[jeffkeen]

This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.

The Mac OS classic architecture definitely had some problems with its non-protected memory and cooperative multitasking, but what it _allowed_ were extensions that could really get in there and muck around with things… and I looovvvved the zaniness that provided. To name a few:

- ResEdit! - Extensions that could seriously improve your computer's performance like RamDoubler or SpeedDoubler - That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash - The talking moose was fun for about 15 minutes, but still, I love the attitude. - After Dark! - Easter eggs like that "secret about box" text clipping thing that pulled up the pirate flag flying over the Apple Campus. - Playful messaging like "Installing System Morsels", or Sim City 2000's "Reticulating Splines" - Even the iconography was more playful—that little bloated mac icon in the Memory control panel next to Virtual Memory comes to mind

I miss the crew of developers, capabilities, and playfulness we lost in transitioning to OSX, but am thrilled that tiny fragments of this playfulness seem to be returning.

Welcome back Clarus! Moof!

[macNchz]

I had many of those fun extensions, I think my favorite was one that added physics to your desktop icons so they’d hang from your cursor at an angle if you dragged them from a point other than their “center of gravity”. Sometimes I’d just twiddle icons while thinking through things I was working on.

I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.

Edit: found the extension! http://www.wildbits.com/gravite/

[hedgehog]

The Grouch was great. Or "great" if there were little kids around, intermittent fun reward for throwing file in the trash, what could possibly go wrong?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE7EWDKVM1Y

[dylan604]

More than the Grouch, I'm getting pains from the Iomega references

[tksb]

gravite was delightful!

> I too miss that sort of whimsy and playfulness–I don’t think it’s inherently incompatible with modern expectations of professionalism/accessibility/security but it definitely seems to have been lost from most software these days.

Agreed completely but every now and then it still pops up. Recently, Notchmeister [0]

[0]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notchmeister/id1599169747

[inasmuch]

> This is so great. The 90s/pre OS-X Apple (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple) had a sense of playfulness in their UIs that was largely lost when they became the Apple we know today.

What's so strange about this is that, as that playfulness has been lost, the software has, in many ways, moved in a direction that feels more childishly cartoonish. It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly (even when it perhaps ought to be more serious or economical), which has, ironically, stripped all the charm out of the experience by inundating us with bright colors and childsafe corners.

Small, unexpected, thoughtful moments and Easter eggs like those described in this thread are like a small piece of chocolate after a healthy meal. What we have in most software now (Apple is by no means the only company guilty of this) is more like a diet comprised entirely of candy.

[deergomoo]

> It seems the aim is now to make all computing feel fun and friendly

The weird part is most current attempts of this are actually really bad at it past initial surface appearances.

Minimalist and “content-first’ UIs look great in screenshots and I guess they prevent new users from getting overwhelmed, but they also hide all the features in a way I find quite hostile. We have an absolute wealth of pixels in our displays today, but tons of software makes you decipher abstract line icons to work out what it can actually do.

The Mac thankfully still has the escape hatch of the menu bar, which almost universally allows you to browse and search all performable actions (and see their keyboard shortcuts inline!), but mobile operating systems don’t even have a touch-centric equivalent of tooltips.

[weikju]

I dread the day the menubar disappears...

[warning26]

Luckily, considering they brought the menubar to iOS (you can open it on most apps if you have an external keyboard connected and hold CMD), I'd say that Apple is at least somewhat committed to it!

[WWLink]

Can you imagine if they changed it so that you had to get those actions by doing a 5 finger swipe while hovering over an app (on the trackpad) or clicking 3 times while moving diagonally across?

Ugh I hate gestures. Such a stupid stupid non-intuitive stupid practice.

[hansword]

> childsafe corners

had me chuckle

[shagie]

> That extension that made Oscar the grouch climb out of the trash can and sing a little ditty when you emptied the trash

This was responsible for my little sister completely erasing a 20 MB hard drive one file at a time.

[dtgriscom]

There was a very early (1985-6?) app called "Selectric." When you ran it, it immediately exited, leaving you wondering what the point was. Until the next time you started typing: every key you typed made a "Chunk!" sound, the spacebar went "-diggit-", and the return key went "zzzzz...DING." Way fun.

[mattl]

Sounds like it was trying to be the IBM typewriter of the same name.

