[edgyquant]

I have never seen anyone argue Mac OS was anything but beautiful but I guess there’s a first for everything. These threads pop up constantly and I always jump in to ask people claiming they find the blocky beige of late 90s OSS more aesthetically pleasing to explain how it is they believe this to be true.

There are lots of complaints about modern OSs one can make but none of the major three are anything close to ugly and are all easy on the eyes. So I ask you to explain why you believe UI design peaked in the 90s, when just using these OSs was unintuitive to anyone but a tech enthusiast, other than you are looking through rose colored glasses.

I started on Win95 and remember how I couldn’t wait to switch to XP and where there were actual colors and it didn’t feel so empty. I then wanted to switch to vista so bad that when my PC wouldn’t handle it I download SUSE Community Edition (a Linux) because Vista copied a lot of its fancy new UI (like previews and 3D icons) from Gnome (at least it seemed that way to me, may not be true or it could be they just happened to be tested on Gnome first.)

I get rose colored glasses for sure but romanticizing about a UI that only looked as plain as it did due to technical limitations just seems weird to me.

Then again I suppose their were people who thought black and white cartoons were objectively prettier than technicolor. People have a way of convincing themselves what they initially got used to is the best way and any change is a regression.

[jeroenhd]

> I have never seen anyone argue Mac OS was anything but beautiful but I guess there’s a first for everything.

Well, allow me to be number two, then. In my opinion, macOS is bland, unclear and the general UX is peculiar to say the least. I dislike the concept and the design of the system bar at the top and the blur effect they add to some UI elements (which Microsoft copied for their latest Metro design language) just looks excessive to me. The iPhone-i-fied controls that have been added to macOS are a step back, in my opinion, because now there's a giant system status popup that looks like you're supposed to touch it but Apple doesn't want to introduce touch screens to macOS.

The thing the macOS-ecosystem does well is integration, which is arguably much more important than just design. I rarely use any tool on Windows that follows Microsoft's guidelines, whatever those are this month, but on macOS the UI designers seem to be focused on integrating well with the looks of rest of the system. This has the unfortunate side effect of putting some of developers using the macOS design language on other platforms as well, fragmenting the system even further, but for macOS users this is a great benefit. Even an awfully ugly system (like the BeOS look which some people love, but also the Gnome 2 "3D" look) is still much more usable than most "modern" designs because you know what to expect from applications running on that system.

You can disagree with me, and that's alright. Any design is liked and disliked by different people. I personally enjoy the simplicity and elegance in designs like the SerenityOS UI, but I can definitely see why others hate it.

But, if you truly have never met heard anyone say that they didn't like macOS' design, then you're part of some very different social circles than I am.

[grishka]

Two things.

- The UIs of the 90s were made with mice and keyboards in mind. The designers' minds weren't yet compromised by the existence of touchscreens, both on phones and Windows laptops.

- IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely. It was important to make sure your UI doesn't suck, because otherwise someone else will. This competition required the companies to put users' needs before their own.

And tangential to that: "developer experience" wasn't a thing. Writing software was an engineering job done by people knowing what they're doing. The bar was set pretty high. Compare that to now, when it's almost encouraged to be a junior developer and pile libraries into your project without ever looking under to hood to assess the compromises you're making. And the way the code looks and builds is considered more important by many than the end result that ships.

[KptMarchewa]

How is mac UI "compromised by the existence of touchscreens", when there's not a single MacOS device with a touchscreen?

>IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely.

Glorifying 90s feature factories? That's a new one.

[spectre3d]

>there's not a single MacOS device with a touchscreen

The Touch Bar is a touchscreen. It’s on the current 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro and many previous-gen Macs.

Biggest problem is that I can’t use it without looking at it.

https://robservatory.com/the-fundamental-problem-with-the-to...

[grishka]

Have you seen how unnecessarily huge some controls are in the latest macOS redesign?

[KptMarchewa]

I'm using Monterey daily, so which ones? The top bar/toolbar is smaller than any windows bar, dock size is fully customizable, menus are normal size I'd say.

Rest of space is used by applications, not wasted by system. Coincindetally, none of them are really native. Firefox, jetbrains IDEs, Iterm (well, this one is, but might as well not be since it's just a terminal), Spotify, Slack.

[grishka]

No, don't compare modern OSes to each other, they're all infected with the same disease so this comparison is expected to be bogus. Compare the native controls of macOS Monterey to those of Mavericks (10.9), for example. Or Windows 7.

[KptMarchewa]

Windows 7 to Monterey: https://static.kinguin.net/cdn-cgi/image/w=1140,q=80,f=auto/...

The bottom bar is way larger on Windows than on Monterey. There is nothing like the empty top bar on a Monterey as on the control panel window here. Point to mac here.

If you click on "About this mac" you get the same kind of logo that you get in this Windows photo, so they are about equal there.

