If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).
The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.
Hi, it's a great project, although I found out that some 68k and PPC software seems to have required things that aren't emulated by either BasiliskII nor Sheepshaver, or at least so it looked when I was playing with it - tried running Macintosh Common Lisp and it always seemed to crash.
Still, reminds me of plying with vMac long ago and this weird world of, to our perception then, barely usable machines ;)
Awesome, this is so cool! I remember MacOS 9 with a mix of fondness, hatred, and nostaglia. OS X was definitely a big improvement when it came out (I remember OS 9 having so many crashes), but some of the charm was definitely lost.
And these .app domain names you're all using in this space are great and totally apt. I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.
> I love to see great usages of my work in the wild like this.
Out of curiosity and ignorance--what is the work you're referring to here which is being used for the project / website? The comment makes me feel it's the (dot)app TLD, in which case--fascinating! But also what does it even mean to work on something like that?
OS9 always seemed like little improvement over OS8. The biggest thing I remember was this was when they introduced the Applications folder. It's like they were trying to get you to get used to how the structure in OS X was going to be, but with no explanation.
OS9 was really just 8.7 but, as you describe, a stepping stone towards 10, both numerically and with a few nods to the future, e.g. Keychain Access, CarbonLib, and file/printer sharing over TCP.
Carbon was a moving target; each "update" cut more core MacOS tools and added OSX service interfaces. It was quickly obvious that there was no intention of letting MacOS run in the future, so why port to Carbon? many social signals in the developer group at the same time.
Yeah, so looking back at the release dates of these, I definitely used at least back through OS 7, but I can't say I remember anything specifically about them because it's fading into the haze of youthful memories. In my mind it's all just pre-OS X and post-OS X, as that marks by far the biggest change in Mac OS functionality that I remember.
I love that this exists. Time to time I crave playing some of my childhood games that are OS9 based and setting up sheepshaver is a pain. This will help me to get my kicks playing some old games for the few minutes I intend to play them :) thanks!
I really love your project. It is a giant pain in the ass to get BasiliskII and/or SheepShaper working, at least the few times I've messed with them. Is it possible to run this offline or in some kind of encapsulated web app form?
If you have experience with QEMU now there is good support for MacOS 8/9/X in ppc and there is an alpha version with initial support for System 7/8/A/UX on 68k. It's still a PITA but at least it's similar to the PITA of other QEMU VMs, which you may be familiar with.
It's a great reminder of how well MacOS 9 UI and UX were designed, and how space efficient the whole OS was on screen.
Even the window handle bars were subtly shadowed, the window shadows evolved when they were collapsed. Like Windows 95 at the time, Mac OS 9 was a beautiful work of interaction design.
The whole system.. from the sizing of the borders and titlebars to the font and the menu density to the icon sizing, spacing, and design in general...
All feels more coherent than anything today. It feels like it was sketched out by a small group of people and executed incredibly well. Meanwhile things today look more disjointed like the product of a lot of design-by-committee.
Susan Kare's 'Chicago' in this rendering hits hard in the nostalgia factor to me a well.
I'll be that guy... the system font for menus, etc in OS 8 and 9 is "Geneva" [EDIT: It's "Charcoal", of course. Thanks for the heads up!]. It was "Chicago" up to and including System 7.x.
iPod used Chicago for the same reason Chicago was used on the original Mac—it was designed to make UI elements clearly readable on low resolution monochrome screens.
I agree it was a high point for UI/UX logic. The filesystem was part of the OS experience and it generally made sense with little magic going on.
I have wondered in the years since whether the newer abstractions and UI patterns we find in MacOS and Windows are actually necessary. These days both OSes are trying to be tablet friendly, trying to discourage user-installed/curated software, and trying to promote bundled cloud services, so it's not even clear to me whether the MacOS 9 abstractions are really the correct ones anymore, as evidenced by the many problems with cloud backed file explorer interfaces, synchronization, etc.
The fat borders for the windows and the control strip at the bottom left of the screen took up a lot of space on real monitors of the era. Try running at a more modest 800x600 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars.
