5 ms·

OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does not. I can't put my finger on

OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something to do with "arbitrariness".

jszymborski 4y ago
It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.
- colanderman 4y ago
  Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.
graypegg 4y ago
I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it. Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much. Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.
- artificial 4y ago
  Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group Mac OS X design into four broad buckets: • 10.0 - 10.4 • 10.5 - 10.9 • 10.10 - 10.15 • 11+
- danaris 4y ago
  Wasn't only the first of those actually called Aqua? I don't recall exactly when Apple officially retired that designation, but it was well before the current era.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Internally, even the current UI is referred to as Aqua. Or more specifically, aqua and darkAqua, depending on if dark mode is desired. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearance/name https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearanc...
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    I don't know, but I've seen some people use "Aqua" to refer to the design through 10.4, through 10.9, or through the present day.
- colanderman 4y ago
  I was referring to the earlier iterations, with "shiny" buttons, lots of gradients, etc. 11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit more utilitarian, less showy and particular.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    The early Aqua look and feel was informed by the industrial design of the Macs running it. Consumer Macs were very colorful up until about 2003 and had a lot of the texture effects the Aqua L&F was emulating.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I don't think "modern" flat UI designs will fare any better with time, and maybe even worse. Already, the earlier variations of flat UI (Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, Material 1.0) to my eye look more dated than Aqua during its prime (OS X 10.6-10.9) does.
- astrange 4y ago
  You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, which lack presence and make computing feel less tangible and more disposable. You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates. And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional. Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.
  - BuckyBeaver 4y ago
    There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic controls are actually counter-productive, especially when incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" labels on them... but those labels were actually controls in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him? Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger. I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed." I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.
torstenvl 4y ago
Agreed. The more idiosyncratic aesthetic features, the more something is marked as associated with a point in time. Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-century furniture.
JieJie 4y ago
I wonder what Mac OS X would have looked like if Susan and Bruce had been given access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors instead of chunky bits. I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new features that became apparent with use, and serious functionality that would stay out of the way until it was needed. I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate. 1. https://wetransfer.com/paper https://wetransfer.com/paper
- _zzaw 4y ago
  You mean System 1.0? The designers of Mac OS X did have access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors :-) It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. I think those technological limitations—no color, almost no RAM, no hard disk—are one reason the original Mac GUI looked as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else. That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the Mac's, it looks a lot rougher and more inelegant. Kare was not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.) So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an interesting experiment. (Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)
  - jfb 4y ago
    I would like to see a system that acts like classic System 7, too. Less Unix sludge, more focus on a single interactive user. More explorability, more hackability. A computer that feels like your computer. I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.
    - 4y ago
_a_a_a_ 4y ago
Dated or just plain worse?
flohofwoe 4y ago
Fully agree. It's the same 'bubble gum' look as Windows XP. What were they thinking with those buttons and scrollbars? On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 (minus the media player, ugh)
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I'm still waiting desperately for some DE to get back to this. GNOME 4x has in some ways but obviously not in others... Please someone re-make an OS 9-like UI for me.
  - hexagonwin 4y ago
    mlvwm is available and also works on modern *nix. (worked on gnu linux and freebsd at least) https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm
- layer8 4y ago
  Around 2000 was peak usability in terms of UI design for both MacOS and Windows.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    Modern macOS is remarkably usable compared to that time, especially with a few tweaks in place (Magnet app for window management, three-finger dragging, etc.) It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be eye-opening.
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  I spent large parts of my life with System 7/8/9, but looking back on it now, you'd have thought Apple would have designed a better italics...
  - flohofwoe 4y ago
joshmarinacci 4y ago
While it was garish its purpose was to stand out and attract attention so the the Mac wouldn't die. It worked. I think the toned down version of Aqua released only a couple of years later for Snow Leopard still looks pretty good today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:Leopard_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...
- Rimintil 4y ago
  I always preferred the 'platform' for the Dock vs. the background we currently have. I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did it.
- another2another 4y ago
  Looking at that picture I'm reminded of how sursprised I was (still am!) that they used a picture of an actual bare Hard drive on the desktop to represent the internal disk. Surely hardly any users even knew what a hard drive looked like outside of the computer case, but there it is on the desktop, seemed like a very un-Apple thing to do.
zokier 4y ago
One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and the brushed metal look that followed were extremely distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more slowly. [1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?
- HollowEyes 4y ago
  Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to grey. I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh. Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.
- ndiddy 4y ago
  > What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels? In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    I… don’t believe this. Reviews of the day were preoccupied with drooling over the graphics capabilities, given that it’s a mostly-objective thing to compare and were often the only visible thing that changed in an OS release. If you look at the embellishments that UI picked up they evolved in lockstep with the capabilities of the hardware. As soon as there was sufficient color depth for shadows, then shadows were added. Once that expanded to sufficient color depth for gradients, then gradients were added. Same with transparency. Once MS Windows got a GPU compositor in Vista we got “glass”.
ithkuil 4y ago
Things first get old, then they become antique
steve1977 4y ago
Aqua certainly matched my indigo blue iMac G3 perfectly back then (around 2000?). I sometimes miss these systems... not in terms of performance of course, but the whole experience was beautiful.

