28 ms·

MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

143 points by wastedbrains 3y ago

Chanderton 3y ago
I remember how insanely quick the GUI on the first MacOS X Server (1.0) version was. It was mostly (simple explanation) a classic MacOS theme slapped on NeXTStep with some additional things added (and stripped). Then when the consumer version was released, it looked like a ”Hollywood OS” or a fancy Kaleidoscope scheme (3r party themes for classic MacOS). But it was slow as… So the transition for me took a while at the start. Think it was Jaguar, or maybe Panther when i moved 100% to MacOS X.
LeanderK 3y ago
Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely. It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it. I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would say. It's way more important than wether the GUI configuration options are well thought out or not.
- lannisterstark 3y ago
  Where's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    Maybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.
- darkstar_16 3y ago
  Feels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in my opinion
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    I wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as Windows2k but it was just fine.
    - vbezhenar 3y ago
      Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly. Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI. Those times are over. We can't have good things.
      - linguae 3y ago
        I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and consistent if you stuck to applications written using GTK+ 2. I concur that I’m not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any day.
        kitsunesoba 3y ago
        If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion. Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).
      - mort96 3y ago
        Hard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey doesn't look good to me at all.
        hombre_fatal 3y ago
        Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something special.
- gjvc 3y ago
  It had real character, and the first time I used it, I came away from the iMac (with its soap-on-a-rope mouse) beaming with excitement. OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the peak for me.
- donatj 3y ago
  I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.
    - Reason077 3y ago
      Boring, perhaps. But definitely not harder to read. The old styles with text against textured backgrounds (for example, the pinstriped menu bars) detracted from readability. Current design is significantly better, especially dark mode, although lately there is a trend towards low-contrast UI (text against similarly-coloured backgrounds) in recent versions of iOS and macOS which is also detracting from readability, IMO.
      - badsectoracula 3y ago
        The pinstripes were only in the earliest versions. By Leopard/Snow Leopard (which i also find the best one) the theme looked clean without looking flat.
        sangnoir 3y ago
        pinstripes, brushed metal, linen; one could follow the trends by looking at cargo-culting designers were setting as the background image on their blogs. I'm sure they thought it looked good when viewing on their freshly updated Macs.
      - anthk 3y ago
        Mac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than flat interfaces.
    - 3y ago
- ArtWomb 3y ago
  Circa 2000 I recall playing with a developers beta version of MacOS X approx 6 months or so pre-release. The move from motorola based power pc chips to x86 already felt a decade too late. And the nextstep & netbsd origins? Very "meh". Apache, Mosaic, Napster all crashing hard requiring system reboots. Apple was playing catch-up to professional grade sgi & sunos (which is what every one was using to build the early web back in those days) ;)
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Just so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in 2006.
    - hestefisk 3y ago
      I think they might be referring to the transition from 68K to PowerPC.
      - duskwuff 3y ago
        That happened around 1994-95. By 2000, it was old news.
- G3rn0ti 3y ago
  > It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere. Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design. Windows 8 was the big cut where its UI forcefully pushed material design onto its users without any transition grace period. That’s one of the reasons why everybody hated it. Edit: On Macs even the hardware design reflected the transition from Frutiger Aero to Material Design: The early 2000 Macs were all semi-transparent plastic shells with bright shades of blue and green. Then Apple discovered Aluminum and silver unibody cases. Now there is no color left in the design universe. This also marks the time MacOS interfaces started to look decidedly more "grown-up". I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?
  - theandrewbailey 3y ago
    > I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever? CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it will spread into hardware. https://cari.institute/aesthetics https://cari.institute/aesthetics
    - concinds 3y ago
      > not sure if it will spread into hardware Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if available in half a dozen colors.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    “ I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever” If any design folks have an opinion on which way the winds are blowing, I’d love to see an example.
- beanjuiceII 3y ago
  interesting, it looks sterile to me
- dsego 3y ago
  > It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint. Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were considered like a huge leap (I know it's not strictly an OS thing), and that was almost 20 years ago.
  - zokier 3y ago
    Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I think modal dialogs with forms were far more common interaction pattern back in the day than these days.