There's no obnoxious widgets on Mac, at least by default. I don't remember if they were default on 7 (I think they were on Vista, but that's a different animal). I guess half a point to mac?

[jcelerier]

> when just using these OSs was unintuitive to anyone but a tech enthusiast

That's very far from my experience. I know a fair amount of people who had no trouble going from DOS -> win 3.1 -> 95, 98, XP, but starting from Vista using their computer became much harder and much more external assistance started to be required. I know no one who is learning how to use computers as easily with, say, Win 10 or the latest Macs, than people 15 years ago ; when I give classes most non-CS college students are more computer illiterate than people around me when I was in junior high.

[edgyquant]

I’m not sure how old you are, so I’m inferring, but isn’t the reason because most peoples computers are phones or tablets so what you’re calling them being computer illiterate is really them just being desktop os illiterate?

Also 15 years ago (that’s 2004) the UIs weren’t that different and were no longer the beige UIs of the 90s we’re discussing here. As for using super early windows being easier than modern day I disagree if they were only doing the exact same things I don’t see how it’s harder today. The thing is people use their PCs for a ton more stuff today than they did during say windows 3.1

[jeroenhd]

I think this is because modern computers abstract as much of the underlying system away as they can. Smartphones are hiding the concept of the file system under a layer of custom selectors and UI controls to the point of confusion about where files will end up.

Another factor is that (for some mind-boggling reason) it's still acceptable in some office jobs to "not be good at computers" despite working with them 40 hours a week. Whether it's laziness, learned helplessness or something else, people seem to accept that anything beyond the most basic functionality you need for your day job is left for the IT department or techy family members. There's no incentive to even try to learn, even if learning would increase your productivity and make your life much easier, because "computer stuff" is considered too difficult.

On the other hand, a lot more people are using computers today than they did 20 years ago. If you used a computer around the 2000s, you either had an interest in them or your boss had sent you a manual or a training course with instructions on how to use them for your work. Today, almost everyone owns at least one computer, regardless of their training and interest. People are just expected to know how computers work, despite no effort being spent on that in many educational facilities, while content consumption devices get ever more dumbed down.

[linguae]

The problem with modern UI design isn't necessarily about new designs being uglier than old designs. Windows 11, macOS Monterey, GNOME 3, and KDE 5 all look nice in my opinion, and I cringe when I see old screenshots of Motif and CDE.

The problems I have with modern UI/UX design are as follows:

1. It is often tailored to the needs of mobile interfaces instead of the needs of desktop computing environments, often resulting in certain UI interactions being more complex with modern applications than with older applications that were designed for desktop users. For example, hamburger menus make sense in environments such as smartphones where room is scarce. However, I believe they are inappropriate in desktop environments, yet they are becoming more commonplace on websites (even when browsing on a desktop) and in applications. Another example is a trend in newer versions of GNOME and macOS where the title bar is fused with the toolbar. While this does save space, it makes it harder for me to rearrange windows on the desktop since I must look for empty space in the combined tool/title bar to click to drag (and sometimes not all empty space in this area drags the window), while this was never a problem for me with traditional title bars.

2. We've lost certain affordances that were present in the 1990s versions of Mac OS and Windows that aid in usability. It's harder to visually distinguish between clickable and non-clickable portions of a window in many modern applications. Scroll bars provide useful feedback while reading content that doesn't fit within the window, yet it's a common trend in modern UIs to hide the scrollbars, and when they do show up, they are often very skinny, making it harder to scroll with them (yes, trackpad gestures and scroll wheels make this less of an issue, but not everybody has nice trackpads or mice).

3. The rise of applications that refuse to adhere to platform guidelines, preferring to be "special snowflakes" for branding reasons, engagement metrics, developers' convenience, or cost reasons (it's cheaper to make an Electron app than to make separate UIs that conform to each platform's respective guidelines). The notion that applications should follow a platform's UI guidelines is increasingly fading away, and is being replaced with the attitude of, "You should be grateful that you are able to use this application." The Web, with its lack of UI guidelines and its emphasis on siloed applications instead of interoperability among applications, is taking over the desktop, with unfortunate consequences for the future of desktop computing.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of taking the substance of UIs from the 1990s and having updated color themes, icons, and fonts for them. I personally believe the pre-Yosemite Aqua interface of macOS and the Windows Vista/7 interface were great examples of modernized UIs that were desktop-tailored and retained or even enhanced affordances that were present in previous versions of these interfaces. I feel we lost a lot when the industry shifted to mobile computing and decided that desktops should look and feel more like smartphones and tablets instead of continuing to improve on the desktop computing experience.

[KptMarchewa]

> Another example is a trend in newer versions of GNOME and macOS where the title bar is fused with the toolbar.

It's not a new mac feature. It's an original mac feature: https://i1.wp.com/lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/about.png