5 ms·

The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in monochrome, on computers that did

by wk_end 4y ago

The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in monochrome, on computers that did substantially less, when riding high off Apple ][ money, with radical vision, for hand-selected elite full-time workers being crunched to the bone by said radical visionary. I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there.

n8cpdx 4y ago
High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not getting margins right. Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types. (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)
- andsoitis 4y ago
  > valued by MBA/PM type Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
  - jahewson 4y ago
    It’s true, though most UI/UX people are not experts in their field. Often they’re less useful to listen to than people who actually use the software. Now an expert - that’s a different matter. An expert will transform your entire sense of what a product even is.
  - kybernetyk 4y ago
    Yeah, that's gate-keepery nonsense. Back in the day the discipline of UX was completely unheard of - yet we had better user experiences than in the last decade with all those smart UX people writing lengthy blog posts about why drop shadows are bad.
    - Terretta 4y ago
      > Back in the day... Depends which day one goes back to. Web projects I've been involved with since early 90s considered user modalities, affordances, predictability, and frictionlessness. To clients we used utility words like straightforward, coherent, clean, functional to describe the system, and experience words like delight, effectiveness, familiarity, ease, as sensations a user should have using the system. Not sure when I first recall the abbreviation UX, probably mid-90s. Mostly we just called it Design, a blend of things one might do making comfortable office furniture and effective graphic design and editorial layout for a magazine. Perhaps things were interesting then because design was an emerging intersectional craft and interfaces were experimentally evolving. Digital UX wasn't yet the ubiquitous sameness of content marketing scaffolding.
      - kybernetyk 4y ago
        I meant real software. Not web anything.
        kergonath 4y ago
        > I meant real software. Not web anything. Now that sounds way more gatekeeper-y than what you complained about before. Websites and web apps are by and large terrible in terms of UI and UX and would benefit a lot from people who know what they are doing in terms of design of the user-facing parts. Still, they are the software a lot of people interact with for a significant chunk of the time they spend on a computer.
malermeister 4y ago
I feel like elementaryOS [0] comes a lot closer to the original mac vision when it comes to UX. Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand. [0] https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/
- amaccuish 4y ago
  I used to use elementaryOS but it sucks running on an LTS version when important kernel fixes come for my Lenovo hardware in literally every release.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    Yeah I wish they were more of a DE like GNOME or KDE instead of a full distro. I know you can install their stuff on other distros too, but it isn't well-supported
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  elementary also unfortunately shares some GNOME-isms, such as avoidance of menubars in favor of hamburger menus, which goes against Mac UX. Menubars serve as a central index of application functionality under macOS and are a central pillar to its UX.
  - malermeister 4y ago
    I think elementary isn't trying to be Mac OS, it has its own UX - even though it's clearly inspired by Macs. It has its own HIG, which you can see here: https://docs.elementary.io/hig https://docs.elementary.io/hig Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that difference.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      Of course, but it's probably going to be a sticking point for many longtime Mac users looking for more FOSS-flavored alternatives.
  - 4y ago
chongli 4y ago
I don’t know. Sure, we may likely never see such a crack team of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary again. But we do have vastly more computing resources than they had. Can’t we solve some of these problems with software? Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little innovation in native UI frameworks. So my point is: couldn’t most of the attention to detail in Apple’s Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing, Schelling points, etc?
- LeFantome 4y ago
  ChatGPT, create a modern ClearType font in the style of the 1984 Mac that scales well with high DPI displays….
  - numpad0 4y ago
    Here’s a website where TrueType font in style of 1984 Mac that scales well can be downloaded: http ://freefonts.liftedfrom.behindpaywall/macos.html
  - chongli 4y ago
    It's hard to tell if you're being facetious but the original Mac used bitmap fonts that were hand-designed by drawing individual pixels on a grid. Any sort of "modern ClearType" font would be anti-aliased and therefore not at all like those bitmap fonts.
  - anthk 4y ago
    Unifont at 16, 32, or 64px.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > we may likely never see such a crack team of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary again Why not? Nothing is stopping them - but statements like yours.
grishka 4y ago
It's not a matter of hardware capabilities or human resources. Sane paddings and proportions and pixel-perfect controls are no different on a modern XDR retina display than they were on a monochrome CRT. You do have more color and pixels to work with, but the underlying principles are all the same. My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the readme to my project for all of the internet to see.
mrcwinn 4y ago
Whoa, whoa, and whoa. The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more impressive because none of the scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system resources were also far, far less. You're significantly discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that — even among the engineers who left or felt too much pressure — nearly all of them say the emotional investment was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world. Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's not rewrite history.
- wk_end 4y ago
  I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be honest, given that I mentioned both that they were exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of RAM. A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either. My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.
  - LeFantome 4y ago
    Really solid example
grumpyprole 4y ago
> HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem I really don't think so. The original Mac had 128K.
juliendorra 4y ago
Apple did it again between 2005 and 2007 when creating the UI for the iPhone. Using a similar playbook! They for example had to find the exact minimum touch targets (57x57px square), amongst many other UI explorations. The iPhone platform was much more complex than Macintosh of course, and had to inherit OS X kernel and some APIs. I’d argue that Palm was also a similar success at the time. You are right that it’s not easy and probably impossible for a too small independent team or an open source project, it needs as you say a very focused goal, a small cohesive team. And for example Meta totally failed to ship a great UI/UX for Quest (it’s ok, but with incredibly bad parts like inviting other users, typing text, inconsistent controls between apps and games, no standard UI library, etc. they really need to just start from scratch now, IMHO). So pure ressources are not enough.

