[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.