ago
macintoshjs co-creator Christian Bauer's personal website is appropriately 90s-website-y and full of goodies (recommend the Japan travel pics particularly!) https://www.cebix.net https://www.cebix.net

crawl_soever 5y ago

Page requires js to see images and I didn't feel like making a noscript exception just to read text and see images so I guess I'm moving on. Please, support raw html fallback web!

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
anaganisk 5y ago
Guess its a react or angular or vue app.

jonpalmisc 5y ago

Wow, this is incredible. Can’t imagine how much work this took. Seeing this makes me think about how many modern applications could learn a few things from the old Mac OS 8/9 Human Interface Guidelines. [0] [0] http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/HIGOS8Guidelines.pdf http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...

tailspin2019 5y ago
I almost didn’t scroll down and spot the video. What an amazing amount of effort…
- pstadler 5y ago
  Overlooked it too. The mouse wiggling during app loading is subtle.
jonpurdy 5y ago
It’s amazing to me how much more usable those UIs are. Not to mention how much more performant they’d be than modern Electron garbage. But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  >we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore Wait you can't just call the respective APIs anymore? I thought the reason people don't use them is not because they aren't available but that 2 different codebases would have to be maintained hence things like Electron.
  - sjmulder 5y ago
    There's isn't a "the respective API" any more for Windows, it seems. Win32/ATL/Forms don't get the new widgets and design language (just a bit of lookalike styling). WPF, UWP, WinUI 2/3 are all bundled toolkits that mimic the Windows' fashion of the day to varying degrees.

jrmg 5y ago

This is amazing. And, wow, actual separate windows for things! I am constantly frustrated by Slack’s inability to show more than one conversation at a time.

cknoxrun 5y ago
Not the greatest UI, but you can show 2 conversations at the same time by command-clicking on a person/channel (or right clicking on a second person/channel and choose "Open in split view").

recursivedoubts 5y ago

incredible work (really) but this is obviously not a realistic user experience: I can tell what's clickable on the screen easily and things are generally too consistent and simply make too much sense I mean, neat concept, but really lacking in the user hostility that today's users demand

bitwize 5y ago
And without click-tracking telemetry, how can the software vendor measure engagement and optimize the user experience in a data-driven fashion?
ajmurmann 5y ago
And it's usable on 1024x786. I didn't by my big hires screen for that!
anchpop 5y ago
I don’t get the “I can’t tell what’s clickable” complaint. I just opened up spotify and it’s obvious what’s clickable and what isn’t. Same for gmail. I don’t remember having any issue learning how to use these either.

floam 5y ago

Stimulates a bit of an impulse I had as a teenager and wanting to experience that on my PC, or get into BeOS or QNX, based just on witnessing screenshots and something deeply striking my fancy. Before I got into Linux (which was before I got a Mac in 2006), I used WindowBlinds and LiteStep to do exactly that, and more. I used to really care more about certain trappings of my experience, and I didn't have any actual work to do. Now I settle for whatever in my 30s. Let's see, what is my first extant contribution to the Internet… oh yeah, I thought this was handsome. It was a theme for an explorer.exe shell replacement. https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/ https://www.wincustomize.com/explore/litestep/154/ https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6-154.jpg https://skins14.wincustomize.com/1/53/153855/6/154/preview-6...

floam 5y ago
"542 lines of code" (a configuration file), "best viewed in tahoma size 7"... cringe. In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).
- laputan_machine 5y ago
  For some reason when I was that age I loved tiny fonts, too. Actually a nice theme, I probably would have used it!
  - floam 5y ago
    I know my vision is still good, but there is no debate that my vision back then was a lot better. And focusing for tens of hours certainly wasn't any kind of effort.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Qnx was pretty unique. We no longer have any RTOS with a desktop GUI sadly
- zozbot234 5y ago

classichasclass 5y ago

I enjoyed this, though the pull down menus at the top are shifted down a little further than the real thing and spaced a little far, and the labels on the desktop icons weren't quite that fat. Hey, when it comes to the uncanny valley, it's the little things. But the apps ring true. The splash screens are a nice touch.