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      > the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars This change irks me quite a lot. Hamburger menus are terrible and while command palettes are nice, they aren't available everywhere, and so on Windows and Linux you end up with a lot of software not having any kind of index of its functionality and burying functions in dialog tunnels.
    - gedy 3y ago
      > Search as the primary interaction method Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.
      - SllX 3y ago
        Personally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired with a robust system for browsing.
      - wildrhythms 3y ago
- Reason077 3y ago
  This was the first version of Mac OS X I ran on my first "modern" Mac, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4. There were some performance issues in this first release, but 10.2 (Jaguar, pronounced "Jag-wire" by Steve Jobs) had a focus on performance and resolved much of it. I vaguely remember dual-booting Mac OS 9 and X for a while, but it wasn't long before Mac OS X took over full time.
- icedchai 3y ago
  Windows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the time, it seems.
  - Sakos 3y ago
    I still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme because I didn't like XP's theme.
jeroenhd 3y ago
Having never actually interacted with a mac from that era, are the grey and white stripes in the toolbar screenshots actually visible on the screen or are they an artifact of old screenshots on modern displays?
- neilalexander 3y ago
  They are visible. It was a design element throughout the UI at the time.
  - fathyb 3y ago
    I really liked that look. The first iOS versions also had a similar pattern in the background: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-custom-vibration-alerts-in-ios-5-2/ https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-custom-...
  - goosedragons 3y ago
    Not just the UI. Apple products in general. The G3 iMac, Apple Cinema Display, Power Mac G4 all had pinstriping elements.
  - gmac 3y ago
    They matched the iMac case's stripes. See: https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/
    - spatulon 3y ago
      Yes, and it was actually Microsoft who first brought the iMac stripes to Mac software with Internet Explorer 5, before OS X.
  - em500 3y ago
    I guess it was a carry over from the original Macintosh OS all the way back from 1984. https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1
haunter 3y ago
Here is the John Siracusa review from 2001 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/
- blamazon 3y ago
  > As in Mac OS 9, it is possible to play DVD movies "on the desktop" by setting the desktop pattern to be a particular color. The DVD player uses this color as a mask for its video display, allowing the movie to appear on the desktop pattern even when the player window itself is hidden. Today I learned!
  - omnibrain 3y ago
    Unrelated: in Windows you can paint on almost everything you see. You just have to get the handle and then you can paint on the canvas of the UI element at runtime. So you can have videos play on buttons for example.
  - netsharc 3y ago
    Windows has this too. Something to do with sending the video data directly to the graphics card, and the graphics card doing the decoding of the MPEG data, and replacing the color (which is usually green) with the video image before outputing to the screen. So if you're playing a video and you open a web page, and the webpage has the same green color, it looks like there's a hole on the browser window and you can see the video playing "behind" it.
    - akx 3y ago
      This isn't probably really used much these days, but yeah, it was/is called Overlay mode. The graphics card isn't necessarily decoding the MPEG data (though that could have been an option in the olden days too), but it is likely scaling it and spitting it out in the given-colored pixels faster than you could've done with just software back in the days. The AVS visualizer for Winamp also supported this; if you set the overlay color to black, you could have all of the black text on your desktop be very, very funkily animated.
simongray 3y ago
> Also folders can be browsed as a series of menus when placed in the dock. http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg That is more useful than the icon view it has now.
- cprecioso 3y ago
  You can still get it like that, just right click on any folder that is pinned to the right side of the Dock, you’ll get 4 different display options.
  - simongray 3y ago
    Thank you!!
    - pantulis 3y ago
      Also should mention "Folder Peek" by Sindre Sorhus which basically does the same but in the menubar, quite handy and free.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    You made my day! That’s actually really slick in the “list” mode.
davidy123 3y ago
They glossed over the NeXT roots which is telling, the ideas were only half-heartedly baked into the OS. It should be strictly enforced that everything on-screen has a relationship to everything else. But that would have been hard work, and they realized eye candy was an easier route when you can just announce something else every few years. This is why desktop evironments really haven't changed since the first commercial releases and Apple is just another PC vendor. Too bad because imagine if the relationship based operating environment was well developed for their spatial headset.
- CoryAlexMartin 3y ago
  What does it mean for everything on screen to have a relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?
  - spatulon 3y ago
    The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder on disk could only be open in a single window, and that window remembered its position and layout, there was a certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency and stability you expect of real-world objects. Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder. This article goes into a lot more detail. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very strong — humans are generally quite good at remembering where things are in physical space, retaining such information more easily than we do abstract information like file paths.
