[HN Gopher] HelloSystem - OS with original Mac philosophy with a... ___________________________________________________________________ HelloSystem - OS with original Mac philosophy with a modern architecture Author : dev_tty01 Score : 187 points Date : 2023-01-25 15:56 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (github.com) (TXT) w3m dump (github.com) | stuaxo wrote: | What is this using as it's GUI, and file manager etc ? | wmf wrote: | It's using Qt and they're writing their own file manager. I | didn't check whether they're starting 20 years behind by using | X11. | ozten wrote: | Are you suggesting they should have chosen Wayland? I think | they have a good argument against it: | | "Wayland: Under development since a long time, it offers no | clear advantage over Xorg while it makes things more | complicated (e.g, breaks screen recording) --> Use Xorg | instead, or (maybe even better) no X server at all but pure | framebuffer (like *ELEC does for media centers). Also see htt | ps://gist.github.com/probonopd/9feb7c20257af5dd915e3a9f2d... | " | | https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and- | unwelc... | wmf wrote: | If you think those are good arguments then... enjoy | helloSystem I guess. | ozten wrote: | I am a total newbie in this area. I thought the gist was | compelling, demonstrating a lot of screen recording apps | that can't or won't support Wayland. | wmf wrote: | Those apps just haven't been updated to use the proper | APIs. | r00fus wrote: | The readme seems out of date - the privacy issue for CSAM is | essentially not an issue anymore - Apple has no plans to do on- | device scanning. | giantrobot wrote: | Correction, Apple has given no public commitment to completely | shelve their on-device scanning. There's no guarantee they | won't try boiling the frog with their CSAM scanning plans. | goodSteveramos wrote: | I wish they would enable the CSAM scanner for children's | accounts when parental guidance is turned on. That makes so | much sense. If my child is being abused I want to be | notified. But instead they shelved it because they couldn't | get their spyware installed. Shows how much apple really | cares about children and how much they care about spying on | us. | SkyMarshal wrote: | I appreciate the intent here and don't want to be overly | critical, but this appears to be attempting a nicer UI for | FreeBSD. Not a bad goal, but I'd like to see a page somewhere | that lists not just the grievances with Apple that led to this | project, but also how this project improves on a standard Linux | config. Or better yet, a Linux config hardened as much as | possible without losing compatibility with its software ecosystem | or with Wine/Proton. | | Replacing Apple with a more privacy-preserving alternative is not | really about UI minutia. UI/UX is mostly solved, for 2D displays | at least. Gnome, KDE, Elementary OS's Pantheon, and others all | offer usable and customizable variations on this tech that get | you 90% of the way to Apple's standard. Incremental improvements | in 2D UI/UX are reaching a point of diminishing returns, where | it's more annoying for users to have to learn new interaction | mechanics than to simply stick with the ones they know, even if | the new mechanics are slightly better in some way. | | Rather, I think the area that really needs focused developer | attention, and with bigger and more meaningful payoffs, is in | bringing the most secure and hardened base systems up to full | compatibility with the broadest possible application ecosystem/s. | The best option for that right now appears to be Linux + | Wine/Proton, ideally using a hardened Linux base like Qubes or | SEL4 or similar and Nix/Guix-like reproducible builds, while | integrating the extensive work already put into existing | UI/UX/DE's. I think if hackers want to achieve this objective, | then that's where they need to start and build a community | around. | donatj wrote: | The hero here I see, that isn't shown on that page is Application | Bundles. Being able to drop a single .app in the Applications | folder and have it work is one of the biggest selling points of | macOS imho. | | https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/application-bun... | | The docs page have a lot of interesting technical details that | the linked page either gloss over or do not touch. It's worth a | look to see why this is seemingly more than a skin on FreeBSD. | ThePowerOfFuet wrote: | >Easily be understood by switchers coming from other operating | systems with similar application distribution formats | | Interesting use of the plural form of _operating systems_ here. | oneplane wrote: | Sigh, here we go again. These keep popping up and a few months | later the projects are dead again because it turns out this isn't | all that feasible without both massive engineering capacity and | an ecosystem to go with it. | | Most of them that manage to get to the point of a UI that doesn't | look like Fischer-price fail on the ecosystem (i.e. they have no | ecosystem at all, or they try to shoehorn an existing one on top | like a standard ports/apt/yum repo from another distro). | | Besides that, the FUD in the README doesn't really help anyone | since the masses care very little, and even if they did care, | they almost never have what it takes to look at the sources, and | even the small subset that does is practically not even checking | a single package's sources. | | If they just stuck to a "we want something that feels like 2005 | apple" tagline it would have been a fine project to fiddle with | for fun, but as soon as grand statements are made ("reinvent the | Mac") we're back into generic "things few people care | for"-territory. | jackson1442 wrote: | Agreed. And even in their cherry-picked screenshot there are | several