[LeanderK]

Wow, unbelievable that it was designed in 2001! It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish? But only barely.

It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system, I instantly feel right at home although I've never used it.

I find the review terrible though, one of the major changes was the user interface, revolutionary I would say. It's way more important than wether the GUI configuration options are well thought out or not.

[G3rn0ti]

> It still looks fresh and modern, although maybe a bit too playful so that it appears a bit childish?

The aesthetics is called „Frutiger Aero“. Lots of colors and especially of blue, lots of transparency effects and fake light reflections. It all is inspired by natural landscapes with blue skies or blue water surfaces. Also skeuomorphisms everywhere.

Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design. Windows 8 was the big cut where its UI forcefully pushed material design onto its users without any transition grace period. That’s one of the reasons why everybody hated it.

Edit: On Macs even the hardware design reflected the transition from Frutiger Aero to Material Design: The early 2000 Macs were all semi-transparent plastic shells with bright shades of blue and green. Then Apple discovered Aluminum and silver unibody cases. Now there is no color left in the design universe. This also marks the time MacOS interfaces started to look decidedly more "grown-up".

I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?

[robertoandred]

Nah, the aesthetic is called Aqua, not a name borne out of a Windows OS that copied Aqua five years later. And Apple hardware never transitioned to a Google software interface concept.

[com2kid]

> Windows 7 could be called the pinnacle of the use of Frutiger Aero in UI design when Apple already started to move away and embrace material design.

Windows Media Center was the origins of the Metro UI, Windows Phone 7 was the industries 21st century intro to a typography first flat design.

Sadly the good design aspects of Windows Phone 7 mostly got forgotten about by the time Windows 8 came along, IMHO it is because WP7 had a small dedicated design team compared to whatever large group I imagine did Windows 8.

[pjmlp]

Plus Windows 8 with Sinofskys .NET hate, decided to go back to the original plan of improving COM, which could have been a good idea, if the execution hasn't been so tragically performed.

[theandrewbailey]

> I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever?

CARI has probably cataloged it already. Apple is already going all in on colorful aesthetics recently, not sure if it will spread into hardware.

https://cari.institute/aesthetics

[concinds]

> not sure if it will spread into hardware

Already has for most of their devices (iPhone and iPhone Pro, iPad and iPad Air, iMac, HomePod). Their pro computers only come in one/two colors, which is understandable since their low volume would create an inventory nightmare if available in half a dozen colors.

[graypegg]

I wonder if we’ll ever find ourselves in a “aero” nostalgia cycle? I already see a lot of hazy glass and reflections on some apple UI! Maybe it’s time for it’s renaissance!

[golergka]

It was heavily referenced by vaporwave movement alongside windows 95 aesthetics. And vaporwave was 12 years ago.

[germinalphrase]

“ I wonder what will be next or are we going to stick with heartless, cold metal designs forever”

If any design folks have an opinion on which way the winds are blowing, I’d love to see an example.

[einr]

I think there's a tendency recently towards keeping the Apple-esque minimalism in terms of shapes, but moving the materials to softer, warmer, speckled, textile or textured, and the colors to earthier, more natural.

You can see these tendencies in stuff like the recent Microsoft Surface laptops and their textured handrests, the Acer Aspire Vero and its recycled plastic shell, but also in small ways in some Apple products, i.e. power cords for the Mac Studio and the handle for the box (!) being made of textured fabric instead of featureless plastic/rubber, as well as some of the new iPhone colors being Forest Green and the like.

It's not a huge change but it feels like a trend to me.

[bacchusracine]

> Also skeuomorphism everywhere.

I miss skeuomorphic design. :(

I hate how flat everything is these days.

[wildrhythms]

Yup. We used to apply shadows to things to give the user a sense of depth and contrast. Now everything is on a flat plane, and any overlapping elements are either indecipherable, or live on a full bleed scrim. Very boring!

[dsego]

> It appears to have all the basic functionality expected from a modern operating system

The truth is, for the most part operating systems haven't really advanced that much, at least from a ux standpoint. Speaking as someone who started using computers in 1997 on windows 95 and a 133mhz pentium. All the basic metaphors and mechanisms have stayed the same. Tabs in browsers were considered like a huge leap (I know it's not strictly an OS thing), and that was almost 20 years ago.

[zokier]

Search as the primary interaction method instead of menus and icons is pretty dramatic shift though; compare vscode command palette to traditional vs, or windows 7 and later start menu to its predecessors. Another thing, especially on Windows, is the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars, once staple of desktop interfaces. As a more generic trend, I think modal dialogs with forms were far more common interaction pattern back in the day than these days.

[kitsunesoba]

> the de-emphasis or straight out removal of menu bars

This change irks me quite a lot. Hamburger menus are terrible and while command palettes are nice, they aren't available everywhere, and so on Windows and Linux you end up with a lot of software not having any kind of index of its functionality and burying functions in dialog tunnels.

[robertoandred]

Macs have the best of both worlds: consistent menu bars with built-in function search.