  - 3y ago
lvl102 3y ago
The first time I learned about OS X, I blindly bought Apple shares. I knew it would set them up for success down the road. Sounds silly now but foundation, such as OS for a computer company, matter. Although, OS X was painful for many years.
- zoky 3y ago
  > Although, OS X was painful for many years. I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they announced it—it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the same time? Wow, was that cool. There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles. I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that literally had no modern web browser support except for something called "iCab". Anyway, all of this is to say… I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at the most, "many".
  - lvl102 3y ago
    To be fair, OS X was OK by 2003 but third-party softwares and especially MS Office sucked until 2007-08.
    - rvense 3y ago
      Well, depends. For music that era is just an explosion of great things. From 10.3 or so a Mac and a Firewire audio interface was an amazingly stable and portable package, with possibilities you could hardly have dreamed of even with a studio full of gear ten years before. The extra power that became available in the Core 2 Duo era was transformative, too, but the software was available for a good while before.
perihelions 3y ago
Here's that mozilla.org/start page from 2001 if anyone was curious how it continues, https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozilla.org/start/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozill...
jraph 3y ago
Notice the Internet Explorer icon? This may feel unexpected and out of place but Safari was first released only in 2003.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  And the Tasman engine that IE for Mac was built around was much nicer than the Trident engine that powered IE for Windows. IE for Mac had good support for CSS and support for transparent PNGs many years before IE for Windows did. I always wondered why MS decided to fix up Trident to create the original Edge instead of porting Tasman to Windows.
- kzrdude 3y ago
  I have a memory of browsing on my mac with 5 staggered internet explorer windows (this was before tabs, and I was clearly showing my tab-addiction to come already then by using five windows in parallel.)
weevil 3y ago
I have such strong nostalgia and latent excitement about the early days of OS X. I was just a teenager in the early 2000s, and as a young Apple nerd with several iMac G3s in the house (my parents are graphic designers; there was a family Mac, and some cast-offs from my high school) I'd get so into upgrading them through the versions and looking at all the cool new stuff and thinking it was so damn clean and futuristic.
OnlyMortal 3y ago
Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn’t a completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every alternate build, for instance. I’d come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.
- WillAdams 3y ago
  Blame Adobe and their renegging of their promise to provide a free Display PostScript runtime. Getting Quartz née "Display PDF" up to where it was took the better part of a decade as Mike Paquette explained in detail on comp.sys.next.advocacy
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep APIs without needing to transition to Objective-C. The UNIX aspects to it came primarily from NeXTStep and weren't something new Apple added.
  - OnlyMortal 3y ago
    Apple decided to create a NeXT Workspace clone with PowerPlant (Carbonized). My understanding that this was due to politics with both Microsoft and Adobe. It wasn’t done very well and was clunky. The later re-write to Obj-C was an improvement. As for the rest of OSX, most of the inbuilt apps were just direct from NeXT. Even today, Mail and TextEdit are still similar. ProjectBuilder was much the same as on NeXT as was InterfaceBuilder. Their merging into the blob that is now XCode was a mistake IMO. With ViaVoice, the training app was a PowerPlant port from the older Classic version. It wasn’t hard to munge PP to get it to work. I did the UI for the VoiceCenter (a HAL-like UI intentionally) and the Preferences given my AppKit skills. One advantage we made use of is we used a UNIX voice engine that ran as a process on its own. The OS really was just a NeXT with skinning for Apple and a few apps using PowerPlant. I think the old Sun based network management was still present (NIS??). Obviously, a lack of Display Postscript made a difference as Apple had to develop their own renderer using the same graphics primitives. That may be why it was so slow back then.
classified 3y ago
I miss that metal waste basket and the web link "@" spring. And some of the Dock animations.
coreyh14444 3y ago
I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!
- freedomben 3y ago
  I remember feeling that way too but had forgotten about it! Wow, what great life lesson I nearly missed, thank you! It's never too late (well, usually not)
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain. I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now. It was the right bet.
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Another hard decision that was the right choice in retrospect was going with KHTML. I remember watching the keynote and waiting for them to announce it was based on Gecko. Camino had shown it was possible and worked well. Apple had hired David Hyatt. It was obvious they would go with Gecko. There was an audible gasp when they announced it was based on KHTML. What the %^&$ is KHTML?
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      Yet another one was going with LLVM. Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch? Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't take advices from me.
      - 3y ago
freedomben 3y ago
