[ctas]

I’m working on something similar for Linux. Would love to chat if this is interesting to you.

The idea is to bring the UX of OSX Snow Leopard back, adjusted for today’s possibilities (better developer experience, AI, etc.). I’m developing a DE, SwiftUI/AppKit-equivalent, and a bunch of reference apps I‘m personally missing in terms of quality (e.g. Raycast/Spotlight, Mail).

[probonopd]

Definitely let's talk. You'll find us on GitHub Discussions and Libera Chat.

[astrange]

> adjusted for today’s possibilities

You would want to adjust it for today's display and input technologies. A high resolution OLED display deserves a different UI design than a 6-bit low-contrast TN LCD display did.

[ctas]

I agree that displays and input changed. But if you think in fundamentals, like clarity, readability, affordances, you tend to arrive at the right answers anyway.

Those principles survived CRTs, TN panels, Retina, touch, trackpads. They’re not tied to a specific technology.

Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

[wtallis]

> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

There are a lot of places where I now see a miniature thumbnail preview of a file's contents, where in the 1990s you would only have seen an icon corresponding to the file type. Those previews are enabled partly by faster IO and processors making the preview rendering cheap, but also by higher resolution displays making the previews a lot more useful than they could have been at 32 pixels or smaller.

While it's not exactly a quality change as the driving force, the proliferation of dark mode UIs is a result of OLED displays that draw meaningfully less power with darker content, so pushing users toward darker UIs helps battery life. And it looks much better on a display with decent black levels than it would on a crappy LCD that washes out all the dark colors.

[astrange]

> Those previews are enabled partly by faster IO and processors making the preview rendering cheap

That's not really it. You could cache the thumbnails so it was never expensive to do.

If anything standards for performance were lower then (no 120hz displays) so people felt free to do more expensive things at the time.

[astrange]

> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?

The extremely heavy "pinstripe" Aqua UI existed because displays were so low contrast at the time that it didn't look nearly as heavy. A much higher contrast display that actually displays blacks properly means it'd look more like visual noise.

[ludamn]

Is there a link for this project? It sounds exciting!

[ctas]

Thank you. Not all parts are open-sourced yet. I published the first repo yesterday: https://github.com/cihantas/applib

Going to launch a few apps powered by AppLib in the next few weeks and then continue with the DE.

[lproven]

https://github.com/gershwin-desktop