UI bugs/inconsistencies that would drive me insane as a | daily user. | | I'll just take KDE plasma. | torstenvl wrote: | I think a much better approach would be porting Pantheon to | FreeBSD, and patching Pantheon to allow a global menu as an | compile-time option or user configuration. | | All the other stuff can come later. IMO it's a bit overly | ambitious (I'd be happy to be wrong!) and I fear it dying | prematurely. | ChrisArchitect wrote: | More discussion: | | a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 | | 2 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 | snvzz wrote: | >Modern Architecture | | I wouldn't call FreeBSD (or any UNIX(1971)-like system) modern. | | A modern architecture would be something like Genode[0], a multi- | server system built around the concept of capabilities. | | 0. https://www.genode.org/ | Findecanor wrote: | FreeBSD does have Capsicum [0] though -- with file descriptors | as capabilities. FDs can be passed between programs over UNIX | datagram sockets. | | Processes can enter "capability mode" where only open (or | rather: active) file descriptors can be used. There used to be | an alternative runtime for FreeBSD called CloudABI [1], with | which native programs could be _started_ in capability mode, | but it was discontinued in favour of WASI [2] (server-side | Webassembly) -- which adopted CloudABI 's libc API. | | 0: <https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/> | | 1: <https://github.com/NuxiNL/cloudabi> | | 2: <https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI> | criddell wrote: | What's the permissions model like? I'm on board with | | "Because we want to run apps from _unidentified developers_ that | need no blessing by the operating system vendor " | | but I also don't want that cool calculator application I just | downloaded have access to the network, my webcam or microphone, | my photos, email, or really any files outside of the ones in its | directory. | | I do have nostalgia for the way computers used to be, but there | have been a lot of OS improvements since then that I don't want | to give up. | kitsunesoba wrote: | I agree that third party applications shouldn't be given carte | blanche by default. Third parties are best assumed to not be | well-behaved, because it's been proven many times over that | devs can't be trusted to keep their hands out of the cookie jar | and to follow best practices (which I say as a dev myself). | | The extent of moddability and control afforded by Mac OS 9 | extensions with their ability to patch the OS itself in memory | as they pleased was incredible, but it was ridiculously | insecure and unstable which makes that model untenable today. | Applications having full access to everything is no different. | malermeister wrote: | It feels like if they really wanted to go for the original Mac | philosophy, it might've made more sense to use something like | GNUStep as the base instead of Qt. | | There's even some precedent, but it never really took off: | http://etoileos.com/etoile/ | tgv wrote: | The mac (nextstep?) philosophy contains at least building | blocks for common UX tasks, Cocoa, which gradually grew over | the various versions of OS X. I remember being quite astonished | about what you could do with an array controller or two: parts | of the UI practically wrote themselves. And it was all | consistent across apps. | | "Qt on FreeBSD" simply isn't the same, even though it may have | copied the rounding and color of the buttons. I get that | GNUStep simply isn't there, and will never be, but this looks | like three raccoons in a trench coat. | malermeister wrote: | Yeah I feel like this project should've tried to get GNUStep | to a usable state instead of putting a skin on top of Qt. | kitsunesoba wrote: | IIRC the problem with GNUStep is that it got stuck at a version | of Objective-C and Cocoa/AppKit roughly equivalent with that of | OS X 10.6 and would take a lot of work to even catch up to | modern Obj-C and Cocoa, let alone get Swift integrated into. | grishka wrote: | Original Mac philosophy, yet attention to detail in the UI is | severely lacking. The paddings are all over the place, the | gradients on buttons and the menu bar are an absolute eyesore, | the menus have a 1-pixel white line to the right of the | highlight, etc. | wk_end wrote: | The simple sad reality is that Apple's attention to detail was | difficult-but-doable...in 1984, on lower resolution screens, in | monochrome, on computers that did substantially less, when | riding high off Apple ][ money, with radical vision, for hand- | selected elite full-time workers being crunched to the bone by | said radical visionary. | | I'm not sure if all the ingredients necessary to brew up that | magic could ever come together in quite the same way again. | HelloSystem is dealing with a vastly harder problem with vastly | fewer resources; it's no surprise that they're not there. | n8cpdx wrote: | High DPI and a full color palette are no excuse for not | getting margins right. | | Attention to detail is still doable, it just isn't something | that is valued by MBA/PM types. | | (Being an ambitious personal project made in limited free | time is a better excuse, and I commend the project author's | efforts) | malermeister wrote: | I feel like elementaryOS [0] comes a lot closer to the | original mac vision when it comes to UX. | | Too bad the project is going through some drama from what I | understand. | | [0] https://elementary.io/ | kitsunesoba wrote: | elementary also unfortunately shares some GNOME-isms, such | as avoidance of menubars in favor of hamburger menus, which | goes against Mac UX. Menubars serve as a central index of | application functionality under macOS and are a central | pillar to its UX. | malermeister wrote: | I think elementary isn't