Worse, a bunch of applications had code that would set up window locations with the assumption that the window borders were 1 pixel wide, like they were prior to Mac OS 8. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border.
I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X.
On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits.
That would be 10.7 Lion, in 2011. But I believe OP was talking about the older window borders, which afforded the ability to drag the window from any part of the perimeter.
Yes, but also keep in mind that the pointing devices in use were very primitive compared to what we have today and that many users were not as proficient. All contemporary operating systems had thick borders and some had very prominent resizing handles.
The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary. They weren’t present prior to Mac OS 8, and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9. You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002.
If anything, modern pointing devices are often less precise. We now commonly use trackpads, touch, and pens. In the 1990s, it was usually the mouse, so you find a lot of 1990s UI elements that are very small. The only reason our modern scrollbars on macOS are so small is because it’s assumed that you can scroll without them, either with a scroll wheel or with a touch gesture.
I’m not sure if the list of contemporary operating systems is particularly illuminative. You might look at Windows ’95, CDE (Solaris), or BeOS and find chunky borders. Or you might look at TWM or Window Maker (OpenStep) and see thin borders. The only conclusion I draw is that everyone agreed that you should have borders.
I’ve been using old versions of Mac OS, like Mac OS 8, with both new hardware (modern trackpads) and original hardware (ball mice). The ball mice are much more precise than modern trackpads, when you’re clicking on something. If they stick, it’s frustrating and you have to wiggle the mouse around to get it to land on your click target, but once the cursor is over your click target, you can click on it. When you try to click on something with a trackpad, what happens is you end up moving the pointer during the click.
This strikes me as very much a 21st century sort of comment, which looks at the "what" and totally fails to consider the "why" and the historical context.
> The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary.
Define "necessary". I think you are not considering why they were present in the historical context.
> They weren’t present prior to Mac OS 8
Yes, but there are reasons for that which I will go into.
> and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9.
There was no "after"; MacOS 9 (no space) was the last version. It was replaced.
> You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002.
Which fails to consider what happened in that timeframe.
Up to System 7.x you could only resize a MacOS (note, again, no space; that was important) window from the bottom right corner, where there was quite a big widget for this sole purpose... but in a brilliant bit of UI design, it was at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal scrollbars. Continuing either of them into the space past the end of the other would imply priority and that was a bad thing; the classic MacOS UI thought about this.
Now consider what happened in 1996. Apple was in big trouble, bought NeXT, and Steve Job came back. The primary reason was to replace MacOS with Mac OS. (Note: that's why the space is important. MacOS = classic; Mac OS = OS X.)
Jobs cancelled Copland, the planned MacOS 8, and directed the internal Apple team to start salvaging what could be taken from Copland into what was really MacOS 7.7 or something, renaming it to MacOS 8 in order to make it look big and important.
It wasn't; it was UI tweaks and stuff. E.g. the multithreaded Finder from Copland, and the Appearance control panel that allows skinning of the OS, which MacOS couldn't do before.
(All this while the new NeXT team are porting OpenStep to PowerPC and building a VM to run Classic in, stuff that has no customer impact or benefit yet.
Important point #1: this is adding a lot of customisability to the MacOS UI that wasn't there before. This is not some minor trivial point of graphical design.
Important point #2: this is Jobs aping a Microsoft tactic.
Windows 98 is the same timeframe. Win98 is the same basic OS as 95, but with UI tweaks. Why? Because NT 4 is late, and not ready for consumers, but also, because at the time, MS is fighting the US DoJ over monopoly claims, because MS is bundling IE with Windows.
To fight this MS rewrites bits of the Windows Explorer in IE. Gaining, oh hey look, what a coincidence, a multithreaded Explorer, because window contents are rendered in HTML... which means it gets a selling point to upsell W95 customers to W98.
Apple borrows the adaptable UI stuff from Copland and backports it to MacOS 7.
Result: now you can resize a window from any side, like Windows. Jobs comes back and Apple starts "borrowing" ideas from Windows UI and MS GUIs, something pre-Jobs Apple wouldn't do, and only fair as Microsoft "borrowed" so much from Apple.
