[felixding]

The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

I spent hours each month looking for a way to bring back Aqua on Mac or Linux through theming or alternative DE but nothing comes close to the real thing.

If one day I have enough money I’ll just start work on a new DE to faithfully recreate Aqua. One can dream.

[jeroenhd]

Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.

In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.

[overfeed]

> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.

Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.

> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

Exactly!

[nekooooo]

i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.

[dylan604]

One of the early DAWs (long forgot the name of it) had an interface that recreated the look of a flatbed with animated reels. It ran on an old monochrome green/black monitor. I saw this in the mid-90s and was already used to seeing a waveform in timelines, so this thing really felt ancient. Apparently, the makers felt sound editors would be unable to grasp a new interface???

[FarmerPotato]

Isn't it a thing for DAW developers to strive for a real-world-looking interface? What I hate is knob re-creations!

[ErroneousBosh]

Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).

Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.

If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?

[1] https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/

[dylan604]

This didn't look real. It looks like what we'd consider a TUI today

[asimovDev]

don't knobs also serve a practical purpose since otherwise you'd have a ton of horizontal sliders, which would quickly crowd the interface?

[alexpotato]

> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel

This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:

- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses

- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid

- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first

As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.

[yndoendo]

My first laptop was G3 Apple laptop.

It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.

Dell XPS 13 was the 2nd worst.

[arm]

HDMI in 1997–2003?

[yndoendo]

Sorry, VGA. And yes the G3 laptop was used to create my first software based solution since it could handle Unix / Linux coding.

By the way the person that down voted my comment highlights the rejection of reality that others lived through.

[akdev1l]

why is this a good thing? This sucks, it would randomly cause IP conflict in some cases

[MrDOS]

There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:

    $ ip address show dev br0 | grep -m 1 valid_lft
           valid_lft 69133sec preferred_lft 69133sec

It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.

I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.

[akdev1l]

Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)

that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc

I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing

[vladvasiliu]

If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.

Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.

[worthless-trash]

Users would assign it to 'just that network is flakey'.. not 'my hardware is not behaving properly' because it works elsewhere.

[silon42]

I do observe this at work sometimes, on Linux I have no issues with wifi/network, but Apple users are complaining.

[Cthulhu_]

> Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another.

This is (maybe tangentially) something I don't understand about the software market today; how come only Microsoft and Apple seem to be in the market for building a suite of native deskop applications, while other companies make one-off applications? Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?

I can make some guesses of course.

[fsloth]

"Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?"

Sure there are but in other domains than "office".

For example CAD has few incumbent companies with their portfolios - Autodesk, Trimble, Nemetchek, Bentley. (etc)

For design - Adobe, Affinity (well it's all Canva now), then legion of smaller offerings like Clip Studio Paint.

CAD is the only domain in which I have domain knowledge but I would be surprised if there are no others.

[xanderlewis]

> Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve

That tends to happen when you're the one defining the curve.

[ErroneousBosh]

> but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.

Actually worse than not looking like Windows, at that.

[pndy]

The UI was so attractive it was back then even "ported" into KDE, not mention the countless OSX-themed visual styles for XP and Dock-like applications (later Launchpads arrived as well). There were even theming packages which were patching everything from icons to bitmaps in Windows somewhere before Vista arrival.

Aqua "era" ended with 10.10 when Apple decided to join flatness craze.

[kccqzy]

The early flatness craze, Yosemite, still looked better than the current Liquid Glass appearance. The Yosemite app icons in particular looked even more refined than Mavericks, and much more sophisticated than Tahoe.

[paradox460]

I remember installing flyakite to get things looking good on Windows, and then growing tired of it all and just buying windowblinds and desktop x

[pndy]

The early packages could really mess up Windows - especially on non-English versions. Later on there were some really good ones around like XPize or Vize for XP and Vista respectively.

Theming Windows was something I always appreciated but that ended by the time I've got 7. Instead I've opted for making workflow bit more smoother with some additional programs like Launchpad and small GKrellM-like sidebar.

[solstice]

Oh yeah I remember that. I use to hang around the customize.org forums a lot in 2003 trying out a lot of the visual styles for XP and winamp themes.

[jofzar]

https://youtu.be/ejPqAJ0dHwY

I saw this video recently, it's crazy how apple lost the tactility of its button.

[pwthornton]

The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.

Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

[steveBK123]

The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.

I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.

One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.

[nandomrumber]

Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.

What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.

1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

[overfeed]

> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.

[kasabali]

> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.

What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.

[overfeed]

> What backslash?

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/11/apples-designers-clashi...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/skueomorphism-red-headed-s...

https://gizmodo.com/apples-podcasts-app-no-longer-has-horrib...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/22/3680320/skeuomorphic-des...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/death-to-textures-io...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367270/yves-behar-apple-...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/skeuomorphism-isnt-ioss-bi...

https://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomo...

Edit: FYI: you typoed 'backlash' twice

[kasabali]

> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.

You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.

Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:

...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...

No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".

[sunaookami]

Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.

[overfeed]

I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.

[ksec]

Huge Huge Thank You for posting this video.

Literally word for word quote some of the thing I have been saying for years. Even the same quote on Craig Federighi and Jony Ive. Would have been better if there was another quote about Jony Ive fall out with Apple User Interface Head in 2015 and destroyed everything great about Apple Store. And again the Microsoft Video about Windows Metro and removing as much Chrome. ( There are still plenty of people on HN who will defend Windows 8 being peak UI and Metro was a right design choice )

And the quote about bringing order to Chaos. Along with Scott Forstall Video basically saying they destroyed everything Steve left behind.

With Jony Ive gone and most of the exec on their way out, may be it is time to think about bringing back Scott Forstall.

[eleveriven]

Modern UI trends seem to optimize for neutrality and content-first minimalism, which is nice in theory but often ends up feeling generic

[jagged-chisel]

“Content-first minimalism”

I disagree. Unless the ‘content’ is “corners are sooo round, and isn’t this glass-like distortion just so neat?”

[ZpJuUuNaQ5]

>The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

Because "good looking UI" is a completely subjective metric.

[oneeyedpigeon]

True, but:

a) We can evaluate UIs on ('more') objective metrics too, like clarity, accessibility, etc. I think that, on most objective measures, the older UI would 'win' too.

b) Subjective doesn't mean 'useless'. If 99% of people prefer one thing over another, even for subjective reasons, it's probably a good idea.

[adolph]

> The UI looks so good. Why can’t we have good looking things anymore?

From the perspective of a Macintosh System 6 appreciator, OSX is kind of fussy with gratuitous details.

https://aaron.cc/opening-screenshots-from-a-vintage-macintos...

[ErroneousBosh]

There used to be a really nice Aqua theme for Gtk back in the day, but like everything else it's gone out of fashion and succumbed to bitrot.

I don't even know where you'd find a copy of it any more, even if it could be ported to modern toolkit libraries.

I wish freshmeat.net was still on the go, that was full of things like that.

[jama211]

Because your opinion is in the minority

[bromuro]

Please no, that Lucida font is unreadable and ugly. Let’s not talk about the childish “aqua” design.