trying to _be_ Mac OS, it has | its own UX - even though it 's clearly _inspired by_ | Macs. | | It has its own HIG, which you can see here: | https://docs.elementary.io/hig | | Personally, I never loved menubars, so I don't mind that | difference. | kitsunesoba wrote: | Of course, but it's probably going to be a sticking point | for many longtime Mac users looking for more FOSS- | flavored alternatives. | grishka wrote: | It's not a matter of hardware capabilities or human | resources. Sane paddings and proportions and pixel-perfect | controls are no different on a modern XDR retina display than | they were on a monochrome CRT. You do have more color and | pixels to work with, but the underlying principles are all | the same. | | My own standards are high enough that I'd never even show | such a screenshot to a friend, let alone put it into the | readme to my project for all of the internet to see. | mrcwinn wrote: | Whoa, whoa, and whoa. | | The technical hurdles they had to overcome - despite | targeting lower resolutions, non-color screens - was | considerably higher and more impressive because none of the | scaffolding was there to support the work, and the system | resources were also far, far less. You're significantly | discounting that effort. It's also worth reminding you that | -- even among the engineers who left or felt too much | pressure -- nearly all of them say the emotional investment | was both necessary and worthwhile in retrospect. There are | very few ex-Macintosh-team detractors in the world. | | Taking nothing away from this open source project, but let's | not rewrite history. | wk_end wrote: | I don't think I'm discounting that effort at all! To be | honest, given that I mentioned both that they were | exceptionally talented ("elite" and "hand-picked") and | worked incredibly hard, I'm not sure where that | interpretation came from. And retro game programming is a | hobby of mine, I know all too well what it's like to write | bare metal 68000 assembler and squeeze every last gasp of | performance you can get out of an 8MHz CPU and handful of | RAM. | | A comparison I might make, then, is to video games then and | now: despite extreme technical restrictions, in the 80s, a | single person or at most a small team could make the | equivalent of a AAA game in a matter of months in their | basement. But precisely because those technical | restrictions have now been lifted and so much more is now | possible and expected, such a thing these days is absurd, | and it instead takes teams of hundreds years of work and | tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars to put | together a modern AAA game. But observing that fact in no | way discredits the talent, hard work, and ingenuity of | those basement coders of bygone days; nor does it mean that | I think game devs these days are orders of magnitude less | competent, either. | | My intention was never to say that what the Macintosh team | did was easy; but it was possible (clearly) with the | enormous effort they put in, and I don't think what | HelloSystem is trying to do really is, especially not with | the resources they have. After all, Apple can't even do it | these days, and they have virtually all the resources in | the world. | chongli wrote: | I don't know. Sure, we may likely never see such a crack team | of programmers and designers driven by a radical visionary | again. But we do have vastly more computing resources than | they had. Can't we solve some of these problems with | software? | | Since everyone gave up on native software in favour of web | frameworks and the browser, there has been precious little | innovation in native UI frameworks. | | So my point is: couldn't most of the attention to detail in | Apple's Classic Mac OS be replicated with a UI framework that | understands design concepts such as proportionality, spacing, | Schelling points, etc? | wrldos wrote: | As always, these things look like an average xfce theme. | rob-olmos wrote: | Relatedly I wish Mac's "mission control" and "app expose" was | better, becomes difficult to find frequently used windows.. seems | to place windows in random places. It'd be nice if it made it | easier to see browser tabs. | | I liked the the UI/UX of David Gelernter's "Scopeware" layer, | that seemed like it would be a nice alternative to either of | those. | kitsunesoba wrote: | I'd like to see a return of Spaces as they were in OS X 10.6, | where they could be arranged in a 2D grid. That felt really | nice and no desktop environment to date has reproduced it | exactly, though a few Linux DEs get close. | dkonofalski wrote: | I use Spaces a lot with Mission Control and now Stage Manager. | Anything that's vital gets a full-screen space and I can just | swap between them with a swipe or with Ctrl+L/R. It's very | quick and I never need to search for windows outside of 2 or 3 | swipes. I've also turned off the automatic ordering so my | calendar is always the last swipe and my email is always the | first. | boxed wrote: | I switched to the mac (back before the intel transition) because | I became more productive writing apps after ~1 week of hobby | fiddling, than I was at my day job doing win32 programming that I | had done for several years. | | This project doesn't tackle the reason macOS was so great: Cocoa. | SilentM68 wrote: | I tried to run it in VMWare and VirtualBox and it just kept on | rebooting the VMs. | artificial wrote: | Will have to dig into this. Seems pretty, would be nice to pick | apart the API, looks like Python with PyQt is what most utilities | are written in. The crux with not being mac/windows is driver | performance. It's a bummer it takes such a massive effort to | support hardware. | xwkd wrote: | Supporting hardware is pretty much what operating systems are | supposed to do. Computation