srvmshr 5y ago

It might be an unpopular opinion (in general), but OS 9 was actually beautiful. The design elements might look clunky by today's standards, but they were quite self-explanatory & functional, as compared to current macOS flat designs. I am stating purely from an angle of being friendly to an absolute beginner (e.g. a kid). I was in middle school in 2001 when I saw a paint program (MacPaint?) on an oyester iBook - It was way more intuitive and engaging than Windows counterpart. I think late Classic Macintosh (v8.6-9) to early OSX (~10.8) had a very good aesthetic balance between form & function.

chrisseaton 5y ago
> being friendly to a beginner (e.g. a kid) My child seems to intuitively get modern UI design, and doesn't seem to need many affordances to understand what to interact with or not. I think people who say older designs are better for beginners may be applying some retrospective thinking.
- chongli 5y ago
  Let's not underestimate neuroplasticity. Children can figure out almost anything. If you want a true test of UI intuitiveness then you ought to give the computer to an elderly parent or grandparent. Anecdotally, my 70-year-old father and several of my elderly uncles & aunts had a much easier time figuring out Classic Mac OS. Modern macOS and iOS are much more complicated. While they still use these systems, they do so in a much more superficial way and they tend to exhibit what (for lack of a better term) I would call a "fear response." That is, when attempting to do a novel task they refuse to experiment and instead resort to asking for help immediately. Classic Mac OS was much better designed to encourage experimentation and avoided surprising the user (in a negative way) as much as possible.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    Here is a screenshot from my MBP which used to run 10.7 until two years ago :). I would anyday prefer these over the flatter icons. https://imgur.com/a/e6AEdwR https://imgur.com/a/e6AEdwR

29athrowaway 5y ago

This would not only look great, but run incredibly fast: Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc. On Linux you can still have a pretty old school desktop with some of these elements... but may not run well on HiDPI.

kalleboo 5y ago
MacOS 9 had vector TrueType fonts and text antialiasing. It was still blazing fast on a G4.
zozbot234 5y ago
There is a nice Win9x style theme for GTK+3 that works quite well IME. And the look is quite faithful to the original (with some minimal changes for, e.g. modern headerbars).
- petepete 5y ago
  https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 - if anyone's wondering
kaba0 5y ago
> Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc. I don’t think that high-res icons, vector fonts, aliasing and composition meaningfully effect today’s hardware — we can and do have GPUs barely sweating on even much more demanding functionality and these are mostly parallelisable/easily cacheable things. If anything, they take up some GPU memory. What makes some of today’s apps resource hogs is the different abstraction level which can be useful (accessibility was absolutely not something important back then and even today it is not without lack), cross-platform, but often much more leaky than it could be.

smoldesu 5y ago

God... the classy Platinum look is peak MacOS to me. I was never super fond of Aqua, and the modern design ranges from "pretty usable" with Mojave to "I think this is an Ubuntu skin" with Big Sur. Platinum just feels... right, to me at least. It's aged pretty gracefully compared to the look of Windows 98, and manages to look equal parts fun and professional. The only real sticking points are the graphics used in the icons, if they were replaced with more appropriately lo-fi versions of the NeXTStep ones I think it would be a true Renaissance system.

chaostheory 5y ago

I’ve used OS 9 and earlier versions. It wasn’t until OSX did an Apple OS feel right GUI wise.

hanief 5y ago

Ironically, the website is broken when viewed on Safari. Just white blank page. :(

rolha-capoeira 5y ago
Same
simion314 5y ago
It would be great is the giant company that makes Safari could find a solution so any webdev could run Safari (and the betas too) on their machine to be able to test in it.
evercast 5y ago
Works perfectly fine for me. Safari 15.1 on Monterey. Same on iPad with iOS 15.

zrail 5y ago

I know at least one person who would pay _very good money_ for a version of Slack that opened channels in separate windows.

