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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 ba
by 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 agoWhere's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.
- tyingq 3y agoMaybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.
- darkstar_16 3y agoFeels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in my opinion
- baal80spam 3y agoI wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as Windows2k but it was just fine.
- vbezhenar 3y agoEverything 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 agoI 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 agoIf 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 agoHard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey doesn't look good to me at all.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoYeah, 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.
- twoodfin 3y agoWindows 2000 predated XP by almost two years.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoOh yeah, that's right. Though the chronology isn't important. I think modern macOS is a decent example of how you can increment away from the drab corporate gray of that era without using flashy colors like XP and without going too far into flashy effects like Vista.
- nazgulsenpai 3y agoI found the bright blue taskbar and window decorators and the bright green start button, among other very bright and contrasting colors, quite the eyesore both at the time and now. Thankfully you could switch to the Windows Classic theme.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoThe best thing about Luna is that its existence necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of those were very well designed and a joy to use. Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7 version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles for it too. I’ll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than what shipped in Windows 1.x.
- zokier 3y agoThere was also the silver version of Luna that was far less garish https://twitter.com/zacbowden/status/1089184545201709056/photo/1 https://twitter.com/zacbowden/status/1089184545201709056/pho...
- dsego 3y agoThe fisher price look. For me it was a downgrade in aesthetic and seemed like trying too hard to make it appealing and friendly for the computer illiterate masses.
- nobleach 3y agoI called it that too! My backup was, "well, when your UI is designed by Hasbro". It really did have that Duplo Block look to it. When run at very high resolutions, it did get a bit better.
- spider-mario 3y agoI found the “Royale” theme from Windows Media Center far superior. https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_XP_themes#Royale https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_XP_themes#Royale
- gjvc 3y agoIt 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 agoI’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoI 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 agoBoring, 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 agoThe 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 agopinstripes, 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 agoMac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than flat interfaces.
- 3y ago
- ArtWomb 3y agoCirca 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 agoJust so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in 2006.
- 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 agointeresting, 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 agoSearch 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 agoPersonally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired with a robust system for browsing.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
- Reason077 3y agoThis 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 agoWindows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the time, it seems.
- Sakos 3y agoI still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme because I didn't like XP's theme.