[mark_round]

A tangent I know, but looking at those old screenshots really made me miss that era of OS X. The first versions of Aqua with pinstripes were a bit busy for my liking, but by the Mountain Lion time frame it was just lovely. Actual buttons! Soft gradients! Icons that had colour!

[deergomoo]

I am still very sad that the point we started getting high-DPI displays everywhere was about the same time we decided to throw away rich icons and detail in UIs in favour of abstract line art and white-on-white windows.

Maybe it was on purpose? Those fancy textures and icons are probably a lot more expensive to produce when they have to look good with 4x the pixels.

iOS 4 on an iPhone 4 and OS X whatever-it-was that was on the initial retina MacBook Pros are still very clear in my memory. Everything looked so good it made you want to use the device just for the hell of it.

[mattkevan]

It’s because the higher the resolution, the worse those kinds of design effects look. It’s why they’re not much used in print design and look quite tacky when they are.

At low resolutions you need quite heavy-handed effects to provide enough contrast between elements, but on better displays you can be much more subtle.

It’s also why fonts like Verdana, which were designed to be legible on low resolution displays, don’t look great in print and aren’t used much on retina interfaces.

[bartread]

The font point aside, which I do agree with, the rest of your comment sounds very subjective to me.

I too prefer more distinction between different UI elements than is fashionable in recent years - and, make no mistake, that’s all it is: fashion - and don’t see why higher resolutions preclude that. That’s not to say we have to ape what was done 10 or 15 years ago, but we can certainly take things in a more interesting and usable direction than we’ve chosen to do since around 2013.

I find myself clicking the wrong window by mistake a lot more frequently than I did back in the day due, I think, to current design trends.

[II2II]

I don't understand why the effects would look worse at higher resolution, or why how they add contrast. The tacky part I do understand, as well as the point about screen fonts like Verdana.

To choose a relevant counter example: the Macintosh System Software prior to version 7 was also very flat. System 7 to 7.5.5 introduced depth in a subtle way and a limited manner. It was only around System 7.6 when they started being heavy handed, something that I always attributed to following the trends in other operating systems.

[mattkevan]

It’s because at higher resolutions you can see the flaws more easily.

They’d have to be implemented perfectly every time, otherwise the whole thing becomes a mess. Not everyone will bother to do this.

Also, often when creating designs, things look better the more you take away rather than add.

[vintagedave]

There are a couple of places where macOS still has Aqua-style icons. Not sure I should name them in case someone sees this and removes them, but... eh... set up a VPN but leave the credentials blank so you're prompted when you connect: that dialog has a beautiful icon.

It looks _just fine_ on a Retina display.

When Retina displays were introduced with the iPhone 4, gel-style iOS also looked just fine.

In print, we're interacting with paper and a fake reflective style looks odd. On a computer, we're interacting with glass and something reflective or high-detail feels very suitable. It matches the look to the medium.

[cesarb]

> the point we started getting high-DPI displays everywhere was about the same time we decided to throw away rich icons and detail in UIs in favour of abstract line art and white-on-white windows.

I might have an alternative explanation.

I often think about something I saw, a long time ago, on one of those print magazines about house decoration, which also featured sample house blueprints. That particular issue had a blueprint for a house which would be built on a terrain which already had a large boulder. Instead of removing the boulder, the house was built around it; it became part of the house, and guided its layout.

In the same way, the restrictions we had back then (lower display resolutions, reduced color palette, pointing device optional) helped guide the UI design. Once these restrictions were lifted, we lost that guidance.

[rubymamis]

> Maybe it was on purpose? Those fancy textures and icons are probably a lot more expensive to produce when they have to look good with 4x the pixels.

That's an interesting observation. If it was indeed on purpose, I wonder whether they were weighting it based on the effort on Apple's designers/developers/battery usage or the effort it would have drawn from 3rd party developers.

[cosmic_cheese]

The stark whiteness of “light mode” colors that’ve become standard since the rise of flat UI is I believe greatly under-credited cause for the increase of popularity of dark mode. Modern light mode UI is not fun to look at even at relatively low screen brightness, whereas the middle-grays it replaced was reasonably easy on the eyes even at high brightness.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

I've also noticed that as screens got larger screen real estate got cheaper so UI design doesn't require as much effort and it shows.

