[HN Gopher] Hello Mac OS X Tiger ___________________________________________________________________ Hello Mac OS X Tiger Author : ronyfadel Score : 301 points Date : 2022-01-17 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago) (HTM) web link (bunn.dev) (TXT) w3m dump (bunn.dev) | j4yav wrote: | I don't know if it's nostalgia but somehow this interface looks | more lively and friendly to me than modern MacOS which feels | flatter and has less personality (to me personally). | nly wrote: | I agree. Modern UIs are soulless | petepete wrote: | I agree to an extent but the thought of having an application | spread across seven or eight windows makes me feel nauseous. | ptx wrote: | It helps that you can press Command+Option+H to hide all | other windows (from other applications) to reduce clutter. | dkdbejwi383 wrote: | It can be a good way to make use of smaller screens (e.g. | on laptops). Multiple "virtual desktops" makes it easier to | manage | dijonman2 wrote: | I use many, many windows and tools to help me switch | including virtual desktops. Carryover from X11 days. | abraxas wrote: | Yeah, it's like everyone fell in love with the X/Athena | widgets all of a sudden. I'd never have guessed that after | all these years we'd go back to UIs looking like this: https: | //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Athena_Widgets#/media/File:S... | sneak wrote: | Apple's post-Steve brain drain is real, and a lot of the | internal redesign projects are now simply resume-driven | development. | | A lot of the people working on these systems weren't working | professionally when 10.0 came out. Most of those people have | moved on. Apple is not the same humans. | wombatmobile wrote: | A corporation is neither a human nor an AI. | | A corporation is a shield behind which humans plot and | practice their most deliberate, libidinous schemes of | avarice, moderated not by morality or community, but only by | laws and markets. And for that, corporations have lawyers, | resumes and advertising. | | It is a rare corporation that retains a soul for longer than | its founders presence, because lawyers, resumes and | advertising cannot sense what founders could: a creative | future. | hhh wrote: | I would think an increasing amount don't remember it either. | I was three at the time. The earliest OS X version I remember | hearing about was Tiger, and I used Leopard. | lalwanivikas wrote: | Is it possible to get it(old look) back? I tried searching for | it but did not find anything promising. | SllX wrote: | Any method I can think of to replace UI assets would be prone | to breaking with every patch Apple pushes out. I'm not going | to say it's impossible, but it's probably not worth your | time. If you want to explore what the UI felt like, you're | better off exploring VMs or old hardware and install media. | Klonoar wrote: | To be honest, with the way Apple does support for releases | 1 or 2 back from current, you could potentially do this | easier nowadays: just don't support the current version | (e.g Monterey), only target Catalina or Big Sur. When | Monterey is no longer the new one (only receiving security | patches), that's when you roll it forward. | can16358p wrote: | To be honest I really kept away from that old Mac interface for | years. When they switched to a cleaner and flatter design, I | literally went "now I want to jump on Apple ecosystem". Same | for iOS 7 update. | | They weren't the only or primary reasons but they had | significant role. I personally love the new flat interfaces | MUCH more TBH. | anthk wrote: | Flat interfaces today on desktops are unusable compared to | OSX Tiger, KDE3 and Windows 9x/2k/XP. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | Absolutely. It feels like playing battlefield. Just like | you do not see the soldiers in that game, you don't know | where the buttons or clickable things are. Does this page | when scroll? Who knows. Maybe it does. | dijit wrote: | I understand some of what you mean with this. | | I couldn't really stand the tiger-era MacOS either; but early | iOS and *MacOS Snow Leopard* we're the _pinnacle_ of UI /UX | for me. | | I still remember the high pixel density of the devices being | shown off so well with the crisp rendition of paper and | leather. The way it felt like it was popping off the screen. | | Back then I had really good eyesight (I was 20-22~) and those | UI elements sold me on the quality of the hardware. | | That, and it was much smoother in it's animations than | android/windows/compiz. | can16358p wrote: | All of them were the right choice for their time though. | Especially early iPhone and its skeuomorphic design taught | (practically) the whole world how to use a touch interface | with buttons, lists etc. and it looked great for the time. | Similar for old Macs too. Then flat design, IMO, cleaned up | the general UI after teaching it. | mirkules wrote: | I still have a working 2007 16" MacBook Pro (fully loaded 4GB | of RAM, yeah!). It's not just the software that was better but | the hardware too. That keyboard has so much travel compared to | these newer ones, it's crazy. It actually feels like a real | keyboard. | tomxor wrote: | I've got a 2009 MBP, After continuous use enough of the | keyboard domes finally cracked to become (almost) unusable | after 10 years (made it Linux after 5 after Apple | abandonment), now a lot of the keys are mush but still | actually work. | | i duno... "they don't make em like they used to"? :P | jacobolus wrote: | The newest generation of Apple keyboards has a bit more | travel than the previous generation, but the laptops from 15 | years ago are nicer. None of them come close to the glory of | this keyboard though: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Portable | pram wrote: | Wow that thing looks bigger than the IIc I had. Portable | indeed! | salamandersauce wrote: | It is. Also really heavy because it used a lead acid | battery. It was also wired in such a way that if the | battery died it wouldn't turn on anymore unlike modern | laptops that can run off the AC adapter directly. My | parents threw theirs out because of that. | jagger27 wrote: | 15" or 17"? I have a PowerBook G4 from the same era, and I | think the keyboard is the same as that. Indeed it has better | travel, but I find the keys are slightly wobbly and a bit | unrefined. Having torn one apart a while ago, I'd suspect | it's due to looser tolerances than more modern designs. I | think ThinkPads from the same era have significantly better | keyboards. They're less mushy and have a better texture. | jacobolus wrote: | The wobble in keyswitches is often intentional: it prevents | keys from binding when pressed off-axis, and makes them a | bit more forgiving when they get dust inside. | | I didn't like the older thinkpad keyboards; noticeably too | stiff for my taste. But this IBM "portable" keyboard is a | dream: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_5100 | csdvrx wrote: | I just don't understand how many people prefer these | keyboards. | | Key travel is only important to assist in your typing + | provide feedback, but unless you type like a brute (I've | a friend whom I would NEVER lend my laptop too, as I | would be worried for my keyboard) or have sensory nerve | issues like from diabetes, you don't need much travel. | | I was dubious of the newest Lenovo keyboards, but after | using my X1 Nano for a few hours, I was convinced: while | the keys themselves have less travel, it has a strong | opposing force that gives a lot of feedback. | | It's still a bit too stiff for my taste (it seems to have | been made for big burly guys) and I'd prefer something | more like the current Macbook keyboards, a self-avowed | heresy for any Thinkpad fan :) | jagger27 wrote: | It's funny to think about Lenovo making the X1 Nano for | big burly guys. | | It's too bad that laptop switches will likely never see | the huge and varied aftermarket that we have with | mechanical keyboards. There's a switch for everyone, and | it'll work in almost any keyboard if you're handy with a | soldering iron or have one with hotswappable switch | sockets. | csdvrx wrote: | > It's too bad that laptop switches will likely never see | the huge and varied aftermarket that we have with | mechanical keyboards. There's a switch for everyone | | Is there one for me, who likes little key travel, | softness, and silence? | | So far the best solution I've found : thinkpad USB | keyboards everywhere :) | jagger27 wrote: | Possibly a lightweight Kailh Choc linear switch? They're | very soft and quiet, but they have no tactility. The | tactile ones leave a bit to be desired. It's hard to | match rubber domes there. | | https://mkultra.click/choc-switches | csdvrx wrote: | > It's hard to match rubber domes there. | | Indeed. Even if it's antithetical to the mechanical | keyboard idea, I wish MX style keycaps (wide | availability, for ex this is how I could get a Cyrillic | keyboard) could be made compatible with rubber domes | (with no mechanical switch) | jagger27 wrote: | This was somewhat common with Alps, actually. They made a | rubber dome slider that was compatible with their | mechanical mount. | | https://deskthority.net/wiki/Alps_dome_with_slider | jagger27 wrote: | > a bit more forgiving when they get dust inside. | | It's a tough engineering problem, that's for sure. I | agree that older ThinkPads are a little bit stiff. | | Apple went too far with butterfly, but I think they | landed a good place with their current line up. They have | very little wobble. Cherry MX switches (and clones) are | excellent in terms of off-axis binding. Some clones are | significantly less wobbly than others, for various | reasons but none of them sacrifice off-axis performance. | It took decades to get to this point though. | | On a related, Alps mechanical switches are notorious for | dust and dirt ingress issues as they get older and | they're extremely hard to clean. For some reason Cherry | MX switches have fared much better over the years. | pivo wrote: | I still have one of those too. I do love the keyboard on | that, it feels very luxurious to me, but I have to admit I | can't type as fast as I can on my 2019 MBP work or 2021 M1 | personal MacBook Pros. | | I'm definitely in the minority in that I actually prefer the | 2019 keyboard over the others. It's the "fixed" version with | the rubber gasket that prevents dirt getting in the works and | I've never had an issue with a stuck key. Maybe it's because | I'm a very light typist, but the 2019 butterfly keyboard | never leaves my fingers feeling tired after a day of typing, | where the 2007 keyboard did. | [deleted] | ImprovedSilence wrote: | Wow, Agreed. The window shadows here really help them pop way | more than I remember, and they seem to do a much better job | delineating overlapping windows than the current "styles". | yoz-y wrote: | macOS still has window shadows and they are still the same | size (by eyeballing them). The only difference is that in | dark mode the shadows are of course less visible because the | contents of windows are darker. | kitsunesoba wrote: | At some point, window shadows became much more diffused. I | think the release that implemented this change was mountain | lion. | | I keep a Snow Leopard VM around to occasionally run old | software in and the difference in shadow size is always | striking. I personally like the more focused look of | pre-10.7 shadows. | yoz-y wrote: | Ah yes. When looking at it it does indeed look darker | towards the window in the screenshots. