[srvmshr]

It might be an unpopular opinion (in general), but OS 9 was actually beautiful. The design elements might look clunky by today's standards, but they were quite self-explanatory & functional, as compared to current macOS flat designs. I am stating purely from an angle of being friendly to an absolute beginner (e.g. a kid).

I was in middle school in 2001 when I saw a paint program (MacPaint?) on an oyester iBook - It was way more intuitive and engaging than Windows counterpart. I think late Classic Macintosh (v8.6-9) to early OSX (~10.8) had a very good aesthetic balance between form & function.

[zozbot234]

> The design elements might look clunky by today's standards

They were optimized for the low-resolution screens of that time (hence 'pixel perfect' design was the norm), and there was also no expectation whatsoever of "touch friendly" controls so everything was a lot more tightly-spaced than today. Though the mockup does show how larger widgets could also be integrated quite well in that sort of design.

"Flat design" is a disaster and the latest redesigns are slowly inching away from it by adding some 3d-rendered shadows to try and restore some intuition for "depth". But that sort of fancy, almost photo-realistic rendering just adds more weirdness to the overall "flat" look.

[com2kid]

> "Flat design" is a disaster

The original flat designs, Zune HD and the Zune software, Windows Phone 7, Windows Media Center, was incredibly usable.

All those were produced by small design teams at Microsoft, and for, relative to an entire OS, small projects. (Settings aside Windows Phone 7 for a bit, which IMHO actually had very few distinct UI elements.)

Heck Windows Phone 7, to this day, is unlike anything else on the market, It is still going to be more responsive, and look cleaner, than almost anything else out there.

I am not sure why someone decided "flat" means "no button border", that is where I think it all went wrong.

Oh and also people who think flat means getting rid of text! Windows Phone 7 loved text, text was everywhere!

[shp0ngle]

I always feel bad for Zune, because it honestly was not that bad to become a joke; on the other hand, it was crazy late - it debuted the same year as iPhone did!

iPhone (and iPod touch) had an actual WiFi and later apps, while Zune had... WiFi, where you could only connect two Zunes.

[srvmshr]

Windows Metro UI was not well received on the PC platform. But it was genuinely a leap forward in mobile space. It was very futuristic and ahead of its time.

[com2kid]

The Metro UI that debuted in Windows 8 was an abomination, it violated many of the design principles of the original Metro.

It was born out of Microsoft's fears that Tablets were going to take over everything, but at the same time Microsoft didn't want to invest 100% in a pure tablet experience, viewing the escape hatch to traditional Windows land as being a necessity. Win32 apps were going to be the advantage Windows tablets had over iPad!

So anyway that OS release was terrible.

To this day, Apple being the only company that was willing to go all in on tablets, is the only company with a successful tablet product and tablet software ecosystem.

[pjmlp]

No need for tablets when one can use a foldable laptop or 2-1 hybrids, which are quite successful in Europe, including the Surface models.

Now the Android tablets, that is another story altogether.

[com2kid]

In retrospect, sure. But back at the time, every tech news outlet was proclaiming the death of the desktop, and that iPads were going to take over the world.

So Microsoft panicked. Windows RT is the end result.

Eventually iPad sales dwindled, it turns out that if you make a really durable product and sell it to everyone, you do end up saturating a market!

Phone screens also got a lot larger, negating some of the need for tablets.

[SllX]

> and there was also no expectation whatsoever of "touch friendly" controls so everything was a lot more tightly-spaced than today

Well if Apple’s Execs are to be believed, touch-screen Macs aren’t in the pipeline, which is aces with me because that’s what my iPad is for.

So given that the preeminent pointing devices on a Macintosh are still the mouse and trackpad, I could do with them tightening up the spacing again and walking back the last 10 years of nonsense.

We don’t have to go back to Snow Leopard, certainly not Platinum; but widgets and theming that are consistent with how a Macintosh is used and the hardware it actually runs on would be preferable.

[kaba0]

But ios apps are runnable on macs, aren’t they? And on that front apple does want some unification.

[SllX]

On ARM-based Macintoshes, as an option that a lot of apps I personally use haven’t taken.