[gedy]

> Search as the primary interaction method

Thanks, I hate it. Search is terrible for browsing/discovery, in spite of many people liking it.

[wildrhythms]

The Mac OS menubar search actually opens the relevant menus and submenus and puts a big floating indicator on the result. It does teach rather than simply surfacing the result.

[SllX]

Personally I love it, but I love it a lot more paired with a robust system for browsing.

[tgv]

One thing that makes macOS stand out, is the frameworks. Every version of the OS has come with improvements in the UI libraries. I remember being amazed at Cocoa's bindings, which developed into a way to bind arbitrary data to UI controls. It was reactive before React (although not taken that far, because the UI 'language' was limited). That's just one small part, and it's why replicating macOS is so hard.

[pjmlp]

Just like any other desktop OS since 16 bit home micros, with exception of MS-DOS.

BSDs and Linux distributions are the exception with their fragmentation, even other commercial UNIXes had a proper set of desktop frameworks.

[varjag]

20 year ago in mainstream; earlier if you used first implementations like in Galeon.

[donatj]

I’d vote the opposite on the playful aspect. Todays UIs feel oppressively monotonous and lacking heart.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I miss the textured Aqua days. Peak was Leopard/Snow Leopard.

Flat is just so... flat. And boring.

And also harder to read, because it's harder to orient yourself in a big textureless area than in a space with some texture in it.

[nobleach]

It got to a point with Apple where I had to tell my mother, "just tap everything... there's really no indicator if anything's a button anymore". While material/flat can look pretty, it is counterintuitive to communication. I'm sure Jony Ive read "The Design of Everyday Things" at some point in his career. Perhaps he got to a point where he decided that didn't apply?

[samtheprogram]

Historically Jony Ive isn't involved in the user interface. Has he been in more recent years? I know that back during Scott Forstall's time and Apple's skeuomorphism phase that Ive stated in interviews that he wasn't involved in any of that. I thought his (direct) influence was limited to (hardware) product design.

[pavlov]

Jony Ive was at least nominally in charge of UI design for the post-Forstall iOS 7 update which removed almost all textures and pseudo-3D and most button borders, replaced the previous earthy color palettes with primary colors and gradients, and switched the system font to Helvetica Light:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...

[spider-mario]

I kind of liked the “brushed metal” texture that could be found in Tiger (10.4): http://toastytech.com/guis/osx14slideshow.png

[graypegg]

The “brushed metal means hardware” [0] concept was always something I thought would’ve worked great in practice. Of course apple never really committed to that, and made any window they could look like a slab of aluminum for a while.

But the idea of making a subtle signal that this thing you’re interacting with will have external effects, in the age of MP3 players and digital cameras, was smart.

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushedmetal

[wildrhythms]

I've seen speculation that we are slowly returning to a less flat, more depth-oriented design trend based on what Apple showed in the Vision UI demo (skip to 15:13 to see all the components): https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2023/10076/

Notice the shadows inside of the in the inputs, and the 'shine' applied on the bottom. Web designers from the 2000s will remember all this stuff. What's old is new again!

[Reason077]

Boring, perhaps. But definitely not harder to read. The old styles with text against textured backgrounds (for example, the pinstriped menu bars) detracted from readability. Current design is significantly better, especially dark mode, although lately there is a trend towards low-contrast UI (text against similarly-coloured backgrounds) in recent versions of iOS and macOS which is also detracting from readability, IMO.

[badsectoracula]

The pinstripes were only in the earliest versions. By Leopard/Snow Leopard (which i also find the best one) the theme looked clean without looking flat.

[sangnoir]

pinstripes, brushed metal, linen; one could follow the trends by looking at cargo-culting designers were setting as the background image on their blogs. I'm sure they thought it looked good when viewing on their freshly updated Macs.

[anthk]

Mac OS X Tiger was not stripper and far more usbable than flat interfaces.

[freedomben]

Likewise. Leopard/Snow Leopard were the point at which I was happen with everything Apple. It truly was peak (for me at least). I still had a Windows 7 PC and Linux (Fedora, Backtrack) on a laptop for running security tools, but I felt most "right" when on the mac.

[delta_p_delta_x]

I recall upgrading from Leopard to Snow Leopard on my 2008 polycarbonate MacBook. I got back 30 GB of disk space, and it absolutely flew. I straight up don't recall seeing a beachball while using Snow Leopard. Apple called it a 'purely bug-fix release', and free of bugs it was.

In my opinion, OS X has been (mostly) downhill after that. The iOS-ification began with Lion, which changed the juicy blue scrollbars to a boring grey, got rid of 'Save-As'—an extremely controversial addition, as I recall it—and added then-newfangled things like iCloud.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

100%. The day I get my chunky aqua scrollbars back, I will shed tears.

[gjvc]

It had real character, and the first time I used it, I came away from the iMac (with its soap-on-a-rope mouse) beaming with excitement.

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was the peak for me.

[Reason077]

This was the first version of Mac OS X I ran on my first "modern" Mac, a 2001 Titanium PowerBook G4. There were some performance issues in this first release, but 10.2 (Jaguar, pronounced "Jag-wire" by Steve Jobs) had a focus on performance and resolved much of it.