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | Definitely. It feels lively and exciting. Jonny Ive's decision | to go with flat killed all joy in the UI space and millions of | designers copied it mindlessly which I find especially | egregious. | germinalphrase wrote: | My nostalgia is that iPhone rumor render at the bottom. Kind of | love and want it. | Scene_Cast2 wrote: | Same. I remember a lot more of that type of content around | that era (2005-2012) - does anyone know where there's similar | content now? | Toutouxc wrote: | What do you mean by "similar content"? For unreleased | device rumors and leaks there's https://www.macrumors.com. | TillE wrote: | There's definitely some ugly bits from that era, but I | miss...color. | | My favorite example are the icons in the iTunes sidebar, which | used to be distinctly colored (and therefore quickly and easily | distinguishable!) and then became a dull grey. It looks | incredibly bland _and_ it 's harder to use. | | Now it's split into multiple apps with monochromatic sidebars, | which is slightly less boring but no more usable. | macNchz wrote: | I had some firsthand experience of how many people were | bothered by the grey iTunes icon change after I released a | little hack to restore them. The demand blew through a month | of my web hosting bandwidth in a couple of hours, and people | kept sending me emails about it for years! Comment from a | previous discussion: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638381 | gurkendoktor wrote: | Thanks! I think I've used that, and a SIMBL bundle for | Finder when it became necessary. | kergonath wrote: | Hey I think I used that! That's about 10 years late, but | thank you! | philistine wrote: | Imagine if they kept the monochrome design but gave every | icon a different shade of red. It would get us so much closer | to the colourful past ! | duxup wrote: | I ran into a site I was fixing that used an older css | framework. | | Buttons had depth and looked like candy.... I really liked | them. | sdevonoes wrote: | I think, in general, UIs back then felt more "human": soft, | intuitive, yes, sometimes a bit clunky, and yes, sometimes with | contradictions (like any human being). Now they feel more | "robotic": harsh, darker (or is it that designers nowadays tend | to use softened colors?), precise as any machine (but this | doesn't always mean that they are easier for humans to use). | Robotic, though, doesn't seem too far off: society is becoming | more and more robotic I believe. | bluedino wrote: | IMO the last few versions of the Classic MacOS were the peak. | There was a lot of hate for Aqua and the fisher-price look. | Remember the pinstripes? | | Tiger was a big improvement. And, the earlier versions of OS X | still look way better than what we have now. | BoxOfRain wrote: | Tiger remains to this day my favourite look for macOS. It's | not that I don't like the modern look, but there's something | incredibly friendly and inviting about the 10.4 era Aqua | interface. I wish you could still skin macOS because I'd | totally run a Tiger desktop on modern macOS if I could. Best | I can get is a brushed metal theme for Firefox to mimic old- | school Safari! | varunprasad wrote: | The Tiger -> Snow Leopard period was amazing. | | Tiger: Great new UI. Spotlight. Dashboard. Leopard: Quick | Look. Time Machine. I hated it from a functional | perspective, but wow it looked amazing. Snow Leopard: They | just cleaned up everything. | wyclif wrote: | Snow Leopard was also probably the most stable Mac OS X | ever. I had it for years and I don't ever remember it | crashing under duress. | BeFlatXIII wrote: | Tiger looks over a Snow Leopard core. What more could | anyone possibly want? | hyperbovine wrote: | Do not fear--it's only a matter of time before the "design | conscious" crowd, which includes a large contingent of | Apple employees, alights on the year 2005 as the pinnacle | of "retro" and starts creating throwback versions of | everything. By my estimation we're at about 1994 right now | so ... | csdvrx wrote: | ... in 10 years, as the cycle of nostalgia takes about 30 | years. | BoxOfRain wrote: | I literally have a playlist called 'modern 80s' which is | 2020s music releases that kind of sound like they're from | the '80s. I definitely subscribe to the 30 year nostalgia | theory! | adfm wrote: | It used to be 20. 70s-->50s (American Graffiti, Grease, | Happy Days), 80s-->60s (Summer of Love, Touch of Gray, | Love Shack), 90s-->70s (Tarantino, lowrise bell bottoms), | 00->80s... When you're 18-25, your model is the previous | generation. Around 30, the pattern resolves and your | grandparents somehow become sophisticated in hindsight. | Uehreka wrote: | There were a lot of bands harkening back to an 80's sound | in the 2000's, and people were saying that the "retro | cycle" was therefore 20 years (if it was recurring in the | 2020's that'd be 40 years). But I think someone could | make the case that the 80's have just become the | permanent retro decade, and that everything since 2000 | has been subsumed into a sort of "infinite present". | Brian_K_White wrote: | I think the internet and free universal frictionless | undifferentiated unbiased access to recordings has made | all sounds equally available at all times, starting | somewhere in the 90's, and that has made anyone who was | born after that point perceive them a bit differently | than before. | | I have a neice who was born in 96. When she was 10 or so | I found out she was listening to both Green Day and Patsy | Kline with essentially equal interest. | | That's when I got this idea. | | She was born entirely after not only the existense of | recordings that go back at least a few generations, not | only after the existense of the internet, but after the | mass adoption of the internet, digital copies of | recordings, and countless distribution means, both | centralized and peer to peer. The essential nature was | not that different from today, the day she was born, let | alone 10 years later. | | For me, Patsy Kline was only on the oldies station at my | grandmas house and the barber shop and which actually | called itself the oldies station, and my parents wouldn't | be caught dead listening to Green Day. | | For my neice they are both just content. | Shared404 wrote: | Born in 2001 here, and can confirm. | | I can go from Yes, to Twenty One Pilots, to Kansas, to | TheFatRat, to Johnny Cash, to random youtuber, to Linkin | Park, to Guns 'n Roses, to Elvis, and so on. | | They're all just there, there's good stuff from every | time period - why would you limit yourself? | majormajor wrote: | I think there's a technological aspect too where after | 2000 or so, nobody has really figured out as many new | novel sounds to make with synthesizers or turntables or | instruments or whatever. The technology of music | instrument/tool development plateaued, so the novelty | started to as well. | Uehreka wrote: | I'd definitely disagree on that front. Though I do think | there's been a bit of a logarithmic curve, the difference | in what was possible in 2000 vs 2022 is pretty huge. | Like, listen to Animal Collective's Merriweather Post | Pavilion (2009) or any of James Blake, Jamie XX or | Burial's stuff from the past decade. Not all of that was | impossible before 2000, but you'd have a hard time | finding people making music with those timbres (outside | maybe some really cutting edge IDM). | | Oh and don't forget auto-tune ;) Although there are a few | examples of it being used for pitch correction before | 2000 (+ that Cher song), it wasn't until the 2000's that | it got ratcheted up to T-Pain levels. | majormajor wrote: | How does the magnitude of that difference compare to vs | 1980, and then to 1960, though? Both in terms of the | possibilities and in terms of how much the possibility | space had been explored? | contidrift wrote: | >But I think someone could make the case that the 80's | have just become the permanent retro decade, and that | everything since 2000 has been subsumed into a sort of | "infinite present". | | As if we lived in the Matrix. | angio wrote: | My favorite thing about Tiger was that at the end of its | life cycle it was incredibly stable. | lostgame wrote: | Which is pretty incredible, since Tiger was the first | public version of OSX to have distros for both PPC and | Intel! | | Tiger was solid - Leopard was where it was at. Snow | Leopard may be my favourite, but as I can't run it on any | of my PPC systems I have no excuse to run it anymore. | gurkendoktor wrote: | I actually liked Expose a lot more in Tiger and Leopard | than in Snow Leopard, where all windows were resized to a | grid, and you lost relative window sizes as a visual cue. | Thankfully, there was a hack to get Leopard Expose in | Snow Leopard, by overwriting a binary with one from a | beta! https://superuser.com/a/212717 | | There were hacks for absolutely everything. Simpler | times... | Klonoar wrote: | IIRC there was a hack to make it work on PPC machines, | no? | | Or there was a hack to backport certain things from Snow | Leopard onto Leopard PPC... | kergonath wrote: | It was in the middle of the 64bit transition, as well. | lostgame wrote: | I actually still use a quad core G5 with 16GB(!) of RAM, | and 2x1TB SSDs for some audio production work in Logic 9. | | 64-bit started for me back when the G5 came out, and | today that G5 _screams_ , easily feeling as responsive as | my girlfriend's M1 MacBook Air most of the time. | | It's almost unbelievable how the G5 performs like it's | got bloody Sonic the Hedgehog trapped in there on a | hamster wheel generator. My Intel machines never came | close, and a lot of it seemed to have to do with major | bloat as the OS moved along. Probably also bloat in | Logic. My G5 can handle the hell of a lot more effects | and VSTs with about 50% the impact they have on my Intel | machines. It's surreal. | | I also find it absolutely pathetic and astounding that up | until this year (16 inch MBP excluded) the maximum RAM a | MacBook could have was the equivalent of a computer I got | in 2005. 