[micheljansen]

Surprisingly I found myself not preferring the OS 9 versions nearly as much as I thought. I have always thought of the OS 9 UI and the late '90s to early 2000s as representing the peak of OS UI design before everything went skeuomorphic, but a lot of the general aesthetic of that time just doesn't seem to have aged that well. I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time, but there was also a LOT of visual clutter that we no longer need. There's much to say about modern design fads, but we have also come a long way.

The author has certainly done a great job of capturing the zeitgeist of the era (the garish bevels on the Spotify app are spot on!), but I would love to see how the OS 9 UI would hold up in modern times, on a retina screen with more than 256 colours, modern anti-aliased typography and much more screen real estate.

[AndyJames]

Yes, the resolution could be higher but for me almost all of the apps (except Zoom) looks great. I would love to have that option today. Old design is much thinner and clearer. Buttons are buttons, they're visible and easy to click, almost every decoration is minimal, they're not taking unnecessary space just for sake of it. This is why I didn't like anything after Windows 7, this is the reason why current Gnome is is just wasteful. I much prefer simplicity and "smallness" of Gnome 2 UI hence I'm using Mate as my daily driver

[frereubu]

"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..."

If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.

[grishka]

There's a setting to "show shapes of toolbar buttons" or whatever it's called in English. It adds 1px faint grey lines around them. I turned it on the day I got my M1 mac. Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess, but better than nothing still.

[deergomoo]

> Doesn't help with the fact that the icons on these buttons are drawn as if there's no pixel grid and so are a blurry mess

Are you using a MacBook by any chance? Out of the box the Air and 13” Pro are set to render to a higher resolution than the panel, which is then non-integer scaled down. So everything is just sort of fuzzy.

[grishka]

The new MBP with M1 Max. They do look okayish on the built-in display. You can still see the fuzzy edges if you look at them long enough. But I'm using mine with a non-retina monitor and it shows these fuzzy edges such that you can't ignore them.

[bitigchi]

Where is it? Can you add a screenshot?

[grishka]

It's the last checkbox in display accessibility settings: https://imgur.com/5mEgihY

The one above it is also useful, it brings back the tiny draggable file icons in title bars in apps that edit files.

[bitigchi]

По-моему это только в Monterey. У меня ещё Big Sur -- но буду знать!