always supports some human end. | Humans are doing a lot more with their hardware these days. | user3939382 wrote: | It's based on FreeBSD so maybe the driver support isn't too bad | (?) | artificial wrote: | Correct, compared to Linux it's a redheaded step child. I | love FreeBSD and the resources behind Linux are enormous. I | wish things turned out differently in the 90s. Total tangent: | If I had Musk level funding to allocate for a pet project it | would be Haiku. A purely single user desktop focused OS which | happens to featured grafted on FreeBSD hardware support. I'd | love to throw a meager billion at it and shake things up ;) I | do all my real work on servers as it is and FreeBSD is viable | for hardware, just look at the PS4, so no shade at pulling | drivers where you're able to. | colanderman wrote: | OS X "Aqua" theme, 20 years on, looks dated to me in a way that | the 40-year-old Susan Kare-era design of the original Mac OS does | not. I can't put my finger on why, but I think it has something | to do with "arbitrariness". | ithkuil wrote: | Things first get old, then they become antique | zokier wrote: | One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and | the brushed metal look that followed were extremely | distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination | makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac | OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more | slowly. | | [1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating | UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels? | ndiddy wrote: | > What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating | UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels? | | In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS | vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at | a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as | easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the | main UI background color because it makes colored elements | easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived | color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it | obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't. | HollowEyes wrote: | Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on | the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to | grey. | | I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple | window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and | fresh. | | Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, | and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up | some bile. | kitsunesoba wrote: | I don't think "modern" flat UI designs will fare any better | with time, and maybe even worse. Already, the earlier | variations of flat UI (Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, | Material 1.0) to my eye look more dated than Aqua during its | prime (OS X 10.6-10.9) does. | mech422 wrote: | I agree - I love the old '3d' interfaces, and Aqua in | particular. The new 'cell phone' interfaces are just a PITA. | Really hard on my old eyes - no real indication/border around | buttons, no color cues, often not even a place to grab the | window and drag it around. Everything is just the same drab | shades with no differentiation between elements. | | As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, | I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use | a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil | screens are too hard to read. | pndy wrote: | Hot take: the current mobile flatness we see all around | mostly serves dark patterns schemes and it's anti-user by | default. It's easier to hide options within an interface | that has no clearly distinction between link and the | button, the interactive object and just the decoration. | That helps trick users to pick something they didn't want | or make them keep the defaults that works against them. | | And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the | Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to | theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For | a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to- | prevent-theming... | mech422 wrote: | Thats another pet peeve of mine - web pages where every | pixel is some sort of link/hotspot. Like I just wanted to | activate the window, or grab some whitespace and scroll. | Not switch tabs, not maximize the window and definitely | not navigate away to some ad or whatnot. | | Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript | ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously | part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For | all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P | mech422 wrote: | I was always camp KDE - but that libadwaita thing sounds | horrible... Maybe Rasterman is due for a comeback - | enlightenment desktop looks pretty nice! | HollowEyes wrote: | I think I have some cognition issues, and can only read | eink and off of crisp OLED. Love touch screens, pointers | etc. But don't much like Apple iOS style. | mech422 wrote: | heh - I have fat fingers on top of everything else, so | touch screens always turn into "where did I leave the | #$%#$%^ stylus" :-D | | TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet | from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA | stuff... | HollowEyes wrote: | Oh God I am still pretty fat fingered on a phone. But I | do like the 'tactile' simplicity. I still think | touchscreen UI / OS is in its infancy, and could be | better. But am amazed in some ways that it's as good as | it is. | astrange wrote: | You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get | the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will | look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED. | [deleted] | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism | blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, | which lack _presence_ and make computing feel less tangible | and more disposable. | | You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is | a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates. | | And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are | more corporate and functional. | | Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - | inoffensive, but claustrophobic. | BuckyBeaver wrote: | There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic | controls are actually counter-productive, especially when | incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's | cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured | such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" | labels on them... but those labels were actually controls | in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries | to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him? | | Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, | depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen | and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some | of the labels in that display were actually clickable | controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with | displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried | to poke at one with my finger. | | I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of | graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. | Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had | beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was | "depressed." | | I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of | "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of | controls. | flohofwoe wrote: | Fully agree. It's the same 'bubble gum' look as Windows XP. | What were they thinking with those buttons and scrollbars? | | On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well: | | https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90 | | (minus the media player, ugh) | guerrilla wrote: | I'm still waiting desperately for some DE to get back to | this. GNOME 4x has in some ways but obviously not in | others... Please someone re-make an OS 9-like UI for me. | hexagonwin wrote: | mlvwm is available and also works on modern *nix. (worked | on gnu linux and freebsd at least) | https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm | layer8 wrote: | Around 2000 was peak usability in terms of UI design for both | MacOS and Windows. | TimTheTinker wrote: | Modern macOS is remarkably usable compared to that time, | especially with a few tweaks in place (Magnet app for | window management, three-finger dragging, etc.) | | It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back | to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be | eye-opening. | cmrdporcupine wrote: | "lickable" I think was the phrase Steve Jobs used for it. | | Remember that Apple had just made a killing selling jelly- | bean aesthetic iMacs (running classic Mac OS 9, even). The | Aqua stuff matched the physical case design of those | machines. | | It all goes along with the late 90s / Y2K times, intense | colours. "Run Lola Run" and Fifth Element and late 90s club | culture and whatnot. Nothing restrained about that era in | terms of style. It was boom times end-of-millennium and that | aesthetic continued even for a bit after the .com crash and | 9/11 deflated the tires. | | Also as others have pointed out, it had to do with _" we can | do this now'_; the graphics hardware and the software stack | (showing off "Quartz" etc) | Doctor_Fegg wrote: | I spent large parts of my life with System 7/8/9, but looking | back on it now, you'd have thought Apple would have designed | a better italics... | robinsonb5 wrote: | Funnily enough I was playing with a couple of old PowerMac | G4s a couple of weeks ago (actually wiping them for disposal | - though I've since decided to keep at least one!) | | I realised very quickly that I'd forgotten how good the OS9 | interface is, and how well it stands up against today's | offerings. Trying out a lookalike theme on Linux [1] is | definitely on my todo list: | | [1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9 | JieJie wrote: | I wonder what Mac OS X would have looked like if Susan and | Bruce had been given access to the power of a G3 and millions | of colors instead of chunky bits. | | I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed | iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new | features that became apparent with use, and serious | functionality that would stay out of the way until it was | needed. | | I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate. | | 1. https://wetransfer.com/paper | csilverman wrote: | You mean System 1.0? The designers of Mac OS X _did_ have | access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors :-) | | It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know | how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites | (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to | full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. | I think those technological limitations--no color, almost no | RAM, no hard disk--are one reason the original Mac GUI looked | as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else. | | That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so | tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and | would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. | (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely | similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the | Mac's, it looks a _lot_ rougher and more inelegant. Kare was | not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.) | | So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original | Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an | interesting experiment. | | (Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; | he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.) | jfb wrote: | I would like to see a system that _acts_ like classic | System 7, too. Less Unix sludge, more focus on a single | interactive user. More explorability, more hackability. A | computer that feels like _your_ computer. | | I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the | standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are | too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all. | alrs wrote: | https://www.haiku-os.org/ | flenserboy wrote: | This, but System 6. 