> This screen shot shows the login screen. It displays a graphical list of users that can login on this system. (Interestingly Windows XP does something similar) > Being based on BSD Unix, MacOS X inherits many useful unix features such as real security and user accounts. > This means that, for example, you can create a special account for someone else to play games and don't have to worry about them deleting system files, accessing your personal files, or changing system setting. > This can be somewhat confusing to users who are used to having complete control over their systems in earlier versions of MacOS. To do things like install software you must be logged in as the Administrator. While this can be annoying it prevents users from accidentally messing up their system or from malicious programs or viruses that could otherwise infect the system. There is also a hidden "root" account that has slightly more privileges than the Administrator, but this is rarely needed. Reading this now in 2023 it seems laughably primitive, but I remember the mass confusion at the time! Very similar thing happened with Vista. When old people like me pine for the simpler days of yore, it's hard to imagine just how much simpler those times were (mostly in a good way!) I love modern Linux and use it on my family PC and it's great having full multi-user tooling for my kids to have their own spaces with no root, but I do fondly remember the days before user accounts were a thing on your PC. Not to mention how open and interopable things were. Those days don't come back
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  I get this. I started with Windows 98, and it was much easier to mess up the system, but that's how we learnt. Low security invites play.
- abtinf 3y ago
  Turns out it wasn’t enough. What we were just barely starting to grasp then was that, among the “other users” we need to be protected from, were the software vendors themselves. In other words, I am not a single user; the combination of me and various groupings of binaries are the user, and they must be carefully isolated. And now, it turns out I want still another layer of protection too (e.g. multiple browser profiles/containers). Back then, most people were still on dialup internet. It was still relatively rare that software would record everything about us and report all of it to HQ. We used to call software like this “spyware”, which isn’t really a word that even exists anymore. The idea for the need for something like Qubes OS would’ve been completely alien.
avidphantasm 3y ago
I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over what we have today. Blech!
- kilroy123 3y ago
  Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.
  - jonhohle 3y ago
    And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to do - like change network interface priority by reordering the list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want to prefer ethernet when it’s attached, for example). I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for long time users, it’s bewildering.
    - avidphantasm 3y ago
      It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.
      - kitsunesoba 3y ago
        One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors. If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement. [0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-os-x/mac-os-x%5E2009%5E10.6-snow-leopard-finder.png https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mountain-Lion-Finder-Home-2000x1384.png https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...
racl101 3y ago
Still one of the best looking OSes of all time.
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
graypegg 3y ago
I think one of the weirdest things to me is how unchanged OSX / MacOS is. As much as I like this specific paradigm of computing UI, I kind of see why they’ve been trying new things as of late. (Stage manager, new settings panel, iOS-y control centre) Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it NEEDS to change, but I can imagine the need to at least explore a bit if something stays mostly the same for 20 years.
- nobleach 3y ago
  It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want. Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks section in the Control Panel??"
  - graypegg 3y ago
    I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-market.) If you’ve grown up with phones and tablets, anything that’s a change to the device, even if it’s an operation and not a setting, is in “settings”. I get it, doesn’t mean I agree with it to be fair! I miss old system preferences as much as you.
    - golergka 3y ago
      Why can't this function be found in several places at once?
      - graypegg 3y ago
        Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even duplicate UI to control the same setting. I think generally that’s seen as confusing, and probably not something worth striving for IMO.
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
This was Tog's critique, at about the same time: https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html
I_am_tiberius 3y ago
I wish the would modernize the Dock.
- klocksib 3y ago
  What do you mean?
  - I_am_tiberius 3y ago
    E.g. window previews and virtual desktop miniatures.
threeio 3y ago
I miss my candy coated unix as I used to lovingly refer to 10.1 on my iBook back in the day.
b33j0r 3y ago
So, I’ve got to ask the practical question. For you early-adopters, is it stable enough to upgrade to, yet? :p
- steve1977 3y ago
  Using it since the Public Beta that came out in 2000, no complaints here
- andrekandre 3y ago
  its good but i'd still recommend to wait for jagwire (^_-)
mmphosis 3y ago
Each window has Close, Minimize and Maximize button on it. The "X", "-", and "+" symbols only appear when the mouse moves over these buttons. The "+" symbol is Zoom, not Maximize. https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png
tobiasbischoff 3y ago
Yeah, I remember that a fried installed a very early pre-version on his powerbook and we where all blown away.