So how do you show that a window can be resized from any side, not just from the bottom right corner? Answer: you put big fat draggable window borders on it, just like Windows has.
Because Apple was recycling tech from its own, very expensive, failed new-OS development project, so that it could:
[1] offer UI tweaks that [a] enabled it to upsell customers an OS facelift and [b] showed that it had learned both UI and business methods from MS.
[2] as a byproduct kill the Mac clones as that only covered System 7
[3] find a use for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spent on Copland
[4] show people it could adapt and survive and sell new stuff while the NeXT team worked on Rhapsody, which would in time become Mac OS X.
In other words, there are very good strong reasons by those windows got big fat borders, important reasons that helped to save the company.
Second lump of history you failed to consider.
Why didn't Mac OS X (note, with a space), have those?
Two reasons.
[1] Because NeXTstep didn't have fat window borders, and Mac OS X is NeXTstep. NeXTstep only let you resize from bottom left or bottom right, and to do that, it had a big fat bottom window border with market bits at the left and right end to show you where to grab.
And why didn't NeXTstep use the bottom right corner? Because NeXTstep doesn't put scroll bars on the right. It puts them on the left.
Why? Because in the late 1980s when Jobs started NeXT, Apple had recently sued Digital Research over GEM, because GEM looked too like MacOS (no space), and it won, and PC GEM was crippled as a result.
So the little startup company founded by the departed leader of the hostile litigious one does things as differently as it can so it can't get sued by the CEO's former employers. Or by Microsoft.
So, no menu bar, menus stack up on the left.
So, scroll bars are somewhere else.
So, windows aren't resizable by the edges and don't have fat window edges.
Aside:
Fun fact: Motif had those fat window edges and resizing from all corners and all edges too, because the design of Motif was licensed from Microsoft by the OSF. This is also why Motif menu bars are inside the window, like on MS Windows. Because back then MS was trying to be Not Like Apple, and Apple wasn't like anyone by default, but both sued anyone who copied their designs.
And that's also why almost all Linux desktops today are recycling the same tired old ideas. Because since the dawn of GUIs on xNix, it's been under the influence of Apple and Microsoft designs.
Sun did interesting stuff in OpenWindows and OpenLook but it wasn't really "open" despite the name and it's gone now. Damned shame.
SGI did some, in other areas, in IRIX. Also not really open. Also gone now. Also a shame, although there is the Maxx desktop, but nobody cares because everyone else did an end-run around it and the industry moved on. By 1993 it was a little throwaway gag in _Jurassic Park_ -- "hey, this is Unix, I know this!"
End of aside.
Mac OS X dropped that clunky bottom bar, because when the litigious company that sues copiers owns you you don't need to worry. So, scrollbars move back to the right. Menu bars go on the top screen edge, like MacOS and GEM and AmigaOS, and where Fitt's Law of ergonomics says they are easy to hit.
And then Mac OS X one point zero, sold as Mac OS X 10.0, uses 3d shading to show the edges of windows, because by the 21st century you could assume the display was in 24-bit colour and could do stuff like that.
And truecolour icons and things, and shading everywhere, because when you control the hardware you can assume stuff like this and show it as the only way of showing window edges.
Fun fact: we early adopters of Mac OS X used little utilities to turn off the window shadows because it sapped performance on the low-powered old Macs we were using to run this stuff.
But oh hey look, the window corner widget has come back because we need to tempt Mac users onto the new OS, too.
Because Jobs _thought_ of stuff like this. How can I use any of the failed OS project my company rendered obsolete? How can I salvage some of all that wasted R&D budget? How can I sell interim releases? How can I make MacOS (no space) a little bit more familiar to Windows users? MS is making money selling small UI innovations to Windows customers, so how can I do that too?
There are good solid reasons for all this stuff, reasons totally driven by business models and IP ownership and tech of the time.
It wasn't accidental. It wasn't a blip. It was all for very good reasons, all of which you just skipped over with your rash assumption that it was a glitch of late-1990s design cosmetics.