hiptobecubic 5y ago
Yes. My main takeaway from this slideshow is that designers are control freaks that treat their applications like an art canvas instead of just letting the window manager manage the windows. In my opinion it is 100% better and I wish I could explode features out of various apps into separate windows all the time. Video conferencing is a really obvious one.
martinald 5y ago
Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is. It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis. It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.
- nebula8804 5y ago
  You know whats crazy? A few years back I had this Core i3 Haswell system and I installed Windows 7 with Office 2003 on it. The PC shipped with Windows 8 but I decided to go backwards. My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! It was such a pleasant experience I didn't feel again until I got my M1 mac. Even now the bloat is slowly beginning on even the m1 Mac. I think we need to find every developer/designer/project manager who introduces this software bloat and lock them on a remote island.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    > My god the performance was out of this world. Everything was instant! That's not too far from the performance you can get from a plain Linux install and a lightweight DE (Xfce/LXDE). Though I'll grant you that Office 2003 is going to be a lot lighter than its modern free equivalent.

geogra4 5y ago

As someone who grew up on the classic Mac os this is astonishingly well done. Bravo

linguae 5y ago

As a big fan of the Platinum theme used in Mac OS 8 and 9, I absolutely love this!!! This is a fantastic demo of what modern applications would look like had they been designed under the Apple Human Interface Guidelines of the Mac OS 9 era. If these weren't mockups and were actual redesigns of Spotify, Zoom, and Slack, I'd download them as soon as possible.

UncleSlacky 5y ago
You might like helloSystem: https://github.com/helloSystem/hello https://github.com/helloSystem/hello

BitAstronaut 5y ago

The Spotify design reminds me of Kazaa

pembrook 5y ago
Ironically, the original design of Spotify (before it launched in the US) actually looked like a ripoff of Limewire. I’m guessing this was on purpose to try and transition the P2P crowd over to streaming.

userbinator 5y ago

It's amazing how much more usable applications become when their UIs are consistent with the other UI of the platform. Unfortunately, marketing wants every product to "stand out" and thus (even before the Electron fad started) they develop custom controls and other annoying "uniqueness". The Zoom one reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CU-SeeMe --- yes, videoconferencing was actually possible on the hardware of the time.

jen20 5y ago

I definitely can’t help but wish a version of Slack that actually gave a passing concern for integration into a system UI exists. The “look we can do custom CSS everywhere and not look like ANY of our target platforms” garbage has the bane of my work day since it became popular.

Aeolun 5y ago
At least Slack has an API where you could potentialy build one yourself. I wish that were true for Teams…
- grishka 5y ago
  Everything has an API if you're brave enough lol
bbkane 5y ago
You might like https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ . I haven't tried it, but it's a QT client for Slack/Discord
- e_proxus 5y ago
  The problem is, it doesn’t look anything like the system UI either. Just because it is using a native toolkit doesn’t mean it automatically looks good or integrates well.
rconti 5y ago
I rarely used Windows, but I remember Trillian was one of the first applications I truly hated for exactly this reason.
- grishka 5y ago
  It was always not uncommon for Windows apps to apply custom skins to their UIs.
  - 5y ago

justahuman74 5y ago

This visually looks so much easier to use than the modern versions

yehaaa 5y ago

This is cool. I must say that I prefer the OS9 version of Zoom with the detached windows.

ajmurmann 5y ago
The crazy thing is that you can get at least two windows in Zoom. It's my favorite feature and the reason I prefer it over any of its competitors. However, it's for some reason hidden and handicapped. You need to turn it on and even then it will only work when you have two screens. IMO it should be enabled by default and work even if you only have a single screen. I use it every day, but usually have both windows on my main screen. It's especially invaluable when someone screenshares and you want to see people's faces at the same time.

vladstudio 5y ago

Now swap the components and do the same for Aqua interface, with translucency and 3D :-) Jokes aside, incredible job.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

I really loved OS 9. My first mac dual booted OS 9 and Mac OS X. This was around 2004-2005 I think.

floren 5y ago

A decent Platinum skin for, say, FVWM would really make my day. I seem to remember this sort of thing existing 20 years ago but can't find much any more.

cable2600 5y ago

I still have a G3 iMac Bondi Blue that runs Mac OS 9, my son plays some of the educational games on it. Stuff that doesn't work in OSX.

can16358p 5y ago

Love how the designs in Figma themselves also change to reflect that era's web designs.