MacOS X 10.1 (2001)

143 points by wastedbrains 3y ago

I remember how insanely quick the GUI on the first MacOS X Server (1.0) version was. It was mostly (simple explanation) a classic MacOS theme slapped on NeXTStep with some additional things added (and stripped). Then when the consumer version was released, it looked like a ”Hollywood OS” or a fancy Kaleidoscope scheme (3r party themes for classic MacOS). But it was slow as… So the transition for me took a while at the start. Think it was Jaguar, or maybe Panther when i moved 100% to MacOS X.

LeanderK 3y ago

Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely. It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it. I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would say. It's way more important than wether the GUI configuration options are well thought out or not.

lannisterstark 3y ago
Where's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Maybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.
darkstar_16 3y ago
Feels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in my opinion
- baal80spam 3y ago
  I wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as Windows2k but it was just fine.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly. Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI. Those times are over. We can't have good things.
    - linguae 3y ago
      I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and consistent if you stuck to applications written using GTK+ 2. I concur that I’m not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any day.
      - kitsunesoba 3y ago
        If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion. Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).
    - mort96 3y ago
      Hard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey doesn't look good to me at all.
      - hombre_fatal 3y ago
        Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something special.
gjvc 3y ago
It had real character, and the first time I used it, I came away from the iMac (with its soap-on-a-rope mouse) beaming with excitement. OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the peak for me.
donatj 3y ago
I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard. Flat is just so... flat. And boring. And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Boring, perhaps. But definitely not harder to read. The old styles with text against textured backgrounds (for example, the pinstriped menu bars) detracted from readability. Current design is significantly better, especially dark mode, although lately there is a trend towards low-contrast UI (text against similarly-coloured backgrounds) in recent versions of iOS and macOS which is also detracting from readability, IMO.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      The pinstripes were only in the earliest versions. By Leopard/Snow Leopard (which i also find the best one) the theme looked clean without looking flat.
      - sangnoir 3y ago
        pinstripes, brushed metal, linen; one could follow the trends by looking at cargo-culting designers were setting as the background image on their blogs. I'm sure they thought it looked good when viewing on their freshly updated Macs.
    - anthk 3y ago
      Mac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than flat interfaces.
  - 3y ago
ArtWomb 3y ago
Circa 2000 I recall playing with a developers beta version of MacOS X approx 6 months or so pre-release. The move from motorola based power pc chips to x86 already felt a decade too late. And the nextstep & netbsd origins? Very "meh". Apache, Mosaic, Napster all crashing hard requiring system reboots. Apple was playing catch-up to professional grade sgi & sunos (which is what every one was using to build the early web back in those days) ;)
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Just so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in 2006.
  - hestefisk 3y ago
    I think they might be referring to the transition from 68K to PowerPC.
    - duskwuff 3y ago
      That happened around 1994-95. By 2000, it was old news.
G3rn0ti 3y ago
> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere. Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design. Windows 8 was the big cut where its UI forcefully pushed material design onto its users without any transition grace period. That’s one of the reasons why everybody hated it. Edit: On Macs even the hardware design reflected the transition from Frutiger Aero to Material Design: The early 2000 Macs were all semi-transparent plastic shells with bright shades of blue and green. Then Apple discovered Aluminum and silver unibody cases. Now there is no color left in the design universe. This also marks the time MacOS interfaces started to look decidedly more "grown-up". I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  > I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever? CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it will spread into hardware. https://cari.institute/aesthetics https://cari.institute/aesthetics
  - concinds 3y ago
    > not sure if it will spread into hardware Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if available in half a dozen colors.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  “ I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever” If any design folks have an opinion on which way the winds are blowing, I’d love to see an example.
beanjuiceII 3y ago
interesting, it looks sterile to me
dsego 3y ago
> It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint. Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were considered like a huge leap (I know it's not strictly an OS thing), and that was almost 20 years ago.
- zokier 3y ago
  Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I think modal dialogs with forms were far more common interaction pattern back in the day than these days.
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    > the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars This change irks me quite a lot. Hamburger menus are terrible and while command palettes are nice, they aren't available everywhere, and so on Windows and Linux you end up with a lot of software not having any kind of index of its functionality and burying functions in dialog tunnels.
  - gedy 3y ago
    > Search as the primary interaction method Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.
    - SllX 3y ago
      Personally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired with a robust system for browsing.
    - wildrhythms 3y ago
Reason077 3y ago
This was the first version of Mac OS X I ran on my first "modern" Mac, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4. There were some performance issues in this first release, but 10.2 (Jaguar, pronounced "Jag-wire" by Steve Jobs) had a focus on performance and resolved much of it. I vaguely remember dual-booting Mac OS 9 and X for a while, but it wasn't long before Mac OS X took over full time.
icedchai 3y ago
Windows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the time, it seems.
- Sakos 3y ago
  I still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme because I didn't like XP's theme.

jeroenhd 3y ago

Having never actually interacted with a mac from that era, are the grey and white stripes in the toolbar screenshots actually visible on the screen or are they an artifact of old screenshots on modern displays?

neilalexander 3y ago
They are visible. It was a design element throughout the UI at the time.
- fathyb 3y ago
  I really liked that look. The first iOS versions also had a similar pattern in the background: https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-custom-vibration-alerts-in-ios-5-2/ https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/setting-custom-...
- goosedragons 3y ago
  Not just the UI. Apple products in general. The G3 iMac, Apple Cinema Display, Power Mac G4 all had pinstriping elements.
- gmac 3y ago
  They matched the iMac case's stripes. See: https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/ https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/29/bondi_blue_imac/
  - spatulon 3y ago
    Yes, and it was actually Microsoft who first brought the iMac stripes to Mac software with Internet Explorer 5, before OS X.
- em500 3y ago
  I guess it was a carry over from the original Macintosh OS all the way back from 1984. https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1 https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_1

haunter 3y ago

Here is the John Siracusa review from 2001 https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2001/10/macosx-10-1/