[rrr_oh_man]

Nah, it's because of mobile.

All flat boxes is easier to do with 1,000+ different screen resolutions.

[itomato]

Ah yes, when it hit, one of the first things I did was to replace as much of the Denim and "AquaFresh Stripes" as possible with a flat gray texture.

https://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=26300

[keyle]

Long live Snow Leopard! It made my mac fly. A whole release dedicated to making Leopard better. It was amazing, peak macOS.

[PittleyDunkin]

100% agree; if I could revive it to run it on modern arm hardware I would in a heartbeat.

[themadturk]

Leopard was my first Mac OS, and Snow Leopard (obviously) my second, and boy was it great. I miss it so much...

[vintagedave]

I run an iMac G4 with 10.5 as a home music player. The strange thing is that it feels so easy to use. All the ingredients are the same in modern macOS but the feel is very different.

It’s hard to say why. Clarity in the UI is a big one (placement and interaction, not the theme, ie what we’d call UX today). But the look of the UI (colour, depth) really adds something too. Seeing a blue gel button sparks a sense of joy.

[markus_zhang]

I disdain the modern UI, especially how it treats the scrollbar. On MacOS, even with "Always Show Scrollbar" turned on, applications and web pages try their worst to hide scrollbars or make them unclickable for the users. Check the webpage of ChatGPT for example.

I don't know who the hell had the original idea to do that, but I'll curse in my head for eternity.

[wpm]

Not to mention the macOS scrollbars are ugly as sin now.

[markus_zhang]

Yeah, but I'm mostly focused on the functionality: it's too narrow and sometimes not clickable when you are just off by a bit. The Windows one is ugly AF too but at least it's wider.

[lapcat]

> by the Mountain Lion time frame it was just lovely. Actual buttons! Soft gradients! Icons that had colour!

You may be thinking of Tiger, because Apple already started removing color from Finder icons and such in Leopard.

Leopard also introduced a transparent menu bar and 3D Dock.

[recursivedoubts]

flat UI was the triumph of mediocre repeatability over humane user interaction

[mycall]

If only there was theming available to recreate those old formatting and styles.

[threeseed]

Copland the failed OS NeXT was acquired to replace had themes.

https://lowendmac.com/2005/apples-copland-project

[ChrisMarshallNY]

You also had Kaleidoscope[0]. That had some crazy themes[1].

[0] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1706-kaleidoscope

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20191021204432/https://twitter.c...

[fredoralive]

Mac OS 8.5 and above technically the theming support as well (presumably salvaged from Copland), but Apple removed the themes from the final version of 8.5, and never released any of them. I'm not sure if many 3rd party ones were made either, as another commentator notes Kaleidoscope was already fairly established as the theming tool for classic Mac OS, and worked with older stuff like System 7.

[spiderfarmer]

For me seeing old OS'es always remind me of the bad stuff. Slow CPU's, slow networking, slow disks, limited functionality.

Maybe I'm a bit too negative but for example when people romanticise stuff from the middle ages I can't help but think of how it must have smelled.

[II2II]

Those who romanticize the past tend to highlight the best points and gloss over the low points, which is likely better than dismissing it altogether.

It's also worth noting that some points mentioned either didn't matter as much, or aren't true in an absolute stuff. Slow networking wasn't as much of an issue since computers as a whole didn't have the capacity to handle huge amounts of data, while limited functionality depends upon the software being used. On the last point, I find a lot of modern consumer applications far more limiting than older consumer applications.

[wpm]

Slow networking? Most people’s networking hardware is still only as fast as the best PowerMac you could buy over 20 years ago. Only in the last few years has 2.5GbE become noticeably common.

[spiderfarmer]

20 years ago most people were on ISDN.

[wpm]

And two years ago I was still on a 500Mbps download coax connection with my ISP, that has no bearing on the network hardware in my LAN.

[lapcat]

To me, Finder often seems slower now with SSD and Apple silicon that it was with spinning drives and PPC. And the Mac boots slower!!

Apple's software today is poorly optimized. They're depending on hardware to do all the work.

[wang_li]

OS X on a power Mac g4 quicksilver is a far better user experience in terms of responsiveness and consistency than raspberry pi os on a raspberry pi 3 even though the pi benchmarks faster.