4 ms·

I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy". In the early days, there actually was a "better"

I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy". In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix some of the early issues. Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object oriented user interface. MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" concept yet). (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)
WorldMaker 4y ago
> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.
- chungy 4y ago
  Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged inside them however you want to leave them without necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or anything like that. There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files. But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - chungy 4y ago
      I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your file browser was also your document manager was also your application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows never really supported it (depending on one's view of Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I once briefly heavily used it.) Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.
karmakaze 4y ago
It doesn't really say what parts of the MacOS philosophy it's aligned with. Seems more like riding on coattails. What is listed are a number of differences that apply to most any Linux/BSD distro. I think 'philosophy' here means surface appearance of the desktop. And if it's about openness, why link to the branding pages rather than the source repo? I couldn't even find a link searching for 'source' on the page.
HeckFeck 4y ago
Reminds me of PrismWM. https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_introducing_the_prism_window_manager_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in... Something like it would be a revival of the OS9 theme and philosophy. Unfortunately the thread was started 2 years ago with no reference to a public repo and no updates from the author since. Maybe it was always vapourware :(

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object oriented user interface. MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" concept yet). (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.)

WorldMaker 4y ago

> I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to finally own a Macintosh and a PC I was disappointed that Mac OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a Macintosh such as spatial navigation.

chungy 4y ago
Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in the search terms doesn't reveal it for me.
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged inside them however you want to leave them without necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or anything like that. There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is sometimes hard (even though some of it is more "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important files. But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat better uses of some of our human visual data processing systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chungy 4y ago
    I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.)
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your file browser was also your document manager was also your application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows never really supported it (depending on one's view of Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I once briefly heavily used it.) Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings committing to older GUI principles like spatial navigation might look like.

karmakaze 4y ago

It doesn't really say what parts of the MacOS philosophy it's aligned with. Seems more like riding on coattails. What is listed are a number of differences that apply to most any Linux/BSD distro. I think 'philosophy' here means surface appearance of the desktop. And if it's about openness, why link to the branding pages rather than the source repo? I couldn't even find a link searching for 'source' on the page.

HeckFeck 4y ago

Reminds me of PrismWM. https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_introducing_the_prism_window_manager_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in... Something like it would be a revival of the OS9 theme and philosophy. Unfortunately the thread was started 2 years ago with no reference to a public repo and no updates from the author since. Maybe it was always vapourware :(