7 never looked or felt right, and I | preferred MultiFinder. | _a_a_a_ wrote: | Dated or just plain worse? | jszymborski wrote: | It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia | cycle with the OS X Aqua theme. | colanderman wrote: | Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago. | joshmarinacci wrote: | While it was garish its purpose was to stand out and attract | attention so the the Mac wouldn't die. It worked. I think the | toned down version of Aqua released only a couple of years | later for Snow Leopard still looks pretty good today. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L... | Rimintil wrote: | I always preferred the 'platform' for the Dock vs. the | background we currently have. | | I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did | it. | graypegg wrote: | I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it. | | Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming | effortless to draw on screen, so let's make EVERYTHING a high | res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this | machine is! But now, it's less impressive so the sheen doesn't | sparkle as much. | | Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn't | trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that | it's not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when | it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on. | artificial wrote: | Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by | PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS | Wowfunhappy wrote: | Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group | Mac OS X design into four broad buckets: | | * 10.0 - 10.4 | | * 10.5 - 10.9 | | * 10.10 - 10.15 | | * 11+ | danaris wrote: | Wasn't only the first of those actually _called_ Aqua? I don | 't recall exactly when Apple officially retired that | designation, but it was well before the current era. | Wowfunhappy wrote: | I don't know, but I've seen some people use "Aqua" to refer | to the design through 10.4, through 10.9, or through the | present day. | kitsunesoba wrote: | Internally, even the current UI is referred to as Aqua. Or | more specifically, aqua and darkAqua, depending on if dark | mode is desired. | | https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearan | c... | colanderman wrote: | I was referring to the earlier iterations, with "shiny" | buttons, lots of gradients, etc. | | 11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit | more utilitarian, less showy and particular. | giantrobot wrote: | The early Aqua look and feel was informed by the industrial | design of the Macs running it. Consumer Macs were very | colorful up until about 2003 and had a lot of the texture | effects the Aqua L&F was emulating. | torstenvl wrote: | Agreed. The more idiosyncratic aesthetic features, the more | something is _marked_ as associated with a point in time. | | Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth- | century furniture. | ozten wrote: | I am very attracted to this idea. I want a clean desktop daily | driver that prioritizes UX. | | I love many of the UX-focused priorities, but a much larger % of | their priorities such as Linux vs FreeBSD aren't high for me and | don't seem end-user focused. | | An interesting idea I had never thought to question was | considering "App Stores" as package managers. | | "Package managers for end-user applications: Those are aimed at | "managing the system", whereas everything that is to be managed | on our system can be managed in the file manager and/or other GUI | elements. --> Use package managers to produce a system image, | which is considered immutable for the end user (like on almost | every embedded system/software appliance)" | | https://github.com/helloSystem/hello/wiki/Welcome-and-unwelc... | | Good food for thought. Elsewhere they criticize App Stores for | their commercial and centralized aspects. But I don't really see | an issue with Ubuntu's App Store. It is just a GUI instead of | only offering CLI, right? | can16358p wrote: | While I fully agree with the privacy reasons, I frankly think new | flat design UI is much better and cleaner. | | Whenever I see something from pre-flat era either on macOS or | iPhone, I want to vomit. | whartung wrote: | I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. | | Sort of reading it as "Original MacOS Philosophy". | | In the early days, there actually was a "better" MacOS. It was | the Apple IIGS. The GS system software was second stab at what | was MacOS, but with a bit of "clean slate" ethos to it to fix | some of the early issues. | | Its hard to appreciate the marvel and hoops the system and the | developers had to jump through on early machines that lacked | memory protection. The IIGS was a nice little sojourn further on | in trying to make that kind of system a little bit better. The | IIGS memory/process manager (which is kind of the heart of all of | this) on top of the 65816 is a pretty neat piece of kit. | WorldMaker wrote: | > I was kind of hoping this was