A mouse from 1985 did not feel that much different from one today. Sure, they all had cables, you had to clean them regularely and use a proper mouse pad. But then they were very much as precise as they are today. The last real innovation was the scroll wheel.
You say that but I’ve recently been programming an app in system 7, which isn’t totally dissimilar to 9 in UX, and I keep thinking “wow how did I ever use this.” Windows constantly occluding each other, no easy way to switch between them outside of the mouse, finder windows filled with grids that I have to scroll through, no easy way to just see the desktop, etc. Current macOS is miles ahead in usability.
It’s interesting: my recollection of that period was I rarely stored anything on the desktop. The file system was so much smaller and easier to handle that I stored things in folders and didn’t have trouble finding them again. Not until OS X did I pick up the desktop-as-staging-area habit because navigation was so painful.
Finder aided this by being spacial. If you moved a window, then closed it, it stayed there the next time you opened it. If you moved a folder or file icon around it similarly stayed where you put it when you next opened up the window.
But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru your folder trees each time in Finder? Most apps I’m finding have folder structures with a bunch of aux files. It’s not so seemless as a dock or even a start menu.
> But then how do you easily navigate / launch apps? Dig thru your folder trees each time in Finder?
Back in the day, Finder used to remember whether folders were open on the desktop or "put away". It was a direct, one-to-one mapping between your spatial awareness of objects in the real world and the representation of objects in the computer. Meaning that things were left exactly where you put them on-screen, just like in the real world and, hence, it was easy to find your applications because they will be right where you left them.
But you don't need to launch applications, you just double-click on documents. Mac OS remembered which program was associated with each document -- not each document type or extension, each document. Each file had distinct type and creator codes associated with it, so that a JPEG created in Photoshop will be opened in Photoshop, and a JPEG downloaded off the web might be opened in a browser, when double-clicked.
Mac OS, pre-X, was quite simply the best UI ever designed. It took advantage of pioneering research into human-computer interaction and the underlying psychology of how humans relate to objects in a way that nobody today -- not even Apple -- is doing. It is what all UIs should aspire to be like, even today.
I think the whole spatial desktop metaphor is overhyped. Rather than go point by point on this, I encourage you to use OS 9 for a week or two to actually do work in. Relive using it versus just from memory. Then I’m curious to see if you still feel that way. My guess is you’ll realize it’s actually not all that.
More often than not I was opening documents, not apps. But with spatial windows in Finder I used to just arrange my Applications folder the way I wanted (sometimes using Aliases) and have it open on the left of my screen, then have my Documents on the right. I kept a row of Desktop icons visible with an In and Out box.
There wasn’t a default folder structure in the early days. Your hard drive had a “System” folder with merely a few hundred files in it (in a hierarchy) that you can ignore day-to-day. Otherwise the whole drive was your playground.
O, it can be. It's not /the/ way, but it is a way. Often, aliases (shortcuts/links) to favourite apps ended up there, or on the desktop, or in one of various available launcher utilities.
But now we're just adding 3rd party software to change the fundamental UX. The GP was talking about how much better it was back then, but if you need 3rd party tools to make it work, then it really wasn't.
OS 8 also allowed you to drag any folder to the bottom of the screen to create a pop up tab, and switch any folder view to the At Ease view, so you could do the same thing without any third party software. But DragThing is just awesome.
I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing pixel art way back then: That color is blue.
It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.
It’s funny how mixing pure blue (#0000ff) with pure white (#ffffff) makes it look a little purple, and how you also have the exact same problem when you invert the colors - mixing pure yellow (#ffff00) with pure black (#000000) makes it look sort of green (the complementary color to purple). In both cases you have to adjust the green channel a little “faster” and the red a little “slower” to get something that looks more neutral, ie shift the light blue towards cyan and the dark yellow towards red.
That seems similar to the "perwinkle blue" that was used as the default background in Apple IIGS ProDOS16 / GS/OS. In that case it was done with pairing white pixels with blue pixels.
None of the alternate themes actually made it into a final release of Mac OS; just Platinum.