15 years later I still couldn't get even 32GB | RAM in a MacBook. And it was soldered so it couldn't be | upgraded. Shameful. | kergonath wrote: | The 8 DIMM slots don't fit in a laptop anyway ;) | Seriously though, the 16GB limit was mostly due to the | Intel parts not supporting more LP-DDR. | | But yeah these things were beasts. The dual-CPU and then | the dual dual-core were seriously impressive. I really | wanted one at the time but could not justify it. I | finally got one for EUR100 2 years ago, now it sits next | to a G4 Cube. Both are some exceptional pieces of | engineering. | SllX wrote: | I miss a lot of things about the 10.4-10.6 era. Brushed | metal Safari is not one of those things. | | As I recall, per the HIG, the official line on brushed | metal was that it was for apps that interacted with | physical hardware in some direct way: portable music | players, synch. managers, optical drives, disks, something. | Now if you think that's vague, you're not wrong; most apps | could at least print something, and it wasn't applied | consistently even within the iLife suite which up until the | inclusion of iWeb consisted entirely of apps that were | intended to bring the Mac and peripheral devices together | (CDs, digital cameras, MP3 Players/iPods, DV cameras, | SuperDrives, MIDI). This vagueness and the low popularity | of brushed metal Safari in particular was one of the | reasons the brushed metal theming was retired after Tiger. | BoxOfRain wrote: | I know I'm in a minority with brushed metal but I really | liked it, yes its official usage guide was vague and it | probably was abused a bit but from a purely aesthetic | point of view I liked it, like a lot of things in Aqua of | that era it made things feel very tangible. I'm one of | the apparently few people on HN who actually liked the | touch bar (but not the lack of a physical escape key) on | the MacBook Pro as well so take my opinion with a pinch | of salt! | xattt wrote: | Brushed metal worked because you were already touching a | surface that was a similar texture as the UI. | SllX wrote: | Only on a MacBook Pro or PowerBook. Not accounting for | 3rd party accessories: iBooks, MacBooks, Apple's Mice & | Pro Mice, Mighty Mice, Apple's Pro Keyboards, Apple | Keyboards and Apple Remotes were all plastic at the time, | and mostly white or translucent plastic with a couple of | exceptions. | | The aluminum stuff all came about just immediately prior | to (about one or two month's prior) or after Leopard's | release, but Tiger's era (and Brushed Metal didn't start | on Tiger) was dominated by plastic input devices. | SllX wrote: | That's fair, but I found it grating in any app I looked | at for a decent length of time, like web browsers. I | think brushed metal with stricter usage guidelines | (followed by Apple) that wasn't per App but per Window- | type could have stuck around. Having some way to | distinguish Apps and window types in Expose isn't that | worst thing in the world and was about the only redeeming | aspect of Apple's Lion theming choices. | | Anyway, I used Firefox and Camino around that time. | kergonath wrote: | I loved Aqua, particularly after they toned down the pin | stripes and transparency, so, yes, around Tiger (and up until | around Snow Leopard). It was indeed a great step forward in | terms of UI, which cannot be said of many more recent | releases. | philistine wrote: | Everybody is very positive about Tiger's UI, but what I | remember were the disjointed elements. Brushed metal was | prevalent in many apps, and completely broke the UI's look. | | Even though we have many gaping holes in the details of the | current UI due to the many paradigms (SwiftUI, AppKit, | Catalyst), skin-deep macOS is much more agreeable. | kergonath wrote: | Yeah brushed metal from the experiments in Panther was | still too present. It got better with Leopard. | | Cocoa apps are mostly fine in modern macOS. Their main | issues are the lack of contrast*, but things like the | dark theme are great. From what I have seen SwiftUI is | fine too, although it still has some way to go to catch | up with AppKit, and has some rough edges. Catalyst is | plain garbage, though. | | * a pet peeve: I have to click 3 times when I want to | make sure that the shuffle mode is either on or off in | Music. Another one: document proxy icons are getting | hidden and harder to use, even though they are a | fantastic feature of the OS. There's a bunch of others | features that are becoming more and more obscure, which | is a damn shame. | queuebert wrote: | Since this opinion seems near universal, is there any | explanation for what the heck Apple is doing? | ryanf wrote: | It's not universal, people just don't bother writing posts | with the opposite perspective because it's boring. Tiger | was my first version of OS X and I think what we have now | looks much better. | asdff wrote: | Project manager driven decision-making. Everyone wants to | make a name for themselves, so every update gets a big UI | overhaul even when it doesn't need one. Features get taken | away when they don't need to be. Workflows get redone when | they don't have to be redone. Imagine if this were to | happen for something as important as Bash, people would | revolt and fork, but in the big tech world you are beholden | to these corporate products. | | It's not just apple, its everything in big tech. Venmo just | released an update where they moved key workflows around | for no reason at all, and now I don't have muscle memory | for the app anymore, but I'm sure some project manager | justified it with telemetry and got a huge bonus for | rolling out an update and showing downloads grew by 1% | (which they probably would have anyway). | md_ wrote: | "Project" or "product?" | sbuk wrote: | It's rose-tinted glasses. Every release meets the same same | level of criticism as to how it's the end of macOS, how the | interface design is a regression towards infantilism. It | has been ever thus, even in the System/OS 7, 8, 9 days. The | difference now is that macOS is more mainstream. | tshaddox wrote: | Yep. Everyone is cool with all the change that was | necessary to get software to the point where they were | most emotionally attached to it, and all change after | that is "useless meddling that no one likes and is only | done to give PMs and designers a job." | nitrogen wrote: | This massively oversimplifies the state of technology and | is unfairly dismissive of the significant productivity | hit that some changes can inflict on the most loyal and | experienced users. | tshaddox wrote: | It's certainly possible for changes in UI to | significantly harm productivity, but you would need to | systematically gather evidence to know if this is | happening. Whether it's happening is almost completely | independent of anyone's individual feeling of frustration | at needing to learn about and adapt to new UI changes. | | But more importantly, they existence of change is | _inherently_ important to the large-scale advancement of | computing over time. Even if it is the case that a | certain UI overhaul of a major operating system harmed | productivity, the solution is _not_ "permanently halt all | software changes after this specific version that I have | learned and enjoy using." We ought to reject arguments | that forced stasis is the solution any time changes | introduce risk. | gurkendoktor wrote: | Mh, I don't know. Some of the changes that people | complain the most about (from Leopard's 3D dock to Safari | 15 tabs) were undone by Apple. And for some changes that | haven't been undone, like monochrome icons everywhere, I | still mis-click things so often that I doubt it's just | nostalgia. | | If you'd let people mix and match elements from different | eras of macOS, I'm sure you'd see some patterns | regardless of when people got into Macs; similar to how | people have lots of abstract opinions about architecture, | but somehow the tourist buses always stop at the same | cozy-looking old towns. Beauty and usability are not | entirely subjective. | sbuk wrote: | I've been an Apple user since the early 80's. Apple being | simultaneously the gods of UI and scourge of UI have been | a constant, along with the 'doomed' narrative. A lot of | this is the peanut gallery repeating what they've heard, | as well as exaggeration of the issues individuals face. | For instance, in the 40 or so years that I've used | computers, I believe they have never been more user- | friendly than they are now _for the typical user_. Not | just Macs, but Windows and Linux's desktops too. Reading | opinions here would make you think the opposite is true, | but here is full of people that love to tinker, and fewer | seem to want to go back to the "good old days". Hence the | 'rose tinted glasses' comment. I was there, it wasn't | that great! I jest, well a little bit anyway. I remember | Tiger being released and a-not-insignificant-amount of | people complaining about brushed metal. As I said, it has | been ever this. Long may it continue - it makes us that | do care think. | champagnois wrote: | They are in the Windows 8 phase of design. They want to | merge mouse and keyboard systems with touch systems, and | are thusly forcing mouse and keyboard users to use | interface conventions that are derived from touch | platforms. | | Mobile platforms benefit more from high contrast, very | simple and flat designs. | | Beyond just the touch screen convenience features -- A | significant portion of users is seeig their UI under | conditions of extreme sunlight, water droplets, or cracked | screen at any given time. These things all inform design | choices for mobile. | | Now then, why is Apple making the same mistake as Microsoft | Windows 8 by forcing these design elements onto Desktop and | Laptop market segments? Apple doesn't really think of the | PC market much. According to their financial reports, they | make more money selling chargers for their mobile devices | than they do on the entire PC market. | | The answer, I assume, is apathy. | arrrg wrote: | Apple isn't merging mouse and keyboard systems, though. | Not in macOS. So that hypothesis is complete bunk. | | This design move is at this point getting to be a decade | old. So this explanation from you makes zero sense. | slategruen wrote: | This. macOS has been in an incremental phase for several | years now. Windows 8 was a major overhaul from Microsoft | which ended up as a big mistake since they didn't | consider the impact of such an overhaul in terms of user | experience. macOS on the other hand is quite mature and | Apple knows that any major change would hurt users in the | end. | smoldesu wrote: | Was Big Sur one of those "incremental" updates? | champagnois wrote: | Just an "incremental" update where they added touch | screen apps (from the iPhone and iPad) to the desktop and | laptop experience. Oh, they also changed the system tray | to mimic the touch functionality of iPads 1:1 as well, | despite being a (far more precise) mouse pointer | controlled system. Incremental they say. I was way off | base and taking crazy pills when I saw any relationship | between these design elements and touch interfaces. | jen20 wrote: | Yes. | champagnois wrote: | The latest design elements feel straight from iPad OS | imo. They also have had a focus on allowing iOS installs | onto MacOS. This is from BigSur onward. | | I was mostly describing my feelings and guesses of it. | batman-farts wrote: | I was one of the Aqua haters, but I got used to it quick | after installing OS X Public Beta and switching it to the | graphite color scheme. Doesn't mean I don't miss OS 9 | Platinum, though. I'd be interested to hear from anybody who | spent time using the Dark Platinum/NeXT hybrid desktop of | Rhapsody and OS X Server 1.0/1.2, although I have to wonder | if there was ever anyone who used the server OS as a daily | driver. | | Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting that I | can't quite remember, defaults write com.Apple.something or | other, that would set all Cocoa apps to a straight-up | NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke usability, though, | as windows would minimize into little squares in the corner | of the screen a la NS rather than into the dock. | warning26 wrote: | _> Fun fact: OS X Public Beta had an Easter egg setting | that I can't quite remember, defaults write | com.Apple.something or other, that would set all Cocoa apps | to a straight-up NeXTSTEP appearance. It completely broke | usability, though, as windows would minimize into little | squares in the corner of the screen a la NS rather than | into the dock._ | | Wow I've never read about this -- know of any