[dylan604]

The crayon color picker with an easter egg if you set the computer's date well into the future would cause the crayons to no longer look brand new

[jeffkeen]

Forgot about that one!

[GekkePrutser]

> (the "BuT tHeREs No SOFtWaRe!" and "ApPLe is GoING tO DiiEE" Apple)

To be fair they did come awfully close to that point before Steve came back and reinvigorated the place.

That sentiment was not entirely misplaced at the time.

[geogra4]

I definitely remember those awful days in the 90s. Escape Velocity made them less painful though :p

[Alex3917]

Now they just need to bring back wild eep and sosumi.

[drewzero1]

I have wild eep as my text notification. On the rare occasion that I don't have my phone silenced, it gets some attention!

[kldavenport]

Am I the only one with memories of clicking it over and over again: "eep!,eep!,eep!,eep!,eep!"?

[robertoandred]

And the quack.

[fubar12]

I can hear this post.

[saurik]

OSX was also easy to modify and add extensions to for many years, as Objective-C is so extremely dynamic... until Apple started really trying to lock things down on purpose, turning macOS more and more into the miserably rigid iOS.

[mbreese]

Given how much grief I’ve had from corporate mandated “enterprise” virus and firewall programs, I’m happy they started locking things down. Poorly written kexts were one of the worst user experiences I’ve had to deal with. When your computer crashes because you plug in a USB network adapter (due to a buggy firewall), you’ll want a more stable and locked down system too.

(Oh, and all USB-C/Thunderbolt docking stations have these adapters)

Sadly, there’s a reason why we can’t have nice things…

[lxgr]

I never had a Mac in the 90s/early 2000s, but a lot of this still sounds pretty familiar as a passionate Palm OS user at the time:

No memory protection, no multitasking (not even threads!), more minimalistic than the competition at the time in many ways in its core features – but on the flip side, extremely extensible in almost every way.

As I later learned, PalmOS was heavily inspired by Mac OS!

[NegativeLatency]

https://jcs.org/system6c

[jeffkeen]

Incredible! I have a couple of old Macs lying around and it's a dream of mine to write a native app for them that does something modern, like a way to control spotify of something. Thanks for linking

[NegativeLatency]

I’ve been learning as well, found this book to be pretty helpful https://archive.org/details/macintoshprogram00mark

[poulsbohemian]

Wow, I had completely forgotten about that book - was excellent for its time.

[_moof]

I wrote software for both platforms and it was shocking how similar they were. Like, surprised-nobody-got-sued shocking.

[apple4ever]

I as well miss that playfulness of that era. We use these things all day, why shouldn't they give us a smile from time to time from something that happens.

[ianai]

We've still got "Stickies" though not quite the same level of fun, granted.

[scarface74]

And unfortunately AppleScript…

[tarsinge]

For me it’s the Menuette[0] extension, as a child I loved it (icons instead of menu names).

[0] https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/menuette

[danudey]

> After Dark!

I would pay a frankly distressing amount of money for reproductions of After Dark screensavers, even if it was just videos I can set my TV to play when it gets tired.

[shagie]

https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28006679 )

[fragmede]

https://youtu.be/we8JQe6ugrs

[Bondi_Blue]

I don't entirely disagree, but I think it is worth noting that there was still quite a bit of playfulness in the UX even in the transition to O SX. There are tons of animation and icon secrets as detailed here: http://mewbies.com/easter_eggs_and_then_some.htm#macx Further, using traffic lights for window control icons, the magnification effect in the dock, inclusions of the genie and suck window minimize animations, the iTunes visualizer, (still present in Music.app) the cartoon "poof" animation whenever toolbar icons are dragged out and removed...these are all fun features and secrets that are new or at least persisted into the transition to OS X (not to mention the FreeBSD cal and emacs easter eggs). Some were lost when OS X 10.10 released, or when macOS 11 released, but now here with inclusions like Clarus, I think it is obvious that this culture of fun is not lost.

[m463]

"Why don't we ever go out anymore?" - talking moose

[_moof]

Moof, indeed!

[jeffkeen]

Oof, sorry for that botched list formatting, all.

[Lammy]

Sadly no amount of UI levity can excuse all the ways modern macOS phones home and violates my privacy. I'd rather have a boring OS that doesn't need remote permission to let me run unknown applications, one preferably made by a company that haven't publicly stated their desire to scan my devices for distasteful/illegal personal data.