There was a fairly healthy third-party theming community, though, and the Apple-developed themes (Memphis, High-Tech, and a sketch-styled theme called Drawing Board) would still work if you got your hands on them.
Drawing Board was probably the most usable of Apple's alternative Appearance themes (which never shipped, but were leaked pretty quickly). The little lines extending off the corners of windows had some glitchy behavior in some apps, IIRC, but it was at least visually acceptable, and I used it for a while.
The other two themes were basically unusable, though, and it's very clear why they were never officially released.
I came here to say the opposite: The folder icons ... a mess. Dynamic spacing depending how long the folder name is, free style sorting, "arranging", ... that is a lot of things but not a folder system ;) .. maybe a "desktop" folder ... but not a structural archiving system.
I was a macOS 9 user before I switched to Windows ... and I have to say: I had a fonder memory of it than what I see in this emulation. All operating systems came a long way since. But hey, it is 20 years, is not it.
You could theme some window manager, but it's not the same. It'd be a tough project! The Mac UI was holistic. Early on, it didn't even make much of a distinction between application and operating system. Just getting the menu bar right (shared between OS and application) when every program has its own idea on how to present a menu would be a major challenge. Applications really do need to be designed for the classic Mac environment. Back in the day software was almost never ported directly, but had to be substantially redesigned for the Mac.
Yeah, apps were responsible for drawing the menu bar and handling its mouse events (delegated to toolbox libraries). They also used to ask the OS to put in the menu items for the apple menu, and were responsible for delegating those mouse clicks to the OS as well. Background tasks required the foreground app to release the processor (or interrupts like vertical blank). Everything depended on proper cooperation.
Linux has a standard protocol (dbusmenu) for exporting menu structures supported by most common app UI libraries, and environments like KDE's Plasma use this to offer a global menu bar option, too.
Unfortunately there's a number of Linux apps that don't publish any menus, including most GTK3/4 and Electron apps. I don't think Firefox does either. I remember trying the global menu option in KDE and being sorely disappointed in how few apps populated it.
To get consistent usage out of a dbus-based global menu (KDE's or that one XFCE panel plugin) one would need to fork quite a number of packages, and for proprietary Electron apps you'd probably just be stuck.
GTK apps can support the global menu. There's a GTK plugin that adds support, and many distros install it by default. I think it was originally written by Canonical (their custom Unity desktop also used a global menu bar).
Not sure about the state of things with Electron. I'm sure you're generally right and there are some gaps, and of course, on Mac OS you do only very rarely encounter an app with an empty menu bar (I have though).
It's not maintained, but a few years ago I was feeling nostalgic and playing with "mlvwm", the mac-like virtual window manager, a project from the late 90s.
At least a small amount of C knowledge is sometimes helpful for getting those old projects working. Sometimes a new compiler or new libc will expose old bugs.
My experience with old window managers is they need tweaks to work reasonably on modern high dpi displays.
Iirc mlvwm builds with imake, which is positively ancient. It's the build tool that X.org got rid of after taking over from XFree86.
Ah, so you're the one I have to thank for that! I've used it on Solus and a few others after my dual 867 "Mirrored Drive Doors" machine went down. Thanks!
Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing. Apple has added full screen app support only recently, and any Windows convert who has switched to macOS and has problems adapting to its UI has one thing in common: they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times.
>Believe it or not, full screen apps are a Windows thing.
Nope. It’s just that maximizing—single action to expand a window the whole screen minus the OS docks/taskbars—is present in every widely used OS except for Mac OS.
>they haven’t let go of the idea that all apps need to use the whole screen at all times
Not sure where you’re getting “at all times” from. Windows and Linux desktops all easily support having windows take up less than the whole screen. In fact, it’s easier than in Mac OS because of window snapping to sides and corners. It’s only that Mac OS makes it very clumsy to get the effect that maximizing has on every other OS.
Most 21st desktop UIs are, to a greater or a lesser degree, Windows ripoffs. Most of Win95 or later, but sometimes you can trace a specific version -- e.g. KDE apes Windows 98 in program design as well as function.