screenshots? | Would be really interesting to see what some of the default | OS X apps looked with the NeXTSTEP appearance. | Lammy wrote: | You could move/rename the `Extras.rsrc` file in `/System/ | Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks | /HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources/` and disable | Aqua in the very early versions, returning lots of things | to a Mac OS X DP2-style Platinum appearance: | | https://macosx-dev.omnigroup.narkive.com/WZX5AkMk/extras- | rsr... | | https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macosxdp2 | | I also like to use Jagwire's Extras.rsrc on Tiger to get | my sweet sweet pinstripes back: | https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/jaguar-ui-on-tiger- | proj... | kitsunesoba wrote: | It's not exactly what you're asking for, but this Twitter | thread from Stephen Troughton-Smith has screenshots of | several stock OS X apps as they changed from | NeXT/OpenSTEP - Rhapsody/OS X Server - Developer Previews | - Public Beta - final release. | | https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1125050952506052609.ht | ml | majormajor wrote: | At the time, some of us went out of the way to get rid of the | blue parts of Aqua in particular. | | Was the graphite option for gray button bubbles available in | 10.0? I can't remember anymore. | | Interestingly, though, Aqua holds up better than the Brushed | Metal OS X phase. | sebow wrote: | (In case there needs to be a reminder) Take a look at | hellosystem if you want this kind of interface on a modern | OS(FreeBSD, that is).Yes, it's nowhere near a complete solution | for most work or even some average usage, but it looks | promising and we don't deal with apple. | johnebgd wrote: | Scott Forstall was fired for the Apple Maps mess up. He | championed good designs like this. When he left it was a race | to the bottom at Apple for their UI/UX. | marstall wrote: | funny I was thinking this would demonstrate that Xcode and | Interface Builder were easier to grok for a beginner than they | are today, but it seems it was just as particular then as it is | today. | Brian_K_White wrote: | Lovely! | | It's just missing the part where half way through, osx and xcode | updates and your existing app no longer builds on your machine | nor runs on anyone else's. | | My ascerbic observations about the platform aside, I love this, | both in it's current context, and would have loved it at the | time. Thank you! | jedberg wrote: | Why would you use Yahoo in 2005? I'm pretty sure Google was | already the more popular search engine by then, especially for | people looking for developer documentation. | | Edit: Best data I can find shows Google was about 35%, Yahoo 30%, | and MSN 15%. So I guess it was a toss up if you were using Yahoo | or Google, but I seem to recall everyone I knew who was a | developer preferred Google because it did a better job finding | developer docs. | dhofer wrote: | There is a collection of redrawn high-resolution Mac OS X Tiger | wallpapers at https://hector.me/aqueux | | After all those years it's still the best. | johnebgd wrote: | During this era Apple sent third party official devs a shirt when | the new OS released. I still have mine but they are quite worn | out from all the wear. Wish they still did that but I appreciate | how much less expensive Apple developer accounts are these days. | PascLeRasc wrote: | This was really fun to read. Tiger was before my time - does | anyone know of good resources on where things went from here? | What were some of the first 3rd party native Mac apps? | lkxijlewlf wrote: | My favorite version of OS X was El Cap. Nothing since has been | enjoyable. | | I get it, my preference, but I'm allowed. | godDLL wrote: | 10.8 was the last of agreeable direction for OSX for me. | | I'm running 10.12, for software compatibility reasons. Likely | here our paths will split. Versions beyond this are of no | interest to me. | sgt wrote: | My favorite is Mojave.. coincidentally the one I am running. | pcdoodle wrote: | Same. | Normille wrote: | Me too. | grishka wrote: | My favorite is Mavericks, the last one with skeuomorphism. | miles wrote: | For anyone on an M1 and feeling nostalgic, PPC versions of OS X | run quite well in UTM/QEMU: https://tinyapps.org/docs/tiger- | on-m1.html | sophiebits wrote: | > Next, go back to the MainMenu.xib, right click on your | MainWindowController and select Instantiate MainWindowController | | .xib - Freudian slip? :) | Shinchy wrote: | I still love the way OSX Tiger looks, even after all these years. | andrekandre wrote: | i really feel the ui in tiger was just great... not perfect of | course, but just feels peak (pre-darkmode) osx to me... | | btw, taping the rss link doesnt open my rss app on ios, i think | it may be the mime-type isnt set? | coolandsmartrr wrote: | Tiger was a solid release from Apple that made me switch to the | then-unstable Windows ecosystem. I guess back when you paid for | software, Apple made sure to squash bugs so you were happy with | it. Nowadays... | matheweis wrote: | About 20 years or so ago, I actually got Apple to replace an | out of warranty motherboard for a paid os upgrade. | | Can't find a reference to it now [1] but there was some sort of | somewhat known issue with the powerbook g3 that I had at the | time that presented under os x, but not os 9. | | I argued successfully that it should be fixed under the | "software warranty" because it said it was compatible with that | powerbook, but the processor issue made it incompatible, and it | worked. | | Imagine that happening today... | | [1] This CNET article alludes to it but doesn't go into much | detail: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lombard-powerbook- | the-pr... | Lammy wrote: | It's kind of remarkable there weren't more issues than that | considering Lombard was their very first "New World" | portable, "PowerBook1,1"! Even the OG toilet-seat iBook comes | afterward as "PowerBook2,1": | https://macintoshgarden.org/apple-powermac-line-of- | computers... | philistine wrote: | That New World switch is such an Earth-shaking change and | it's basically forgotten. It was Steve Jobs' first big | software transition before OS X was even decided on as the | future of the company. | kzrdude wrote: | Tiger was good. Around this time I realized apple really wanted | to decide how my music and photos were organized and weren't | going to let go. Their control put me off it all. Fortunately I | discovered Linux around this time. | grishka wrote: | Nowadays they think there's a need to release a major update to | a feature-complete product every year because marketing said so | and because project managers need something to justify their | existence. | slig wrote: | One can tell this is absolutely true because _emoji_ updates | are tied to major OS updates. | grishka wrote: | If only we could update _a font_ separately from the rest | of the OS. | Hamuko wrote: | Switch _to_ or switch _from_? | bonaldi wrote: | This makes me more nostalgic for the old Interface Builder than | it does Aqua. So much more straightforward to create | actions/outlets and create the files than the current mess. | smm11 wrote: | I used Rhapsody for a couple years on a Thinkpad. It was very, | very limited for what I was doing at the time, and the Lighthouse | applications I could get running weren't anywhere near what | anything else was, by the time I got them. | | My work laptop at the time was a G3 running System 8.6, which | remains my favorite Apple OS to this day. I still have a G4 with | 8.6 stuffed full of everything for the heck of it. And the | Thinkpad. | maxpert wrote: | For the record to this day I believe this aqua pill styled | interface was way more clean and attractive than the flat design. | I've never been fan of flat interfaces, it's the reason I hated | Windows 8 onwards interfaces. Skeuomorphism was just perfect! | mfollert wrote: | I really love this, thank you. This was so much me back then ... | the switch from Windows to a Mac basically was my "awakening" as | a dev. | dmitriid wrote: | An interface where all elements are distinguishable from each | other.. | carlivar wrote: | Because Jobs was still in control. As I understand it, this was | a constant tension between Ive and Jobs. Of course Ive design | eventually dominated after Jobs' death. | grishka wrote: | It appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, | slowly but surely. There are skeuomorphic icons in Monterey, | and I think there's fewer borderless crap. | | The one thing that does really grind my gears though -- | they've replaced all purpose-made icons in toolbars and such | with some "universal" ones that completely disregard the | existence of the pixel grid. There's literally not a single | line in these icons that isn't blurry af. | dmitriid wrote: | > appears to me that they're rolling back Ive's decisions, | slowly but surely | | And yet there's the completely washed out BigSur and | Monterrey for which I recommend turning on contrast mode: h | ttps://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1456894618000400385?s=20 | seumars wrote: | OSX Tiger running on a Power Mac G5 was my dream setup I never | could afford. Time flies. | flatiron wrote: | Someone had one of those g5s on eBay for a few hundo. Ones with | the wheels. I regret not picking it up and at least putting bsd | on it. | chrizel wrote: | I bought my first desktop Mac back in 2004 after owning an | iBook 3G since 2002. And as a 19 year old software developer | from Germany who finished his apprenticeship, I wanted the best | Mac I could afford. I bought a Power Mac G5 - one of the first | dual core models with water cooling. Was a lot of money back | then and I waited months for it to arrive, but it was a great | machine. | | Played a lot of World of Warcraft on this thing. :-) And did | some Cocoa/Objective-C development. But it was never the big | investment that I thought it would be. After the Intel switch | in 2006, the Power Mac G5 didn't have much more use for me | personally because the new Intel machines were so much | better... | | Today I'm more into buying the cheaper machines for myself. | Should have put the money from the Power Mac G5 into Apple | stocks... | Normille wrote: | My first desktop Mac was an 8500. I bought it when I was a | student and took out a loan to buy it at PS3500 second hand. | Unbelievable how cheap computing power has become in such a | relatively short time. | srinathkrishna wrote: | That was such a fun nostalgic ride! :) | throwmeback wrote: | I... don't get the nostalgia. | | Just for context, I'm 26, from a post-commie country, have been | around computers since birth thanks to my dad. He wasn't | technical, he just liked the new tech. | | What stinks to me: - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 | begone) | | - Skeuomorphism was always very "uncanny valley" for me; I much | prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic ones, the | current flat designs are better but way too saturated and I tend | to lose my focus quickly | | - I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those old | IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default - most of | them were never used by anyone and everyone would just click | through to the main window; being a small child I didn't know | what to do or where to start and nobody around me could help - | this memory kept me disinterested