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by Someone 1404 days ago
> The one thing Mac OS X got right in 2001 was consistency and predictability.

Compared to earlier Mac OS, it wasn’t, by a huge margin. Mac OS X was a weird mix of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS, with inconsistent text editing (for example, it had both control-a and command-left arrow to move the cursor to the beginning of a line, working depending on what framework the app was written in, and “page up” might or might not move the selection hor is that a Windows vs Mac thing?)), file name weirdness (Mac OS allowed ‘/’ inside file names and disallowed ‘:’, for NeXTSTEP, it was the other way around. Somehow, the two had to meet on disk), different text layout engines, a desktop UI that tried to be both a file system browser and a classic Mac OS Finder and didn’t quite know whether to use filename extensions or type/creator codes, and to top it off, a Unix CLI merged in.

1 comments

That's actually a great point. I was coming from Windows at that point in time and the contrast alone in UI consistency was huge. But then again, it seems like the MS mantra has always been 'anything goes' when it comes to UI.

Maybe I'm just having my "old man yells at cloud" moment and I'm annoyed things are changing.