8 ms·

Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines: https://guidebook

by Lammy 9mo ago

Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/macosx102-1-3.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema... https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filemanager/macos80.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

WillPostForFood 9mo ago
Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.
- Lammy 9mo ago
  True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
  - Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
    People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily. For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.
    - Lammy 9mo ago
      Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable disc image's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased. One particular artist's CD-ROM is completely outside of it which annoys me every time. Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.apple.com/kb/TA46427 https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...
AkelaA 9mo ago
It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.
- bsimpson 9mo ago
  The default modality changed. Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
  - userbinator 9mo ago
    You're missing the fact that the scrollbars also indicate where you are in their range, which is important regardless of how you do the scrolling itself.
    - bschwindHN 9mo ago
      I think their point also covers this - since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear and see where you are. And that's only if you haven't configured it to always display.
      - nkmnz 9mo ago
        You don't even have to scroll. Placing two fingers on the pad makes the scrollbar appear immediately. I'm happy for each additional pixel of space on my screen, but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.
        bschwindHN 9mo ago
masklinn 9mo ago
It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua. (and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").
- zapzupnz 9mo ago
  Going back to Lion would almost feel like bliss compared to Tahoe. Hell, bliss compared to Big Sur.
Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge! I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.
- Lammy 9mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581813
- leptons 9mo ago
  >Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge! This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.
- oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
  I don't see what's wrong with both, or even whatever combination you choose to configure.
AlienRobot 9mo ago
Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...
- TonyTrapp 9mo ago
  To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.
  - AlienRobot 9mo ago
    What's up with that, anyway? Statusbars are great. They are one of the most useful parts of the window.
  - Lammy 9mo ago
    > To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. Here's a resizable window in Platinum that has a drag handle but does not have a status bar: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/macos80-2-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/ma... edit: I missed "Windows" in GP comment. Well let it be known that at least Platinum wasn't like this :)
npunt 9mo ago
In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence. Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them. We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics. Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.
- Wyverald 9mo ago
  Very much agree. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Not saying GP's opinion was pure nostalgia, but a lot of people certainly selectively remember only the good parts as they complain about the now.
- zwischenzug 9mo ago
  Hard disagree with all of this. I feel like I am constantly lamenting the simplicity and usability of old scrollbars and cursing their will o the wisp modern implementations. Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.
BenFranklin100 9mo ago
Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.
mihaaly 9mo ago
Why did they stop this? It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars). And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!
oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
Yeah, but scrollbars are bad and every bathwater has its baby. (P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)
skdjejdjwjdj 9mo ago
Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.

by Lammy 9mo ago

WillPostForFood 9mo ago

Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.

Lammy 9mo ago
True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
  People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily. For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.
  - Lammy 9mo ago
    Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable disc image's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased. One particular artist's CD-ROM is completely outside of it which annoys me every time. Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.apple.com/kb/TA46427 https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...

AkelaA 9mo ago

It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

bsimpson 9mo ago
The default modality changed. Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.
- userbinator 9mo ago
  You're missing the fact that the scrollbars also indicate where you are in their range, which is important regardless of how you do the scrolling itself.
  - bschwindHN 9mo ago
    I think their point also covers this - since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear and see where you are. And that's only if you haven't configured it to always display.
    - nkmnz 9mo ago
      You don't even have to scroll. Placing two fingers on the pad makes the scrollbar appear immediately. I'm happy for each additional pixel of space on my screen, but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.
      - bschwindHN 9mo ago

masklinn 9mo ago

It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua. (and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").

zapzupnz 9mo ago
Going back to Lion would almost feel like bliss compared to Tahoe. Hell, bliss compared to Big Sur.

Wowfunhappy 9mo ago

Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge! I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.

Lammy 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581813 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46581813
leptons 9mo ago
>Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge! This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.
oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago
I don't see what's wrong with both, or even whatever combination you choose to configure.

AlienRobot 9mo ago

Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...

TonyTrapp 9mo ago
To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.
- AlienRobot 9mo ago
  What's up with that, anyway? Statusbars are great. They are one of the most useful parts of the window.
- Lammy 9mo ago
  > To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. Here's a resizable window in Platinum that has a drag handle but does not have a status bar: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/macos80-2-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/ma... edit: I missed "Windows" in GP comment. Well let it be known that at least Platinum wasn't like this :)

npunt 9mo ago

In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence. Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them. We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics. Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.

Wyverald 9mo ago
Very much agree. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Not saying GP's opinion was pure nostalgia, but a lot of people certainly selectively remember only the good parts as they complain about the now.
zwischenzug 9mo ago
Hard disagree with all of this. I feel like I am constantly lamenting the simplicity and usability of old scrollbars and cursing their will o the wisp modern implementations. Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.
Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.

BenFranklin100 9mo ago

Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.

mihaaly 9mo ago

Why did they stop this? It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars). And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!

oneeyedpigeon 9mo ago

Yeah, but scrollbars are bad and every bathwater has its baby. (P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)

skdjejdjwjdj 9mo ago

Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.