something based on MacOS 9-. | | I miss proper spatial navigation sometimes. As a Windows owner | I was often envious of MacOS up 9's spatial navigation. I | briefly had my own spatial navigation on devices I owned in | OS/2 WARP and that one time I was running Gnome-based | distributions when Nautilus still had a somewhat buggy spatial | navigation mode (which I admittedly compromised some of the | design reasons behind spatial navigation by eventually | switching to a tiling window manager). When I was old enough to | finally own a Macintosh _and_ a PC I was disappointed that Mac | OS X had dropped some of the things I liked when working on a | Macintosh such as spatial navigation. | chungy wrote: | Could you explain what is meant by "spatial navigation"? | Searching the web for that term and even including "mac" in | the search terms doesn't reveal it for me. | WorldMaker wrote: | Spatial navigation is the idea that folders and files have | a consistent "place". The basic idea is when a folder opens | back up exactly "where" you left it (window position, size, | background wallpaper, other details) and files are arranged | inside them however you want to leave them without | necessarily adhering to a grid or a standard order or | anything like that. | | There are definite trade-offs to it: manually arranged | files and folders without strict grids can create a lot of | cluttered "mess". (Add to that ideas of custom per-folder | wallpapers and the "mess" gets even more chaotic.) It can | be confusing if you aren't expecting it, and teaching it is | sometimes hard (even though some of it is more | "intuitive"). The mess can sometimes hide/"lose" important | files. | | But the interesting benefits to it involve sometimes | superior muscle memory for frequently accessed folders, a | better recall of "where" you left things, and somewhat | better uses of some of our human visual data processing | systems for visual wayfinding via distinct "landmarks". | [deleted] | chungy wrote: | I guess I could see how that's neat, but for me, I | wouldn't want it. I think the computer should organize | files for me and I care not where they are on-screen, | just that they're organized. (Then again I live in a | terminal, "ls" is my directory viewer.) | alexdbird wrote: | I think along the same lines, well, not the living in a | terminal bit, but have worked with people who would | probably be described as neurodiverse that absolutely | hated files moving from the order they'd left them in. | | Xcode projects still keep files in the order you leave | them in, unless you tell it to sort them. I'd guess 99% | of people, like me, sort a group every time they add a | file though. | WorldMaker wrote: | Yeah, it mattered a lot more in the GUI days where your | file browser was also your document manager was also your | application launcher. There's a lot of reasons Windows | never really supported it (depending on one's view of | Windows 3.x's half-hearted mostly wrong attempt, Active | Desktop, and/or Live Tiles, of course) and all of the | best known spatial navigation tools are long gone today. | (Even GNOME's Nautilus spatial mode was removed more | years ago than I would like to admit it has been since I | once briefly heavily used it.) | | Still, though, getting back somewhat on topic, I | sometimes wonder what an OS with modern underpinnings | committing to older GUI principles like spatial | navigation might look like. | HeckFeck wrote: | Reminds me of PrismWM. | | https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/jvnzkb/prismwm_in... | | Something like it would be a revival of the OS9 theme and | philosophy. | | Unfortunately the thread was started 2 years ago with no | reference to a public repo and no updates from the author | since. Maybe it was always vapourware :( | cmrdporcupine wrote: | IMHO the "better" MacOS was the LisaOS, and came before the | Mac. Cooperative multitasking, memory protection, task/object | oriented user interface. | | MacOS took much of the concepts, but was deliberately made | "worse", so it could fit in the Mac's tiny ROMs, and not use an | MMU. It was built as if it was a one-off with no serious | consideration for the future (not an uncommon theme in the | time, many companies hadn't really caught onto the "platform" | concept yet). | | (Re: the IIgs, building an elegant OS on the 65816 is annoying | as hell with its banked memory architecture, tiny stack that | can only be in the bottom 64k of RAM, poverty of registers, and | lack of e.g. memory protection mechanisms. But the IIgs stuff | was really a valiant effort, pretty cool.) | karmakaze wrote: | It doesn't really say what parts of the MacOS philosophy it's | aligned with. Seems more like riding on coattails. What is | listed are a number of differences that apply to most any | Linux/BSD distro. I think 'philosophy' here means surface | appearance of the desktop. | | And if it's about openness, why link to the branding pages | rather than the source repo? I couldn't even find a link | searching for 'source' on the page. | r00fus wrote: | Honestly I really liked Aqua. Flat UI may be easier to work with | (debatable) but seems so characterless. | | Something to be said about the right amount of chrome in your UI | to remind you "where you're at" instead of getting lost in the | content. | dang wrote: | Related: | | _HelloSystem_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28733897 - | Oct 2021 (39 comments) | | _Hello system, a FreeBSD-based OS designed to resemble Mac_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 - Feb 2021 (267 | comments) | | _Hello: Let's make a FreeBSD for "mere mortals"_ - | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25112820 - Nov 2020 (1 | comment) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-01-25 23:00 UTC)