blamazon 3y ago
> As in Mac OS 9, it is possible to play DVD movies "on the desktop" by setting the desktop pattern to be a particular color. The DVD player uses this color as a mask for its video display, allowing the movie to appear on the desktop pattern even when the player window itself is hidden. Today I learned!
- omnibrain 3y ago
  Unrelated: in Windows you can paint on almost everything you see. You just have to get the handle and then you can paint on the canvas of the UI element at runtime. So you can have videos play on buttons for example.
- netsharc 3y ago
  Windows has this too. Something to do with sending the video data directly to the graphics card, and the graphics card doing the decoding of the MPEG data, and replacing the color (which is usually green) with the video image before outputing to the screen. So if you're playing a video and you open a web page, and the webpage has the same green color, it looks like there's a hole on the browser window and you can see the video playing "behind" it.
  - akx 3y ago
    This isn't probably really used much these days, but yeah, it was/is called Overlay mode. The graphics card isn't necessarily decoding the MPEG data (though that could have been an option in the olden days too), but it is likely scaling it and spitting it out in the given-colored pixels faster than you could've done with just software back in the days. The AVS visualizer for Winamp also supported this; if you set the overlay color to black, you could have all of the black text on your desktop be very, very funkily animated.

simongray 3y ago

> Also folders can be browsed as a series of menus when placed in the dock. http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg http://toastytech.com/guis/osxhddoc.jpg That is more useful than the icon view it has now.

cprecioso 3y ago
You can still get it like that, just right click on any folder that is pinned to the right side of the Dock, you’ll get 4 different display options.
- simongray 3y ago
  Thank you!!
  - pantulis 3y ago
    Also should mention "Folder Peek" by Sindre Sorhus which basically does the same but in the menubar, quite handy and free.
- graypegg 3y ago
  You made my day! That’s actually really slick in the “list” mode.

davidy123 3y ago

They glossed over the NeXT roots which is telling, the ideas were only half-heartedly baked into the OS. It should be strictly enforced that everything on-screen has a relationship to everything else. But that would have been hard work, and they realized eye candy was an easier route when you can just announce something else every few years. This is why desktop evironments really haven't changed since the first commercial releases and Apple is just another PC vendor. Too bad because imagine if the relationship based operating environment was well developed for their spatial headset.

CoryAlexMartin 3y ago
What does it mean for everything on screen to have a relationship to everything else? Could you elaborate?
- spatulon 3y ago
  The classic MacOS's Finder was 'spatial'. Since each folder on disk could only be open in a single window, and that window remembered its position and layout, there was a certain physical consistency - it felt like the windows were the actual folders on disk, with the same kind of coherency and stability you expect of real-world objects. Meanwhile, the Mac OS X Finder is not spatial. You can have the same folder open in multiple windows, each with different layouts. There's no longer that illusion that the window and the folder are one and the same – it's just a browser showing you the contents of the folder. This article goes into a lot more detail. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
  - kitsunesoba 3y ago
    Yeah the classic Finder exploited human spatial and muscle memory to help users navigate filesystems quickly, which was pretty smart because those forms of memory are very strong — humans are generally quite good at remembering where things are in physical space, retaining such information more easily than we do abstract information like file paths.
- 3y ago

lvl102 3y ago

The first time I learned about OS X, I blindly bought Apple shares. I knew it would set them up for success down the road. Sounds silly now but foundation, such as OS for a computer company, matter. Although, OS X was painful for many years.

zoky 3y ago
> Although, OS X was painful for many years. I guess it depends on how you define "many". I bought my first Mac in 1998 (the "Smurf" G3) and used MacOS 8/9 for quite a few years after that. I remember looking forward to OS X once they announced it—it was literally the coolest shit ever. Like, the ability to run Photoshop and Emacs on the same system at the same time? Wow, was that cool. There was definitely a period where you had to dual-boot between MacOS 9 and OS X for a while, but by the time I bought my first iBook in 2002, OS X was the standard, and was way better than anything else out there. I don't think I ever booted into MacOS 9 on my iBook, except for shits and giggles. I just don't think there was any question that OS X was leaps and bounds better than OS 9, to the point where when I had to use OS 9 for work 4-5 years later (the video editing world always lags 5-6 years behind the rest of us) I was a little bit peeved about having to used such an antiquated system that literally had no modern web browser support except for something called "iCab". Anyway, all of this is to say… I wouldn't call 1-2 years, at the most, "many".
- lvl102 3y ago
  To be fair, OS X was OK by 2003 but third-party softwares and especially MS Office sucked until 2007-08.
  - rvense 3y ago
    Well, depends. For music that era is just an explosion of great things. From 10.3 or so a Mac and a Firewire audio interface was an amazingly stable and portable package, with possibilities you could hardly have dreamed of even with a studio full of gear ten years before. The extra power that became available in the Core 2 Duo era was transformative, too, but the software was available for a good while before.

perihelions 3y ago

Here's that mozilla.org/start page from 2001 if anyone was curious how it continues, https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozilla.org/start/ https://web.archive.org/web/20011017155749/http://www.mozill...