with programming until I | literally went to a programming bootcamp after my finals. | | - I really mean it! IMHO user friendliness is over the roof | compared to those supposedly golden times. | vintagedave wrote: | > I vividly remember how lost and frustrated I was when those | old IDEs would launch with multitudes of windows by default... | | Tiger and Xcode 2 is quite old and I think is not really the | version of macOS many people yearn for. It was the first | version many started using (10.0-10.3's graphics were terrible | - pinstripes! - and 10.4 was the 'Redmond, Start Your | Photocopiers' release which was genuinely exciting. Although | I'd used OS X at uni, I bought my first Mac with 10.4 Tiger. | Since for many it was the first used, it's what's remembered - | but using Tiger this month, I realised that several things I | fondly remembered were actually in newer versions.) | | The 'best' version is very likely 10.6 Snow Leopard (2009), or | possibly Mavericks (2013), the last pre-flat-design OS X. Snow | Leopard had a clean, fairly modern UI (so your concerns about | multi-window were heard) yet was still joyful. | | > I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) | | The iMac G4, which runs 10.4 Tiger and 10.5, has a 16:10 aspect | ratio screen if you buy the 17" screen option. (Source: just | bought one, to investigate if it's truly nostalgia or things | really were better back then.) | | > I much prefer the Win95/OS 7/etc. designs than skeuomorphic | ones | | Much of OS X was bright and colourful, with pretty graphics, | which as you note is very different to Win95/OS 7. However the | skeuomorphism wasn't as strong as its reputation is these days. | Much of the interaction (say, Cover Flow) is what we'd today | call skeuomorphic but really was just a fairly natural way to | interact. The real skeuomorphic elements, like the Calendar app | using stitched leather, were fairly rare. | | > the current flat designs are better but way too saturated and | I tend to lose my focus quickly | | 100% agreed. I personally find it very hard to distinguish | elements at a glance in modern macOS. | | > IMHO user friendliness is over the roof compared to those | supposedly golden times. | | I think early 2000s OS X was not as golden as remembered, but | mid-2000s to 2012 was extraordinary. OS X really ramped up and | improved in those years. Then when they switched to flat | design, they lost a lot of usability tweaks along with it. | Running current and old OSX/macOS side by side on one desk, as | I'm doing, you can clearly see it's the same OS, but today's | has much more onscreen, taking more space, but has many small | UX indicators missing, and yet despite the amount onscreen the | design feels austere and soulless. I find UIs with UX hints | built in to their design, and designed for visual beauty, both | usable and pleasing for my mind the same way any beautiful | object is, and I dearly miss them. | classichasclass wrote: | I wonder how your iMac G4's arm is. Seems like the 17"s and | up all seem to suffer from stretched springs (the lower | weight on the 15"s has preserved them). | zepto wrote: | I think the answer lies with the 'aesthetic usability effect', | which is a well studied phenomenon. Basically people find | visually appealing UI more usable even if it is objectively | worse. | | https://www.nngroup.com/articles/aesthetic-usability-effect/ | | Of course what we find aesthetically pleasing is a subjective | function of our life experience. | ptr wrote: | Nostalgia is irrational and often felt for things that were | objectively worse. I feel nostalgic about a lot of crap. | Including Tiger. | dgellow wrote: | > - I very much prefer 16:9/16:10 ratios (4:3 begone) | | Have you tried 3:2? Best of both worlds IMHO, I will never go | back to 16:9 or 16:10! | | My personal ranking: 3:2 > 16:10 > 4:3 > 16:9. | throwaway675309 wrote: | Hard disagree on aspect ratios. I grew up on 4:3 which was | great for working with text editors and long blocks of code. | The switch to 16:9 felt like it was just driven by the movie | industry for people who had nothing better to do but use their | computer for multimedia consumption. | randallsquared wrote: | > _Apple releasing their first phone, which will likely run some | kind of Cocoa in it. Good thing you already know how to write | applications for it, right?_ | | Awww. It must have been so shocking to MacOS devs when the iPhone | was announced and it was web applications or nothing. | Lammy wrote: | Probably less so if they'd written a Dashboard widget (also a | new feature in Tiger) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashcode | draw_down wrote: | sharikous wrote: | Tiger was the apex of developer-friendly FOSS-friendly Apple. | | You can find the last official guide to modifying and compiling | the xnu kernel from that time. | | Documentation was fabulous. I miss those times. | kzrdude wrote: | I do too. It was around this time I left my kiddie days as OS X | dev behind and became an adolescent Linux dev. :) It's actually | true, been using Linux since then, it was just a much better | hacker environment. | easton wrote: | It's kind of sad when you find a great Apple doc that there's a | 90% chance the top of the page says "Documentation Archive". | toyg wrote: | It's not just Apple. Microsoft also stopped producing first- | party documentation on low-level technology, just because they | wanted to stop people from using certain things even though | they were still very much a fundamental part of Windows. | sbuk wrote: | The decline of 'FOSS-friendly' Apple coincides with the re- | licensing of many projects under the GPLv3, which is decidedly | enterprise-hostile by design. I concur that the developer | documentation need improvement. | fouc wrote: | Or it has more to do with the "Embrace, extend, and | extinguish" strategy that all big corporations engage in. | smichel17 wrote: | Can you elaborate on how GPLv3 is enterprise-hostile? My | impression was that the main change was fixing the tivo | loophole. | kitsunesoba wrote: | I believe that most corporate legal departments (who are | the ones controlling what licenses can/can't be used, not | the engineers) received GPLv3 as an end to simple ways to | guarantee that GPL had no possibility of bringing legal | trouble. | | Even if it's technically possible to comply with GPLv3 | without open sourcing proprietary code, there's enough | caveats/hoop jumps involved that it was seen as too risky | to even try. They don't want, "no legal issues as long as", | they want a flat, unconditional "no legal issues ever". | kmeisthax wrote: | Well, GPLv3's installation instructions requirement more or | less is targeted squarely at consumer electronics companies | and that includes Apple. If Apple were to include GPLv3 | software in iOS, the only way to comply with the license | would be to significantly alter their security model to | include an owner override. While there are ways that Apple | could still use GPLv3 software, not change their security | model, and remain in compliance[0]; I imagine they decided | it would be easier to just ban new GPL software in their OS | entirely rather than deal with the compliance headaches. | | Apple in particular never shipped any GPLv3 software in | their OS and stopped updating even v2 software. They used | to be very heavy GCC users, but wrote their own | permissively-licensed compiler that outdoes it in almost | every way. In their defense, they actually wanted LLVM to | be an upstream FSF project; but RMS famously lost the | e-mail because he daily-drives barely functional ancient | laptops. In a sense, that too is enterprise-hostility; | albeit not owing to choice of license. I imagine that if | the FSF had agreed to refactor GCC the way Apple wanted, | Apple would have gone through the time and effort of GPLv3 | compliance. | | I'd also argue that GPLv3 didn't actually fix the TiVo | loophole. It can't - not unless we're going to pull an SSPL | and start writing copylefts that trip on software that | merely runs alongside Linux. The way TiVo got around the | GPLv2 installation instructions requirement was to make | their own proprietary app enforce the kernel lockout rather | than the bootloader, and prohibiting that would be very | draconian. | | That being said, you also should take into account the | historical context of GPLv3's announcement and development. | The FSF had some pretty crazy ideas, like rolling the | Affero clause into GPLv3, that probably scared people into | dropping their upgrade clauses even if it never actually | made it into an actual FSF license document. The end | document we actually got is relatively tame, but the | message the FSF sent was that they were willing to ship | whatever license language they felt met their personal | definition of software freedom. If you didn't like any new | restrictions they added to your own code, tough. | | [0] Stuff that runs in a sandbox container and doesn't use | private entitlements _probably_ isn 't violating GPLv3, | because Apple hands out free dev accounts that let you | compile and run whatever, albeit with some annoying | requirements to renew the app's signature every week. | sbuk wrote: | GPLv3 addresses definitions (such as what constitutes | source-code), software license compatibility, software | patents as well as tivotization. The clauses around | software patents are what I was referring to. By design, | they are hostile towards software patents. Hence for | instance Apple not updating BASH for so long (macOS still | ships with BASH 3.2.57, the last version that was GPLv2) | and the switch to (the MIT licensed) Z shell. Not | commenting on the legitimacy of software patents, Apple's | take on using GPLv3 licensed software - merely stating | cause and effect. | azalemeth wrote: | Also, the GUI for building GUIs was great. Nothing really made | you appreciate why they wanted objects so much as dragging | buttons around and instantiating the class. It _made sense | internally_ to me as a university student at the time. | Objective C was a "relatively simple" set of extensions (which | I never really understood) over C (which I claimed to | understand at the time) and the language made you aware of both | "the magic" of what you were doing and, at the same time, how | it related to the bare metal. I learnt a lot from it. | | I'd love to know what this looks like to a straight-out-of- | university developer of an Electron app, though. | zarzavat wrote: | Making GUIs was easy as long as you stayed on the happy path, | but the moment you needed to do something different you were | back to writing reams of code, there was a cottage industry | of custom NSSplitView classes. Even just making a button a | different color involved reinventing the wheel a substantial | amount. | | The current Electron/React approach has no happy path - | everything uniformly requires some amount of boilerplate | code. But when you need to deviate you are less likely to | have to write a novella. | nottorp wrote: | Hmm Delphi 1 (RIP) was released in 1995. When did | Cocoa/Interface Builder show up? | WoodenChair wrote: | > Hmm Delphi 1 (RIP) was released in 1995. When did | Cocoa/Interface Builder show up? | | 1988 [0] | | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_Builder | marcodiego wrote: | And it came from an older (1986) project from | expertelligence. There is a video about it: | https://vimeo.com/62618532 | hokumguru wrote: | This is a beautiful video. | tambourine_man wrote: | NeXTStep and Project Builder (which XCode was based on) was | realease in 1989 | | edit: WoodenChair beat me to it with the right date | nottorp wrote: | Ahh NextStep. For some reason I was only thinking of Mac | OS. Possibly because in 1988 i was a kid with an 8 bit | spectrum clone who only saw NeXT machines in magazines ;) | | Still, RIP both Interface Builder and Delphi. | [deleted] | yoz-y wrote: | Having implemented multiple programs in GUIs for GUIs (with | GtK, UIKit and dabbling with AppKit)... I must say that I | have my past self every time I want to go back and look how | something works. At least with SwiftUI / reactive things the | code can be searched and navigated and doesn't take ages to | load. | a-dub wrote: | > You're amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you | like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it. | | when i was younger i had a used next slab. it had the same | effect, everything was so cool you just wanted to build things | for it. next thing i knew i was coming in on weekends to build a | from scratch port of my then employer's product. my boss at the | time was blown away. | | it's no wonder to me that berners-lee wrote the first version of | worldwideweb on the next, nor carmack with quake... | | edit: i guess it was doom. it was a long time ago! | mietek wrote: | It was both Doom and Quake! | LeoPanthera wrote: | I have occasionally tried to put together a basic Mac app. I | picked up the basics of Swift easily enough, but I get stuck | because XCode seems completely incomprehensible to me, and my | basic attempts at finding a "cheat sheet" or "idiots guide" meet | with failure. | | It's at this point I get frustrated enough to give up and maybe | try again in another year. | | Is it just me? Does XCode really lack basic documentation? | MagerValp wrote: | If you tried to build a Mac app based on Storyboards, which | iirc has been the default for the past few years, then yes. All | the docs are for iOS and the Mac side is completely under | documented. | | The classic way of building building apps is quite well | documented though. It has been modernized quite a bit since | Tiger and Xcode 2.0, but the general structure and workflow is | the same as in this article, and there's plenty of docs. | | The new SwiftUI stuff is still under heavy development, and | starting with the wwdc sessions is probably the best approach. | mrbombastic wrote: | it isn't just you, I've been doing iOS development for the last | few years which generally gets preference for docs these days | but I have still found over the years even if most things have | documentation 1) it is pretty difficult to find 2) it is | lacking. A lot of times you are better off going to 3rd party | tutorials to get what you are looking for, I would recommend | the Big Nerd Ranch books and Ray Wenderlich tutorials. I don't | know if I have come across a general Xcode intro tutorial, | maybe because Xcode is massive, most stuff is task oriented and | you pick up the Xcode quirks along the way. | jjtheblunt wrote: | Did you have a go at Appcode from Jetbrains? | the_only_law wrote: | It's been a while since I tried it, but iirc you had to | context switch between XCode and AppCode if you wanted to use | storyboards or whatever they're called. | Austin_Conlon wrote: | Under the Help menu and in the Xcode Help menu item it's | thoroughly documented. | kailuowang wrote: | Yeah I was there. Some people may think it's just the norm in the | old times. It's not. It's just Apple obsession with being "user | friendly", and for some reason, they think Gui is more friendly | for programmers than code. | anthk wrote: | Where would you put TCL/TK? It merges the best of both worlds. | toyg wrote: | It did work though, the developer drain from MS to Apple around | that time was massive. They were giving easy tools to low-skill | developers, and command-line access to high-skill developers, a | win-win. Whereas MS around that time was busy overcomplicating | Visual Studio in their quest to merge web and desktop | development for lock-in purposes. | jonpalmisc wrote: | Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29962004 | Lammy wrote: | > 2005! The future is here! You have just spent $129 for the | newest release of Mac OS X: Tiger. | | For me it was more like "you have just torrented the Golden | Master DVD image and restored it on to your bootable Firewire | iPod because you only have a CD-RW drive and nobody has released | rips of the six-CD version yet" ;) | | https://betawiki.net/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Tiger_build_8A428 | | e: Siracusa's review for Ars is still a great read too: | https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/ | quijoteuniv wrote: | I had a disc i bought at the end of line to fix a mac of a | friend, some decade ago! and when refurbishing old macs to | Linux become very handy, as before i could install linux | sometimes i needed eEFInd. | kitsunesoba wrote: | The bootable disk function of iPods was really something else. | It saved me multiple times through the years, at one point even | functioning as a primary boot drive when the HD in my sunflower | iMac G4 gave up the ghost. | | I wish modern smartphones had a similar capability. I know | Android phones let you copy files to them via MTP, but that's | not even a fraction as good as the portable HD function of | iPods was. | GranPC wrote: | If your device is rooted you can use USB Mountr [0] to | achieve the functionality you describe. | | [0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/streetwalrus.usbmountr/ | kergonath wrote: | It was so cool to boot from it in the uni's labs and get all | my home environment. | kitsunesoba wrote: | It never shipped obviously, but back in the day there were | a lot of rumors of Apple developing a feature that let you | take your home folder and apps with you on your iPod, with | any Mac you plug it into making your user account available | without even rebooting. So it seems that they saw that use | case and almost acted on it. | kergonath wrote: | IIRC it was even mentioned in the keynote or around that | time. It was one of the bullet points in the magazines | (remember those?) | Lammy wrote: | It appeared in Panther dev builds and even briefly on its | public "Mobility" features page but was pulled right | before release: | | https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/panther-feature- | home-on... | | Unfortunately the oldest snapshot in Wayback is October | 12th 2003 with the blurb already removed. Apple filed a | patent application for it in 2002 which was assigned in | 2006. It expires this year! | | https://patents.google.com/patent/US7246226B1/ | | https://appleinsider.com/articles/06/10/11/apples_missing | _ho... | Aloha wrote: | I think it could be a killer feature for iPhone + Mac | | Here is a secure external disk, which you can plug into your | mac, it will be secure even when plugged into your mac, even | the data over the thunderbolt bus could be encrypted in | transit, its all technically possible to do. | GekkePrutser wrote: | Well it was really just a fancy external drive. It's more | because of macOS happily booting from any kind of external | device that makes this happen. | kitsunesoba wrote: | That's true, I remember being a bit confused when I found | that Windows was extremely picky about what it booted from, | with weird hacks being required to boot a Win2K or XP | installer from anything other than an optical disc. Both OS | 9 and OS X were pretty lax about that. | kccqzy wrote: | A friend of mine even booted from an SD card. | JadeNB wrote: | That must have been slooooow. | lostgame wrote: | I don't think I ever paid for a MacOS (OSX, at the time) | upgrade. | | I still remember buying a RapidShare account for a month to get | Snow Leopard off those multi-split files because I couldn't | find a torrent. | | The 00's were such a different time for tech. | varunprasad wrote: | I paid for alternate OS X versions (and then jumped on the | snow leopard wagon immediately due to the $29? price). | | That meant shelling out $129 after about 3 years (2 year | lifecycles, and I think I bought my first mac almost a year | into the then OS lifecycle). | | This provided me with excellent stability and a very | reasonable price. I'd save up a few hundred $s, and then | upgrade the software and hardware at around the same time, so | I also added additional RAM and moved the HDD to the CD-RW | and inserted an SSD instead of the HDD (I am 100% sure I made | these changes for my macbook, but I'm not sure if I made | them, or if they were even possible, for the iBook I owned | before). | | That was almost a decade+ of highly stable, highly effective, | and almost cutting edge of computing that I haven't even come | close to replicating in the almost decade since, despite | earning real money. | | I did switch to Linux for my personal computing a few months | ago, and I have hopes that this may allow me to do so, once I | really set something up once I get to my Mar-Apr spring | cleaning. Linux is giving me that Mac feeling for the first | time in a long time, although the major challenge here | appears to be restraining oneself. It seems so easy to get | lost trying to distro hop constantly, or try a new terminal | for marginal benefits, etc. The new shiny in Linux shines | very bright, and restraint seems to be the core challenge | required to have a stable, outcome focused computing | experience with Linux. | alisonkisk wrote: | Is that iPhone a legit early Apple mockup before, or just a joke? | callahad wrote: | Just a joke. | | There were plenty of rumors about an Apple phone around that | time, but it was generally referred to as the "iTunes Phone." | And the mockups were significantly more hideous: | https://web.archive.org/web/20070630183849/http://www.applei... | | Five months after Mac OS X Tiger's release, the iTunes phone | was unveiled: the Motorola ROKR | (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_ROKR). | | You can find some fun things in the old MacRumors archives | (https://www.macrumors.com/archive/). For example, a post | (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/07/29/steve-jobs-on-itunes- | ph...) from July 2005, two months before the ROKR, and two | years before the iPhone: | | > _When questioned about the lifespan of the iPod and why the | functionality won 't eventually move into the cell phone, Jobs | answers, "I'm going to leave the answer to our actions in the | future."