by wk_end 4y ago

n8cpdx 4y ago

High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not getting margins right. Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn’t something that is valued by MBA/PM types. (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author’s efforts)

andsoitis 4y ago
> valued by MBA/PM type Or by folks who are not seasoned in user experience. Just because you use something doesn't make you an expert - UI is often thought of that way, but it is a real discipline.
- jahewson 4y ago
  It’s true, though most UI/UX people are not experts in their field. Often they’re less useful to listen to than people who actually use the software. Now an expert - that’s a different matter. An expert will transform your entire sense of what a product even is.
- kybernetyk 4y ago
  Yeah, that's gate-keepery nonsense. Back in the day the discipline of UX was completely unheard of - yet we had better user experiences than in the last decade with all those smart UX people writing lengthy blog posts about why drop shadows are bad.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    > Back in the day... Depends which day one goes back to. Web projects I've been involved with since early 90s considered user modalities, affordances, predictability, and frictionlessness. To clients we used utility words like straightforward, coherent, clean, functional to describe the system, and experience words like delight, effectiveness, familiarity, ease, as sensations a user should have using the system. Not sure when I first recall the abbreviation UX, probably mid-90s. Mostly we just called it Design, a blend of things one might do making comfortable office furniture and effective graphic design and editorial layout for a magazine. Perhaps things were interesting then because design was an emerging intersectional craft and interfaces were experimentally evolving. Digital UX wasn't yet the ubiquitous sameness of content marketing scaffolding.
    - kybernetyk 4y ago
      I meant real software. Not web anything.
      - kergonath 4y ago
        > I meant real software. Not web anything. Now that sounds way more gatekeeper-y than what you complained about before. Websites and web apps are by and large terrible in terms of UI and UX and would benefit a lot from people who know what they are doing in terms of design of the user-facing parts. Still, they are the software a lot of people interact with for a significant chunk of the time they spend on a computer.

malermeister 4y ago

I feel like elementaryOS [0] comes a lot closer to the original mac vision when it comes to UX. Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I understand. [0] https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/

amaccuish 4y ago
I used to use elementaryOS but it sucks running on an LTS version when important kernel fixes come for my Lenovo hardware in literally every release.
- malermeister 4y ago
  Yeah I wish they were more of a DE like GNOME or KDE instead of a full distro. I know you can install their stuff on other distros too, but it isn't well-supported
kitsunesoba 4y ago
elementary also unfortunately shares some GNOME-isms, such as avoidance of menubars in favor of hamburger menus, which goes against Mac UX. Menubars serve as a central index of application functionality under macOS and are a central pillar to its UX.
- malermeister 4y ago
  I think elementary isn't trying to be Mac OS, it has its own UX - even though it's clearly inspired by Macs. It has its own HIG, which you can see here: https://docs.elementary.io/hig https://docs.elementary.io/hig Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that difference.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Of course, but it's probably going to be a sticking point for many longtime Mac users looking for more FOSS-flavored alternatives.
- 4y ago

chongli 4y ago

I don’t know. Sure, we may likely never see such a crack team of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary again. But we do have vastly more computing resources than they had. Can’t we solve some of these problems with software? Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little innovation in native UI frameworks. So my point is: couldn’t most of the attention to detail in Apple’s Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing, Schelling points, etc?

LeFantome 4y ago
ChatGPT, create a modern ClearType font in the style of the 1984 Mac that scales well with high DPI displays….
- numpad0 4y ago
  Here’s a website where TrueType font in style of 1984 Mac that scales well can be downloaded: http ://freefonts.liftedfrom.behindpaywall/macos.html
- chongli 4y ago
  It's hard to tell if you're being facetious but the original Mac used bitmap fonts that were hand-designed by drawing individual pixels on a grid. Any sort of "modern ClearType" font would be anti-aliased and therefore not at all like those bitmap fonts.
- anthk 4y ago
  Unifont at 16, 32, or 64px.
wolverine876 4y ago
> we may likely never see such a crack team of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary again Why not? Nothing is stopping them - but statements like yours.

grishka 4y ago

It's not a matter of hardware capabilities or human resources. Sane paddings and proportions and pixel-perfect controls are no different on a modern XDR retina display than they were on a monochrome CRT. You do have more color and pixels to work with, but the underlying principles are all the same. My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the readme to my project for all of the internet to see.

mrcwinn 4y ago

Whoa, whoa, and whoa. The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was considerably higher and more impressive because none of the scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system resources were also far, far less. You're significantly discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that — even among the engineers who left or felt too much pressure — nearly all of them say the emotional investment was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world. Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's not rewrite history.

wk_end 4y ago
I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be honest, given that I mentioned both that they were exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of RAM. A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a single person or at most a small team could make the equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their basement. But precisely because those technical restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less competent, either. My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it these days, and they have virtually all the resources in the world.
- LeFantome 4y ago
  Really solid example

grumpyprole 4y ago

> HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem I really don't think so. The original Mac had 128K.

juliendorra 4y ago

Apple did it again between 2005 and 2007 when creating the UI for the iPhone. Using a similar playbook! They for example had to find the exact minimum touch targets (57x57px square), amongst many other UI explorations. The iPhone platform was much more complex than Macintosh of course, and had to inherit OS X kernel and some APIs. I’d argue that Palm was also a similar success at the time. You are right that it’s not easy and probably impossible for a too small independent team or an open source project, it needs as you say a very focused goal, a small cohesive team. And for example Meta totally failed to ship a great UI/UX for Quest (it’s ok, but with incredibly bad parts like inviting other users, typing text, inconsistent controls between apps and games, no standard UI library, etc. they really need to just start from scratch now, IMHO). So pure ressources are not enough.