That kind of thing is gravy, where it works, but it’s not worth optimizing the entire UI around when you can optimize the UI around Mac apps instead.

[andrekandre]

a lot of them arent available on the appstore (anymore anyways), and the few i tried were.... not that great (like iphone apps with non-resizable windows)...

[GekkePrutser]

Yes and the touch friendly paradigms waste way too much space on platforms that don't even feature touch, like Mac.

[chrisseaton]

> being friendly to a beginner (e.g. a kid)

My child seems to intuitively get modern UI design, and doesn't seem to need many affordances to understand what to interact with or not. I think people who say older designs are better for beginners may be applying some retrospective thinking.

[chongli]

Let's not underestimate neuroplasticity. Children can figure out almost anything. If you want a true test of UI intuitiveness then you ought to give the computer to an elderly parent or grandparent.

Anecdotally, my 70-year-old father and several of my elderly uncles & aunts had a much easier time figuring out Classic Mac OS. Modern macOS and iOS are much more complicated. While they still use these systems, they do so in a much more superficial way and they tend to exhibit what (for lack of a better term) I would call a "fear response." That is, when attempting to do a novel task they refuse to experiment and instead resort to asking for help immediately. Classic Mac OS was much better designed to encourage experimentation and avoided surprising the user (in a negative way) as much as possible.

[chrisseaton]

> If you want a true test of UI intuitiveness then you ought to give the computer to an elderly parent or grandparent.

A second ago the test for intuitiveness was 'a kid'.

[chongli]

You can take my post as disagreeing with the GP as well on the kid test. Kids have been the ones figuring out computers and doing tech support for their older relatives essentially since the dawn of home computing. If a kid can’t figure out how to use your computer then it’s probably irreparably broken (kids figure out how to fix computers too).

[srvmshr]

Here is a screenshot from my MBP which used to run 10.7 until two years ago :). I would anyday prefer these over the flatter icons.

https://imgur.com/a/e6AEdwR

[chrisseaton]

But is that just based on what you're used to rather than what is intuitively better?

[jjoonathan]

You'll find a lot of people, myself included, that point to the 10.6 era as peak OSX aesthetics. I personally prefer "steel and grass," some people prefer space, the specifics vary person-to-person but a lot of people agree on the trend. Skeuomorphism has an uncomfortably high skill floor, but it has an astronomical skill ceiling. With Apple, it shows. It really shows.

In contrast, flat design has a skill ceiling so low that it can turn the most creatively bankrupt troglodyte of a non-artist into a hunchback.

[chrisseaton]

> a lot of people, myself included, that point to the 10.6 era as peak OSX aesthetics

Just guessing... is that what you grew up with?

[labster]

No, the old icons are objectively better. I’ve used iPhones since the iPhone 1 and I still keep the original as a music player. I have to hunt down apps on current iOS but astonishingly they all look somewhat different in the old days, which means they are easier to find. It’s easier to find my way around an old iOS I use once a month than one I use every hour.

[chrisseaton]

> No, the old icons are objectively better.

Do you mean you're used to the old icons?

My seven-year-old wouldn't recognise them.

[nine_k]

Yes, it refers to well-recognizable imagery from outside the computer world.

[swiftcoder]

Half the "well-recognisable" imagery seems to be of things that are long gone from the world. How many kids these days have ever seen a typewriter, a rotary-dial phone, or a point-and-shoot camera? The "save icon" has long overtaken the actual floppy disk. Many folks are even too young to know that the folder icon is modelled on physical file folders.

[chrisseaton]

But kids pick it up fine without these clues.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

I’m not sure that giving the UI to the elderly is a truer test. Whatever difficulty they encounter, it’s just as likely that it could be because a previous experience with a different OS is shaping their expectations, or many other factors. It does seem that “time from 0 to successfully performing a novel task” is a good metric among many.

[srvmshr]

Classic designs were touted as "something you could give to a grandma and a professional alike" in magazines of heydays :)

[shp0ngle]

Yeah 90s design in general was quite good.

Too bad the actual stability of these systems was horrid (both OS 8/9 and Windows 95).

[adolph]

System 6 or gtfo. 7 was a RAM hog; 8 and 9 were lipstick on 7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_6