jraph 3y ago

Notice the Internet Explorer icon? This may feel unexpected and out of place but Safari was first released only in 2003.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
And the Tasman engine that IE for Mac was built around was much nicer than the Trident engine that powered IE for Windows. IE for Mac had good support for CSS and support for transparent PNGs many years before IE for Windows did. I always wondered why MS decided to fix up Trident to create the original Edge instead of porting Tasman to Windows.
kzrdude 3y ago
I have a memory of browsing on my mac with 5 staggered internet explorer windows (this was before tabs, and I was clearly showing my tab-addiction to come already then by using five windows in parallel.)

weevil 3y ago

I have such strong nostalgia and latent excitement about the early days of OS X. I was just a teenager in the early 2000s, and as a young Apple nerd with several iMac G3s in the house (my parents are graphic designers; there was a family Mac, and some cast-offs from my high school) I'd get so into upgrading them through the versions and looking at all the cool new stuff and thinking it was so damn clean and futuristic.

OnlyMortal 3y ago

Having developed for OSX in that era, IBM ViaVoice, it wasn’t a completely functional OS. The audio input was broken every alternate build, for instance. I’d come from a NeXT background and was surprised how slow OSX (OpenStep in essence) was on PPC.

WillAdams 3y ago
Blame Adobe and their renegging of their promise to provide a free Display PostScript runtime. Getting Quartz née "Display PDF" up to where it was took the better part of a decade as Mike Paquette explained in detail on comp.sys.next.advocacy
mike_hearn 3y ago
I'm curious what you make of the standard narrative that OS X was a fuse of NeXTStep with UNIX and MacOS Classic. As far as I can tell that's not really accurate and OS X was basically just NeXTStep reskinned to look like MacOS, with an emulator for Classic apps bolted onto the side, and some C libraries to ease the porting process from the old Mac APIs to the new NeXTStep APIs without needing to transition to Objective-C. The UNIX aspects to it came primarily from NeXTStep and weren't something new Apple added.
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  Apple decided to create a NeXT Workspace clone with PowerPlant (Carbonized). My understanding that this was due to politics with both Microsoft and Adobe. It wasn’t done very well and was clunky. The later re-write to Obj-C was an improvement. As for the rest of OSX, most of the inbuilt apps were just direct from NeXT. Even today, Mail and TextEdit are still similar. ProjectBuilder was much the same as on NeXT as was InterfaceBuilder. Their merging into the blob that is now XCode was a mistake IMO. With ViaVoice, the training app was a PowerPlant port from the older Classic version. It wasn’t hard to munge PP to get it to work. I did the UI for the VoiceCenter (a HAL-like UI intentionally) and the Preferences given my AppKit skills. One advantage we made use of is we used a UNIX voice engine that ran as a process on its own. The OS really was just a NeXT with skinning for Apple and a few apps using PowerPlant. I think the old Sun based network management was still present (NIS??). Obviously, a lack of Display Postscript made a difference as Apple had to develop their own renderer using the same graphics primitives. That may be why it was so slow back then.

classified 3y ago

I miss that metal waste basket and the web link "@" spring. And some of the Dock animations.

coreyh14444 3y ago

I was deep into OS explorations in this period. I ran BeOS, Yellow Dog linux on PowerPC, had all flavors of NT, etc. My feeling about OS X at this time was that it was the right choice but that it was "too late" and that Apple took too long and the window of opportunity had passed. I take that now as startup advice: It isn't too late!

freedomben 3y ago
I remember feeling that way too but had forgotten about it! Wow, what great life lesson I nearly missed, thank you! It's never too late (well, usually not)
tambourine_man 3y ago
OS X was a bet on the future, that double buffering everything was OK because graphic cards would get there eventually. They certainly did, but we suffered through menus taking a good fraction of a second to drop down for a few years. I can still feel the pain. I would never have taken that bet. I want computers to be fast now. It was the right bet.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Another hard decision that was the right choice in retrospect was going with KHTML. I remember watching the keynote and waiting for them to announce it was based on Gecko. Camino had shown it was possible and worked well. Apple had hired David Hyatt. It was obvious they would go with Gecko. There was an audible gasp when they announced it was based on KHTML. What the %^&$ is KHTML?
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    Yet another one was going with LLVM. Now that they had a decent running GCC on PowerPC they want to build a compiler infrastructure from scratch? Apple is full of those decisions. I'm just glad they don't take advices from me.
    - 3y ago