_ | | Or this (https://www.macrumors.com/2005/09/20/jobs-on-motorola- | itunes...), from September 2005: | | > _- Feels that Bluetooth isn 't a good option. Sound isn't | good. Recharging headphones is a pain._ | | Eleven years later: AirPods. | someotherperson wrote: | Neither -- it appears to be a third-party mockup of what an | Apple phone could have looked like. | andrethegiant wrote: | Tiger also was the debut of Dashboard widgets, which opened up | creating app-like experiences for those who knew HTML/JS/CSS | instead of Cocoa (myself included). | sharikous wrote: | Also it introduced the canvas element and opened the way for | HTML 5. | | To this day I miss being able to enter Dashboard with a single | keypress like in the old days. I used that mini calculator, | note taking app and weather widget constantly. | | By I seem to be alone. For dome reason most people hated | Dashboard. | andrethegiant wrote: | I didn't hate it :-) I actually made the Gas widget, which | fetched local gas prices. It was a popular widget at the | time, and ended up on a slide (amongst other third-party | widgets) during the 2006 WWDC keynote. | ProfessorLayton wrote: | I'm with you here! I still miss Dashboard to this day, and | regret that such a great idea never caught on. Having widgets | merged with Notification Center (!) is such a worse | experience, especially on smaller screens. | | Never mind the fact that apps like Calculator only allow a | single instance/window for no reason. Only way around that is | to literally duplicate the app! | flohofwoe wrote: | Wow, that old Xcode UI with "Active Target" and "Active Build | Configuration" made a lot more sense than the current layout! I | always thought that weird "Scheme" stuff was a left-over from the | olden days, but it actually seems to be an intended feature that | was introduced at a later time. | RandallBrown wrote: | The scheme stuff was added because Xcode became able to do a | lot more stuff beyond "Run app" and "Debug app". | | There were a lot of hoops you had to jump through to get unit | tests working and there weren't iOS apps that could be run in a | simulator or device. | victor106 wrote: | What resources do people here recommend to learn Mac OS | development? | mrbombastic wrote: | I have only read their books on iOS dev but have had good | experiences with Big Nerd Ranch books: | https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/... | Ray Wenderlich tutorials are also iOS biased but have been | great: https://www.raywenderlich.com | jamil7 wrote: | It depends what you want to do, if you're playing around | building apps for a hobby and friends and family and you can | target Monterey, you could go with SwiftUI and Apple's official | tutorials (it runs on older versions but a lot is missing). If | you've got experience in React or any other of the declarative | frameworks you'll pick it up quickly, it's actually much nicer | than React. | ricardobayes wrote: | Very nostalgic. I wonder if an old PPC is feasible at all for | basic browsing these days. Probably would run into issues | updating the browser? | sneak wrote: | You can emulate it on modern hardware, faster than it would run | on the real deal, if you truly want to go that route. | Pamar wrote: | Pretty sure it would: I replaced my old PPC iMac in (IIRC) 2017 | and it was already basically impossible to get an updated | browser version (let alone most if not all the other apps). | fredoralive wrote: | Until recently there was TenFourFox, a Firefox fork for old | Macs, if you wanted a modern browser although it's now mostly | dead. | djxfade wrote: | It has been forked as InterWebPPC | classichasclass wrote: | I'm still doing security updates, but you have to self-build, | and any new development would be "when I get a round tuit." | Some people are doing downstream forks and there are build- | it-for-you scripts/Automator packages you can use. | rayiner wrote: | Still the best version of OS X. | varispeed wrote: | I was never able to work in an environment with so many floating | windows. I lose focus instantly and can't do much work. | throwmeback wrote: | Same, this feels absolutely dreadful! "Where do I start? Why is | there so much stuff screaming at me? What's my first move here? | Oh shoot it, I don't want to do this anymore." | diskzero wrote: | Tiger was the first release of OSX that I was truly proud of. I | came to Apple, not as part of the NeXT acquisition, but from the | post-pivot Be, which had decided to focus their attention on | "internet appliances". My love at the time was operating systems | and specifically GUI libraries and components. | | Apple internally at that time was frightening. Coming neither | from Apple or NeXT, I has an interesting position, being able to | talk to various people more candidly. The Blue [1] team (System | 7/8/9) on the second floor of the IL2 building seemed to be in | constant distress. The ATG [2] team on the 3rd floor of IL3 was | being swept out in mass layoffs and departures. There were still | factions of Pink [3] and Copland [4] adherents trying to get | their technology into the "Beaker" builds of what would become | OSX Cheetah. The Beaker builds at the time were roughly re- | skinned versions of NeXTStep and pretty uninspiring. | | After my experience at Be, I really wanted to be involved in | creating something great that would ship and be of real value to | users. At Apple, I discovered that I just wasn't happy trying to | exist in the chaos. Steve wasn't yet CEO, Avie and Bertrand were | establishing a new OS organization on the 4th floor of the IL2 | building and Steve Glass was still fighting to keep "OS 9" alive. | In fact, OS 9 was critically important as it was needed to run on | the new iMac and support all of the Apple hardware that was | bringing in (diminishing) revenue. On that note, Steve was | actively batting the Mac clone makers (or leeches according to | Steve.) | | In a moment of bleakness I received a call from a friend from Be. | He said I should come join him, Andy Herzfeld, Susan Kare, Bud | Tribble, Bart Decrem, Stan Christensen, Darin Adler, John | Sullivan and more at Eazel. [5] Eazel wanted to create a user- | friendly Linux distribution with a services model to generate | revenue. The main product of Eazel was the Nautilus file manager | and contribution to GNOME. After failing to raise addition | capital after the initial 10 million dollars, Eazel went through | a couple of layoffs. On the evening of shutting the doors, Andy | gave Steve a call and told him about the Eazel team and Steve set | up a large meet and greet with various Apple teams on the 4th | floor of IL2. Those who were interested went to the meeting; the | majority of those who weren't, ended up joining with previous | comrades who had left Be to form Danger, who were now at a | startup called Android. | | The group who went to the meet and greet contained some | significant contributors to various Apple software and hardware | efforts; Darin Adler, Don Melton, Ken Kocienda, Bud Tribble, | Maciej Stachowiak, Pavel Cisler, John Harper and more. Pavel | helped in convincing Dominic Giampaolo [6] to come to Apple. This | group of people also convinced other key contributors to come to | Apple who were leery due to Apple's past history. | | All that wanted to take a job were hired on the spot and we all | showed up on campus got our pictures taken and started doing | whatever project we thought was cool.It had only been 18 months | since I had left Apple, which meant I qualified for an employment | bridge; my stock options, employee number and previous employment | time all rolled into my current employment phase. | | This iteration of Apple was more stable; there was no more OS 9 | group, the clones were gone, ATG was cleared out, Betrand had a | functioning software organization, the product lines were much | cleaner, Bas and the UX team were cranking out good designs and | Steve was CEO and ruled with an iron fist. It was this | organization that produced Tiger; the first release that I felt | really represented the vision and aspirations of what a desktop | operating system should be. | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7 | | [2] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Advanced_Technology_Grou... | | [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent | | [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) | | [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eazel | | [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Giampaolo | rewgs wrote: | Amazing to be able to interact with those who were actually | there. Thank you for the story! | unixhero wrote: | OSX 10.4 and 10.5 were marvelous operating systems for so many | reasons. Particularly 10.4 in my view due to the compatability | layer for legacy MacOS binaries, AND big binary feature that made | the same OS usable on PPC AND Intel X86. Also Quartz Composer, | which I find really interesting and awesome [0]. | | 0, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_Composer | bluedino wrote: | I always wondered how early Mac OS X developers learned to | navigate XCode and Cocoa. Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers? | | I bought an old copy of the Hillegass book _Cocoa Programming for | Mac OS X_ , but I'm guessing most people learned from Apple | developer docs that I never saw (or guess didn't know how to find | back then) | | As an aside, I don't miss the old programming books where each | chapter just showed you how to use some GUI elements and they | never got around to showing patterns on how you would actually | create a usable application. | diskzero wrote: | Shamefully, as an Apple employee working on | Finder/Spotlight/Time Machine and more, I never, ever used | XCode. Almost no one on our team did. We all used a combination | of the terminal, our text editor of choice and command line | tools to wrangle together binaries for local development. The | actual production build was done by the internal build system | which also used various scripts. Why didn't we use XCode? Take | the same reasons stated today and apply them to 2001, 2002, | 2003, etc. etc. etc. | rapind wrote: | Depends how early you mean. The Big Nerd Ranch osx book has | been around for a while. | carlosrg wrote: | Apple's developer documentation was much, much better and | complete back then. There was several introduction documents, | guides, etc. For example: | https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co... | [deleted] | varunprasad wrote: | This was key. I built a couple of minor, but useful for me, | apps by simply following the docs at the time. | | The major difference between Apple docs, and Javadocs at the | time (Java was the actual language I used to program in), was | that Javadocs was basically API references, whereas Apple | docs had API references but they also had guides that went | into the why, and the best practices, and even occasionally | alternatives for edge cases, etc. | | And the fact that it was available offline as an optional | download with XCode was a massive bonus at a time when | ubiquitous Wifi and internet was not a thing. | | It was a real surprise to me, after having stepped away from | any sort of Apple development for a few years that Apple's | docs were considered bad. | fundad wrote: | The most useful non-source code resources at the time were | about GCC, BSD and Apple's PDF guides on how the OS works, and | the Human Interface Guides, paid Developer Connection accounts | got you tools mailed to you and DVDs of WWDC seminars. | | But it's a profession, selling shrinkwapped desktop | applications or the modern equivalent takes a lot. | ChuckNorris89 wrote: | _> Were they all just ex-NeXT programmers?