(Rendering filer window contents as HTML before displaying them using the browser engine: this was designed by Microsoft to evade prosecution by the US DOJ for anticompetitive bundling of IE with Windows. It tried to claim that IE was integral by, for example, rejigging Explorer to render using IE. The Win 95 and 95B versions do not do it; nor did NT 4 at launch.)
If you believe that all GUIs do this, that suggests that the only desktop GUIs you've seen are ones that are copies of the Windows design.
To the best of my ability to recall that long ago, before Windows 3 and OS/2, most GUIs didn't have a maximise function.
Examples: AmigaOS; DR GEM; classic MacOS; Sun OpenLook; Acorn RISC OS.
Prior to full-screen mode on macOS, you would option-click the window resize button to resize it to the full size of the screen. This still works. It just doesn’t snap.
Option-click maximizes to full screen minus menu bar and desktop volume icons.
Apps like games and screen savers don't seem top have trouble covering up the entire desktop and menu bar.
I prefer it to the current macOS Finder where zooming covers up the menu bar and desktop volume icons, and where there doesn't seem to be an easy way to zoom to content.
It's every other platform thing. Even Amiga did just fine with that fucking arcane (apparently, to Apple) concept that your OS needs to fuck off and let me work/play
Classic Mac OS supported full screen applications since the beginning. I'm not sure if Apple allowed it or whatever in their very strict interface guidelines, but from a programming perspective you just have to turn off the menu bar and take the entire screen as the GrafPort.
I think the recommended route is to make a window that fills the screen, rather than taking the entire screen as a GrafPort. If you want the code to be portable, you can make your fullscreen window, draw to an offscreen GWorld, and CopyBits to the window. There’s a whole song and dance that you do in order to make sure that this is fast.
Later on, there was DrawSprocket. It solved the problem of figuring out how to do “portable” and “fast” at the same time, and let you use features like page flipping, if the hardware supported it (saving you the call to CopyBits).
You can think of HyperCard as a fullscreen app, and that’s not wrong. Look at it another way, and it’s displaying a 512x342 pixel window. On B&W compact Macs, that’s the size of the display. If you ran Hypercard on a later 640x480 color Mac, you could see the border of the window and move it around.
Later versions of HyperCard let you choose the size of the window. Various extensions would let you use a borderless window for the stack, and put a big black window behind it covering the rest of the screen.
HyperCard did some particularly weird things to draw to the screen quickly on older machines. If you try dragging a HyperCard stack window around, you'll notice that its horizontal position is quantized to 8-pixel increments, probably to accelerate drawing on low-bit-depth displays. :)
Yes, that’s something you’ll need to do if you want to stay on the fast path :-)
The Motorola 68000 does not have a barrel shifter. You want to shift by 4 bits? That’s four cycles, buddy! Avoiding shifts keeps you on the fast path for CopyBits().
Apple has added full screen app support only recently
I read somewhere that the reason Apple finally added full-screen support to macOS (back then OS X), wasn't because of the Windows switchers. It was to get a bit more real estate out of the MacBook Air's small screen size.
I think it was also to try to get some i(Pad)OS users back to the Mac—one of the major advertised things about OS X Lion (which introduced full screen) was all the iOS stuff they were bringing "back to the Mac".
Mac UX is far worse compared to Windows, in my opinion. I feel very claustrophobic using it. How do you live without a simple maximize button? "Maximimze to contents" is ambiguous, and in practice, does not work at all for most apps. I find myself having to "manually" maximize windows. And now, I don't want a third party app.
To add to this, even after I "maximimze" windows, I have an ugly menu bar at the top, in addition to the windows own titlebar. Allow apps to have a menu in their own window, but don't force an ugly global menu. For the clock/systray, integrate it like windows in the bottom app bar.
I could keep listing frustrations. Many of these are objective.
Note: I'm not talking about app installation, or malware, or "polish". Mac is superior, will agree.
> How do you live without a simple maximize button?
Classic Mac OS apps did not put the entire application UI in a single full screen window. Instead, it was typical for an application to contain multiple windows that could all be visible at once.