jszymborski 4y ago

It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.

colanderman 4y ago
Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.

graypegg 4y ago

I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it. Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much. Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.

artificial 4y ago
Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group Mac OS X design into four broad buckets: • 10.0 - 10.4 • 10.5 - 10.9 • 10.10 - 10.15 • 11+

danaris 4y ago
Wasn't only the first of those actually called Aqua? I don't recall exactly when Apple officially retired that designation, but it was well before the current era.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Internally, even the current UI is referred to as Aqua. Or more specifically, aqua and darkAqua, depending on if dark mode is desired. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearance/name https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearanc...
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I don't know, but I've seen some people use "Aqua" to refer to the design through 10.4, through 10.9, or through the present day.
colanderman 4y ago
I was referring to the earlier iterations, with "shiny" buttons, lots of gradients, etc. 11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit more utilitarian, less showy and particular.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  The early Aqua look and feel was informed by the industrial design of the Macs running it. Consumer Macs were very colorful up until about 2003 and had a lot of the texture effects the Aqua L&F was emulating.

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I don't think "modern" flat UI designs will fare any better with time, and maybe even worse. Already, the earlier variations of flat UI (Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, Material 1.0) to my eye look more dated than Aqua during its prime (OS X 10.6-10.9) does.

astrange 4y ago
You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED.
TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, which lack presence and make computing feel less tangible and more disposable. You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates. And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional. Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.
- BuckyBeaver 4y ago
  There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic controls are actually counter-productive, especially when incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" labels on them... but those labels were actually controls in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him? Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger. I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed." I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.

torstenvl 4y ago

Agreed. The more idiosyncratic aesthetic features, the more something is marked as associated with a point in time. Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-century furniture.

JieJie 4y ago

I wonder what Mac OS X would have looked like if Susan and Bruce had been given access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors instead of chunky bits. I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new features that became apparent with use, and serious functionality that would stay out of the way until it was needed. I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate. 1. https://wetransfer.com/paper https://wetransfer.com/paper

_zzaw 4y ago
You mean System 1.0? The designers of Mac OS X did have access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors :-) It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. I think those technological limitations—no color, almost no RAM, no hard disk—are one reason the original Mac GUI looked as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else. That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the Mac's, it looks a lot rougher and more inelegant. Kare was not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.) So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an interesting experiment. (Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)
- jfb 4y ago
  I would like to see a system that acts like classic System 7, too. Less Unix sludge, more focus on a single interactive user. More explorability, more hackability. A computer that feels like your computer. I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.
  - 4y ago

_a_a_a_ 4y ago

Dated or just plain worse?

flohofwoe 4y ago

Fully agree. It's the same 'bubble gum' look as Windows XP. What were they thinking with those buttons and scrollbars? On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 (minus the media player, ugh)

guerrilla 4y ago
I'm still waiting desperately for some DE to get back to this. GNOME 4x has in some ways but obviously not in others... Please someone re-make an OS 9-like UI for me.
- hexagonwin 4y ago
  mlvwm is available and also works on modern *nix. (worked on gnu linux and freebsd at least) https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm
layer8 4y ago
Around 2000 was peak usability in terms of UI design for both MacOS and Windows.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  Modern macOS is remarkably usable compared to that time, especially with a few tweaks in place (Magnet app for window management, three-finger dragging, etc.) It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be eye-opening.
Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
I spent large parts of my life with System 7/8/9, but looking back on it now, you'd have thought Apple would have designed a better italics...
- flohofwoe 4y ago

joshmarinacci 4y ago

While it was garish its purpose was to stand out and attract attention so the the Mac wouldn't die. It worked. I think the toned down version of Aqua released only a couple of years later for Snow Leopard still looks pretty good today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:Leopard_Desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...

Rimintil 4y ago
I always preferred the 'platform' for the Dock vs. the background we currently have. I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did it.
another2another 4y ago
Looking at that picture I'm reminded of how sursprised I was (still am!) that they used a picture of an actual bare Hard drive on the desktop to represent the internal disk. Surely hardly any users even knew what a hard drive looked like outside of the computer case, but there it is on the desktop, seemed like a very un-Apple thing to do.

zokier 4y ago

One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and the brushed metal look that followed were extremely distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more slowly. [1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?

HollowEyes 4y ago
Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to grey. I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh. Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.
ndiddy 4y ago
> What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels? In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.
- jahewson 4y ago
  I… don’t believe this. Reviews of the day were preoccupied with drooling over the graphics capabilities, given that it’s a mostly-objective thing to compare and were often the only visible thing that changed in an OS release. If you look at the embellishments that UI picked up they evolved in lockstep with the capabilities of the hardware. As soon as there was sufficient color depth for shadows, then shadows were added. Once that expanded to sufficient color depth for gradients, then gradients were added. Same with transparency. Once MS Windows got a GPU compositor in Vista we got “glass”.

ithkuil 4y ago

Things first get old, then they become antique

steve1977 4y ago

Aqua certainly matched my indigo blue iMac G3 perfectly back then (around 2000?). I sometimes miss these systems... not in terms of performance of course, but the whole experience was beautiful.