_ | | Back then probably a significant portion. Today, I guess most | of those former Next greybeards have retired or moved to other | gigs. | vaxman wrote: | Original MacOS X ran unmodified apps for original Mac (which | they called Classic) using emulation, slightly modified apps | for the original Mac (recomplied to Carbon APIs) or slightly- | modified NeXTStep apps (using Cocoa APIs AND InterfaceBuilder | which became part of Xcode), or even slightly-modified Unix | apps (using POSIX APIs) along with AppleScript for | automation. There were few NeXTStep/Cocoa apps, except for | simple graphical wrappers around POSIX apps. Then Apple | started killing off APIs (including Carbon), changing | functionality and picking winners/losers to drive the | developers to retrain, rewrite and maintain their code base | for Cocoa, which most did not do, leaving Mac OS native apps | to languish for many years (sort of similar situation to | AppleWatchOS), especially after the codebase was forked to | become iOS. However, HTML5 apps were on the rise and WebKit | sort of kept the Mac hardware sales going. Then, a year ago, | Apple introduced the ability to run iPad apps on new Macs and | rolled out SwiftUI (which, when it works, can target either | iPad or macOS natively), which is sort of the final nail in | the coffin for Cocoa. | mistrial9 wrote: | yes, and.. "Apple started killing off APIs (including | Carbon)" | | there was some transition time when Apple published Carbon | interfaces to Mac OS 9 devs (like me), stating that they | were "transitional". Quite skeptical, I used them to | rebuild some tools and apps in CodeWarrior. Within a short | time, more updates had less Carbon, and the news came out | that Codewarrior was locked out of OSX -- no deal. It was | obvious that the Mac OS 9 interfaces were for chumps, and | who wants to be a chump. It was true, and things changed. | rjzzleep wrote: | I built a decently widely used mmo chat client, Cocoa was very | well documented in books. Zero NeXT knowledge from my side. | IMHO QT still lacks the amount of information that was | available at the time for Cocoa. | zippergz wrote: | I did learn from the Hillegass book -- the first edition | released in I believe 2002. I also had a couple of old NeXT | programming manuals, and had done a tiny bit of NeXT work in | the past. And I agree with the others who said Apple's dev docs | were better back then. But really Aaron's book is what got me | started. | sillyquiet wrote: | Ha, in the 2006-2010 timeframe I worked for an aerospace | company working on experimental radar sensors and the like and | I developed quite a few Cocoa desktop data analysis and | visualization tools since we were a Mac shop. | | It was a good fit since the physicists and mathematicians wrote | their experimental stuff in Matlab and the engineers and us | computer scientists wrote the actual production code in C | compiled for the embedded hardware in the avionics. Cocoa | provided a good bridging platform for tool sets between the two | camps. (Later, python and its robust set of science and math | libraries became the tool of choice in this role as Python | expertise became more general on our team) | | Long story short, I learned by suffering through the interface, | especially the fairly esoteric Interface Builder. | | And _then_ in 2008 I went to a bootcamp hosted by the former- | NeXT guy that had founded Big Nerd Ranch, Aaron Hillegas. He | made it just _click_ , so yeah, maybe but did take a NeXT | programmer to wrap your ahead around it, ha. | kitsunesoba wrote: | As someone who was a teenager who couldn't afford books up | through 2009 or so, most of my learning of Obj-C and Cocoa came | through scraping the internet for blogposts on whatever | subtopic I needed to know about. Occasionally you'd run into a | full fledged tutorial, which were gold mines. At one point, I | made AIM friends with a couple of people who were more | knowledgeable than myself which was a great help, and later on | Stack Overflow appeared which let me both ask questions and | peruse the answers to others' questions. | | It was kinda rough, and I didn't get to the point to where I | could build useful things until the late 2000s and early | 2010s... just in time to dovetail into iOS development (which | I've now been doing as my job for the better part of a decade). | | The cornucopia of free resources that are available to new | learners today is a ridiculously stark contrast to how it was | back then. | pavlov wrote: | I learned Cocoa in 2002 on Mac OS X 10.1 and Project Builder | (the NeXT IDE that was Xcode's predecessor). | | I remember reading a brand new O'Reilly book called "Building | Cocoa Applications". It was written by two ex-NeXT devs and was | quite helpful in understanding the system. | | Apple's own documentation and sample code was good back then. | The API was much smaller, so I read the reference for every | Cocoa class. | | Apple provided a fully functional demo app called Sketch which | showed important architectural patterns like undo/redo. When | developing my first Cocoa app, I'd basically go see how | Sketch.app implemented something and copied the approach. | | (Incidentally, I'm convinced that the well-known Sketch drawing | app is basically a case of somebody looking at Apple's | Sketch.app sample code and thinking "couldn't we just sell | this.") | | Some years earlier I had tried to learn Win32. It's hard to | overstate just how fun and easy and powerful Cocoa felt in | comparison. | Liquid_Fire wrote: | Maybe I am missing some context here as I have never developed | for an Apple platform, but what is the point this blog post is | trying to make? That the tooling used to be very complicated? | marcodiego wrote: | This! | | I usually praise Apple's UI for often being intuitive and | elegant. But it looks like, in this specific case, there is a | problem only outsiders can see clearly: ctrl+clicking an icon | to an UI gadget is neither discoverable nor intuitive! | | When I improved the Anjuta-Glade integration, I made some | effort to do something simpler: - Open the .ui | then the corresponding (by marker comments that are | automatically created when the project is created) .c and .h | files... boom! They are automatically associated. - | Add an ID to a widget you want to access programmatically, | double-click it on the inspector... boom! Code for accessing it | as a member of the "private" struct is automatically created. | - Add an onClicked signal to a button (which already has an | ID), double click it... boom! Code for the callback is | automatically created. | | It is a shame Anjuta+Glade never became as popular as they | could. | indemnity wrote: | Didn't Delphi/Visual Studio do this as well when using corn | designer / property inspector? | vintagedave wrote: | Yes - Delphi and C++Builder's Object Inspector still does | this. Double-click a control, and the default event handler | (OnClick) will be created. There's a link auto-set between | the button instance's event handler (method pointer) and | the method, which is auto-created in the form the button | belongs to. | gchokov wrote: | I came to the comments, looking for the same answer. Was it | that.. there was no documentation or tutorials whatsoever? | dysoco wrote: | I was absolutely expecting a comparison with how hard it's to | get started and develop software on modern MacOS and XCode | today (is it? I haven't used it). | dkdbejwi383 wrote: | It would be a much better post if a comparison with the | current state of the art was made | kgwgk wrote: | It's funny that you got two opposite answers. | | "GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable" vs "neither discoverable nor | intuitive" | toyg wrote: | Actually the opposite, likely. The tooling was preinstalled and | ready to go, and you could largely click your way through | building interactive experiences. | | Compare this GUI-driven, mostly-discoverable flow with the | incantations you need to know to set up a React interface, for | example. It's night and day. | kzrdude wrote: | Xcode/dev tools were not preinstalled, but just cost a | registration on their site to download and install. | kitsunesoba wrote: | When OS X was still distributed on optical discs, it came | with a dev tools disc for the first several releases. That | how I personally stumbled upon Project Builder, Cocoa, etc. | I may have never found it if I had to seek it out and | download it. | addandsubtract wrote: | What does macOS / iOS / iPadOS development look like today? | Do you not have XCode with a GUI-driven workflow anymore? I | only poked around iOS development during the iPhone 1/3G | days, but I thought tooling has been constantly improving | since then. | mrbombastic wrote: | honestly if you are doing native development and using the | iOS/macOS tooling directly it is not that different than | this. You basically have options, xibs and nibs like in | this blog now have a new friend Storyboards that | encompasses multiple screens and transitions but | development is still GUI based and uses outlets like in the | blog. A lot of programmers just refuse to use this stuff | and just do everything programmatically. new kid on the | block is SwiftUI which is a much saner not XML based | declarative way of defining UI components like React but is | still rough around edges and will likely be for a couple | years. | toyg wrote: | The main difference is that now most development is | actually not based on the platform but carried out with web | tech. Which, compared to desktop tools, is light-years | behind in usability. | AndroidKitKat wrote: | Disclaimer, I'm only a wannabe Apple platform developer, | but the GUI-driven workflow is still the predominate way to | develop for Apple platforms. The most radical change is the | introduction of SwiftUI, which has you writing interfaces | entirely with code, rather than using drag-n-drop | components with Storyboards. | jamil7 wrote: | Most iOS teams I worked on did UI in code since | Storyboards are a nightmare with more than one developer | and version control. | kitsunesoba wrote: | There's quite a few iOS devs who ditched storyboards and | XIBs years ago in favor of full code. I did several years | ago, largely because Interface Builder became so much | worse after it was merged into Xcode. That, and XIBs and | storyboards suck to have to deal with merge conflicts on. | | I still use XIBs when doing personal Mac Cocoa | development though, because the experience there is still | decent (though not as good as it was). Won't touch | storyboards with a ten foot pole though, they slow down | IB too much and generally aren't a good fit for desktop | UI paradigms. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | Alternate take: if you want developing for OS X [sic] to be | this easy, don't even think of trying to use anything other | than the tools we give you (after you ask for them). | philistine wrote: | It's the same logic that drives how they handle OS licensing. | ad-astra wrote: | Hah, I'm so glad that my team writes 100% of our UI | programmatically instead of using IB. | ralphc wrote: | In the vintage apple groups and subreddits Tiger is preferred | over Leopard because it runs on more hardware and it's the last | version that allows Classic mode that runs classic Mac OS | applications. | ilrwbwrkhv wrote: | Can you link to a few such subreddits. Thank you. | vintagedave wrote: | The one I read is https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple . | | If there are more I'd love links too! | jbverschoor wrote: | Not sure why alisonkisk's comment is dead, as that's the only | thing interesting in this post. | | It's funny to see, because the first Android versions were | similar / no touch | skhr0680 wrote: | If someone asked me what I thought an iPhone would look like in | 2006, that's what I would have come up with ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-01-17 23:00 UTC)