I vaguely remember dual-booting Mac OS 9 and X for a while, but it wasn't long before Mac OS X took over full time.

[darkstar_16]

Feels playful because everything else from that era was ugly in my opinion

[baal80spam]

I wouldn't call XP (Luna) theme ugly. It wasn't as clean as Windows2k but it was just fine.

[vbezhenar]

Everything after Windows 2000 was ugly.

Windows 2000 was the last system in the world with coherent and beautiful UI.

Those times are over. We can't have good things.

[linguae]

I disagree; I love pre-flat Mac OS X. I think Aero from Windows Vista and 7 was nice (even if I preferred the Windows Classic theme), and GNOME 2 was well-done and consistent if you stuck to applications written using GTK+ 2.

I concur that I’m not a fan of modern UI/UX, though. Give me the interfaces and the UI guidelines of Mac OS 8, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X Tiger (with Spotlight) any day.

[kitsunesoba]

If one took the version of Aqua from Mavericks and restored aqua scrollbars (it had flat gray pill scrollbars similar to what’s in macOS now), that would be the most perfect iteration of the look in my opinion.

Tiger’s Aqua comes in second, and Leopard/Snow Leopard’s third. I never really liked the ubiquitous dark grays found in 10.5/10.6, it felt kinda gloomy in the same way Win95/98 did relative to Win2K (also due to darker grays).

[sylens]

I really loved the balance Microsoft found in Windows 7 with Aero Glass

[coldpie]

Have you tried an XFCE environment? With the right theme, it's excellent, in my opinion.

A couple examples I picked off the XFCE screenshots page:

https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.16-1.png

https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.14-1.png

[vbezhenar]

Linux will never be as coherent as Windows is. It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system. Windows was built from GUI. Linux is built from CLI and GUI is just incomplete buggy slap upon CLI tools. With myriad of choices it'll never be comparable.

Linux need some visionary company which will push hard on some sane technical choices without alternatives to provide coherent vision. It would require tremendous resources and it'll cause tremendous resistance from community (just observe how much hate systemd receives and it's still not as convenient as services.msc from Windows 2000). It's unlikely to happen, so that's why I think we won't have good things, because Windows itself lost its vision as well.

[coldpie]

> It's not just about theme. It's about the whole system.

Ahh. In that case, yes, I think you're probably right :)

[mort96]

Hard disagree, Windows 2000's large swathes of grey doesn't look good to me at all.

[hombre_fatal]

Yeah, I'm surprised to even see this praise. Win2k was just a return to the corporate grey Windows theme after XP. Just Windows 9x/NT again rather than something special.

[twoodfin]

Windows 2000 predated XP by almost two years.

[spider-mario]

I found the “Royale” theme from Windows Media Center far superior.

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Windows_XP_themes#Royale

[nazgulsenpai]

I found the bright blue taskbar and window decorators and the bright green start button, among other very bright and contrasting colors, quite the eyesore both at the time and now. Thankfully you could switch to the Windows Classic theme.

[kitsunesoba]

The best thing about Luna is that its existence necessitated a capable theme engine, which enabled a vibrant ecosystem of third party .msstyle themes. Some of those were very well designed and a joy to use.

Aero, or at least the slightly toned down Windows 7 version of it was better than Luna, but similarly to me the bigger benefit it brought was the more capable theme engine. There were a lot of awesome third party .msstyles for it too.

I’ll forever resent Windows 8 for ripping out that nice theme engine in favor of one barely more capable than what shipped in Windows 1.x.

[zokier]

There was also the silver version of Luna that was far less garish https://twitter.com/zacbowden/status/1089184545201709056/pho...

[dsego]

The fisher price look. For me it was a downgrade in aesthetic and seemed like trying too hard to make it appealing and friendly for the computer illiterate masses.

[nobleach]

I called it that too! My backup was, "well, when your UI is designed by Hasbro". It really did have that Duplo Block look to it. When run at very high resolutions, it did get a bit better.

[lannisterstark]

Where's the childish part? Didn't notice anything.

[tyingq]

Maybe a few things like the finder and iTunes icons and the default choices for user pictures, but otherwise I agree.

[ArtWomb]

Circa 2000 I recall playing with a developers beta version of MacOS X approx 6 months or so pre-release. The move from motorola based power pc chips to x86 already felt a decade too late. And the nextstep & netbsd origins? Very "meh". Apache, Mosaic, Napster all crashing hard requiring system reboots. Apple was playing catch-up to professional grade sgi & sunos (which is what every one was using to build the early web back in those days) ;)

[actionfromafar]

Just so nobody gets confused, x86 support was released in 2006.

[hestefisk]

I think they might be referring to the transition from 68K to PowerPC.

[duskwuff]

That happened around 1994-95. By 2000, it was old news.

[icedchai]

Windows XP looked "childish", too. That was the style for the time, it seems.

[Sakos]

I still remember changing it to the classic Windows theme because I didn't like XP's theme.

[beanjuiceII]

interesting, it looks sterile to me