[kruuuder]

Funny to see the last screenshot of OS X from 2014 in the article. I would love to use a system with such a high contrast and information density. But I also remember very well how many users were upset with the most recent design changes at that time: The all caps section titles in the sidebar, and the gray icons that were previously colored.

[vintagedave]

It was worse than what came before, but we had no idea how bad it was going to get.

[lapcat]

Yes, IMO Tiger was actually peak Mac UI.

As soon as Apple released iPhone, the Mac took a back seat.

[cosmic_cheese]

Tiger with 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops and Mavericks traffic light buttons, or alternatively Mavericks with aqua scrollbars and 10.5/10.6-style 2D grid virtual desktops is very close to my ideal desktop environment.

[docmars]

Wow I completely forgot that Spaces were also vertically oriented. I miss that.

[cosmic_cheese]

It was really nice. With the current linear design I organize desktops by theme (e.g. one for dev, one for research, etc) and with the 10.5/10.6 design I'd use vertical desktops for subcategories — so following the same example, on a single screen setup I might have desktops arranged something like:

   │   Rails Docs/Search   │   Backend Dev  │    Music   │
   ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
   │   UIKit Docs/Search   │     iOS Dev    │    Chat    │
   ├───────────────────────┼────────────────┼────────────┤
   │  MDN/Web Dev Search   │     Web Dev    │ Email/News │

With this, I quickly develop muscle/spatial memory for where each category "lives" and can navigate there in a flash. It also substantially reduces the need for individual programs like browsers to bear organizational load, so for example suddenly "just" single-tier vertical tabs become sufficient, making browser workspaces and tree style tabs much less necessary.

[docmars]

The added dimension really made things intuitive so you weren't left guessing which vertical had to do with what. One space would give you enough context to know what might be next navigating up/down. It's really a shame how disruptive the change to Mission Control was by removing them.

I tend to organize my spaces by projects and then a dumping ground for "everything else" like general browsing and music.

For projects, unique windows are typically: IDE, Browser(s)

For apps I commonly use across spaces, I assign them to "All Desktops" so they follow me, like iTerm2 and Heynote for keeping notes / task lists even if they cover multiple projects.