freedomben 3y ago

> This screen shot shows the login screen. It displays a graphical list of users that can login on this system. (Interestingly Windows XP does something similar) > Being based on BSD Unix, MacOS X inherits many useful unix features such as real security and user accounts. > This means that, for example, you can create a special account for someone else to play games and don't have to worry about them deleting system files, accessing your personal files, or changing system setting. > This can be somewhat confusing to users who are used to having complete control over their systems in earlier versions of MacOS. To do things like install software you must be logged in as the Administrator. While this can be annoying it prevents users from accidentally messing up their system or from malicious programs or viruses that could otherwise infect the system. There is also a hidden "root" account that has slightly more privileges than the Administrator, but this is rarely needed. Reading this now in 2023 it seems laughably primitive, but I remember the mass confusion at the time! Very similar thing happened with Vista. When old people like me pine for the simpler days of yore, it's hard to imagine just how much simpler those times were (mostly in a good way!) I love modern Linux and use it on my family PC and it's great having full multi-user tooling for my kids to have their own spaces with no root, but I do fondly remember the days before user accounts were a thing on your PC. Not to mention how open and interopable things were. Those days don't come back

HeckFeck 3y ago
I get this. I started with Windows 98, and it was much easier to mess up the system, but that's how we learnt. Low security invites play.
abtinf 3y ago
Turns out it wasn’t enough. What we were just barely starting to grasp then was that, among the “other users” we need to be protected from, were the software vendors themselves. In other words, I am not a single user; the combination of me and various groupings of binaries are the user, and they must be carefully isolated. And now, it turns out I want still another layer of protection too (e.g. multiple browser profiles/containers). Back then, most people were still on dialup internet. It was still relatively rare that software would record everything about us and report all of it to HQ. We used to call software like this “spyware”, which isn’t really a word that even exists anymore. The idea for the need for something like Qubes OS would’ve been completely alien.

avidphantasm 3y ago

I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over what we have today. Blech!

kilroy123 3y ago
Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to do - like change network interface priority by reordering the list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want to prefer ethernet when it’s attached, for example). I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for long time users, it’s bewildering.
  - avidphantasm 3y ago
    It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.
    - kitsunesoba 3y ago
      One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors. If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement. [0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-os-x/mac-os-x%5E2009%5E10.6-snow-leopard-finder.png https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mountain-Lion-Finder-Home-2000x1384.png https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...

racl101 3y ago

Still one of the best looking OSes of all time.

sproketboy 3y ago

[dead]

graypegg 3y ago

I think one of the weirdest things to me is how unchanged OSX / MacOS is. As much as I like this specific paradigm of computing UI, I kind of see why they’ve been trying new things as of late. (Stage manager, new settings panel, iOS-y control centre) Just because it’s old, doesn’t mean it NEEDS to change, but I can imagine the need to at least explore a bit if something stays mostly the same for 20 years.

nobleach 3y ago
It seems like "EVERYTHING" Apple has done in this arena just ensures I'll have to use a search function to find what I want. Same is true for Windows 10+. "I just want to format a USB Thumbdrive!!! why do I have to search for some sort of Disks section in the Control Panel??"
- graypegg 3y ago
  I mean, why not? I think a lot of people under-20 will instinctively think of “erase this whole disk and put a new file system on it” as a very “settings” sort of thing, not something to be done in a separate application like Disk Manager. (Which is technically a hold over from when OSes did not ship with extensive disk management tools, so normally you would have some flavour of Norton Utilities installed after-market.) If you’ve grown up with phones and tablets, anything that’s a change to the device, even if it’s an operation and not a setting, is in “settings”. I get it, doesn’t mean I agree with it to be fair! I miss old system preferences as much as you.
  - golergka 3y ago
    Why can't this function be found in several places at once?
    - graypegg 3y ago
      Windows has multiple settings and control panel lists to launch the exact same control panel applications. Or even duplicate UI to control the same setting. I think generally that’s seen as confusing, and probably not something worth striving for IMO.

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

This was Tog's critique, at about the same time: https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html https://www.asktog.com/columns/044top10docksucks.html

I_am_tiberius 3y ago

I wish the would modernize the Dock.

klocksib 3y ago
What do you mean?
- I_am_tiberius 3y ago
  E.g. window previews and virtual desktop miniatures.

threeio 3y ago

I miss my candy coated unix as I used to lovingly refer to 10.1 on my iBook back in the day.

b33j0r 3y ago

So, I’ve got to ask the practical question. For you early-adopters, is it stable enough to upgrade to, yet? :p

steve1977 3y ago
Using it since the Public Beta that came out in 2000, no complaints here
andrekandre 3y ago
its good but i'd still recommend to wait for jagwire (^_-)

mmphosis 3y ago

Each window has Close, Minimize and Maximize button on it. The "X", "-", and "+" symbols only appear when the mouse moves over these buttons. The "+" symbol is Zoom, not Maximize. https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png https://iili.io/H6a1uAG.png

tobiasbischoff 3y ago

Yeah, I remember that a fried installed a very early pre-version on his powerbook and we where all blown away.