GabbieReagan 5y ago

[dead]

2-718-281-828 5y ago

Mac OS UI is a great example for why one shouldn't "improve" software just for the sake for changing something. UI design peaked at Windows XP style. the design portraied here falls for my opinion in that category. As a user of xfce (on Linux Mint) which is basically Windows XP with different icons I am super happy. Apple actually came up with only a single valuable UI element and that is the three finger swipe to switch workspaces or display running applications. The rest is crap and I am flabbergasted at how Mac fanboys are willing to jump through hoops to justify and praise whatever Apple dumps on them. Working in IT they gave me an MBP (the edition w/o an Esc key) and now my second IPhone (13PM). I say with confidence that the only reason why Mac / IPhone is more popular than a TP (be it with Windows or Linux) / Android is simply b/c it is more expensive and a status symbol. That's it. A status symbol. Congratulations to Apple for conning even IT experts who are at the end of the day also just human beings with psychological weaknesses to be capitalized on.

Duckton 5y ago
Can you give some examples on why you think Windows XP is better than macOS and also how macOS is crap?
- icelancer 5y ago
  Command vs. ALT/CTRL bindings are vastly superior in Windows. The MacOS method of using the Command button is different for the sake of being different, not for any actual productive reason. I had the first Macbook Retina and used it for years at a company where it made sense to do so; when I handed it in and left for my own startup life, I was open to either OS (couldn't use Linux as the daily driver since I my industry uses a lot of Windows-only programs), and Windows was just far more productive to use on a regular basis. The only thing I miss is Final Cut Pro, and Sublime Text to some degree (VS Code has been an adequate replacement).
  - bitigchi 5y ago
    LOL. Not at all. Mac keyboard shortcuts are explicitly more reachable than its Windows counterparts. Try reaching alt+f4 versus command+w/q. Also macOS incorporates more keyboard shortcuts than any other OS. You will need to elaborate more on this one.

russellbeattie 5y ago

Has anyone tried the Unreal Engine's "The Matrix Awakens" * tech demo on the PS5 or XBoxen? The settings menu looks like this. Another recent homage to the late 90s. 1. https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ https://youtu.be/WU0gvPcc3jQ

micheljansen 5y ago

Surprisingly I found myself not preferring the OS 9 versions nearly as much as I thought. I have always thought of the OS 9 UI and the late '90s to early 2000s as representing the peak of OS UI design before everything went skeuomorphic, but a lot of the general aesthetic of that time just doesn't seem to have aged that well. I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time, but there was also a LOT of visual clutter that we no longer need. There's much to say about modern design fads, but we have also come a long way. The author has certainly done a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era (the garish bevels on the Spotify app are spot on!), but I would love to see how the OS 9 UI would hold up in modern times, on a retina screen with more than 256 colours, modern anti-aliased typography and much more screen real estate.

frereubu 5y ago
"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..." If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.
- grishka 5y ago
  There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.
  - bitigchi 5y ago
    Where is it? Can you add a screenshot?
    - grishka 5y ago

Void_ 5y ago

I'd much rather use that version of Slack.

teekert 5y ago

Hmm my cursor disappears and from time to time flickers into existence on this page (FireFox 95.0.2 on Win 10).

Camillo 5y ago

The Figma redesign shows an MDI interface, which was simply never a thing on Mac. It would have had floating palettes, like Photoshop: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/683-adobe-photoshop-4-0 https://www.macintoshrepository.org/683-adobe-photoshop-4-0

marstall 5y ago

just ... wow

flenserboy 5y ago

Nicely done — but what would be even more interesting would be an attempt to see where Mac OS would have gone had a) Aqua not happened, and b) Had they resisted the trends in interfaces that most OSes have followed since. I'm genuinely curious to see where Mac OS (or Windows 2000, for that matter) might be today, especially from the perspective of usability, going their own, user- and content-focused, ways.