> To add to this, the "top" menu bar is lame.
This is related. In Windows, the entire UI of the app is contained in a single window, which you would typically maximize to fill the screen. In classic Mac OS, apps have multiple windows open at the same time, but the menu bar pertains to the application and not to the window.
I understand all of that. And that is precisely my point. Isolate everything concerning an app to its own window, and allow that to be maximized. If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the main app window. Don't pollute the "global" window space with app-specific windows.
> If an app has multiple windows, contain them within the main app window.
This advice is actually rarely followed by apps regardless of whether they are on Windows or Mac. Consider Microsoft Word; if you open two Word documents, does Microsoft Word open two windows or does it open one main app window and then contain both documents in a single window? Are you aware of this Microsoft concept called MDI?
It sounds like you were used to iOS where each app has but one window and you'd prefer that to be the case on desktop operating systems like Mac or Windows. There's nothing with preferring that, but it's against decades of desktop computing tradition.
That makes it really hard to use two (or more) applications side-by-side effectively. I am grateful for individual windows I can move exactly to where I need them without worrying about the application as a whole. I think it boils down to how people think — application-centered thinking makes it easy to have multiple windows from different applications playing nicely with each other, workspace-centered thinking hates what appears to be the messiness of applications having windows here and there.
If they’re anything like this, almost none of your frustrations are going to be objective - they are going to be things that grate on you because of the design and interaction models you are used to.
There’s nothing wrong with that! You’re allowed to prefer particular approaches. It’s like when I use Windows or Ubuntu, and get frustrated at how particular interactions work. It’s not because the Mac is objectively better, but because I’m used to it.
(Except for the keyboard shortcuts. Distinct control/option/command keys is objectively better and I will die on this hill.)
The way I remember it, command was used for commands, option was mostly for typing accented characters, and ctrl was only used within terminal windows (which means most Mac users would have never touched it).
"In recent years, the company has added "contextual menus" to the Macintosh operating system. But to activate them, users must hold down the control key while pressing down the mouse button, which more or less defeats the purpose."
Because it removes the clutter of your desktop + other windows. I think many would agree. Sure, there are times you need to see windows side-by-side, and there is affordance for that. But mostly, a person is doing one task at a time.
As my displays have gotten larger, I've found I want my windows to take up less and less of them. I may occasionally full-screen something, but it always feels incredibly difficult to deal with. As primarily a Windows user, I've more than once wished I had a "fit to content" button like Mac's.
Just another instance of different users having different patterns.
I feel like the expected pattern to deal with clutter in MacOS is by hiding rather than just covering. This is often forgotten about but you can alt+click on an app to hide all other apps but the one you clicked. This is even in possible in Mac OS 9. In modern macOS you can invert the behaviour by turning on single-app mode through the terminal. It's then alt+click to show multiple apps and just click to hide all but the app.
I only started using MacOS a few months ago. For the first ~2 weeks, I hated it. I actually remember thinking that it felt like a poorly implemented clone of MacOS ironically. But the truth is, whilst you can jump between Windows and most Linux distros (even Fedora) without much trouble, MacOS is an entirely different beast.
For example, I learnt that, completely different than Windows, on MacOS you're not really supposed to minimise windows, at least not as you would on Windows. Instead, you open the command centre or whatever its called and switch between them. Workspaces also arent an optional extra, they're pretty crucial to using the OS if you have multiple windows open. Its for these reasons I can see why people praise the trackpad so much, its actually preferable to use over a mouse because its so deeply embedded in the flow of the OS.
I'm not saying MacOS is objectively better in its workflow, for that I'm still not sure what I'll end up using as my main computer, just that its different and should be treated as such.
Apple isn't so great. For example why aren't Copy and Paste separate or specifically marked keys and do we have to use Cmd+C and Cmd+V? Same for Undo/Redo, etc. This is stuff any UX student can figure out.
Separate keys have challenges: in addition to the extra cost, you need to find physical space and train people to look for and use them. The original designers wanted to make it efficient for people who were already typing and as you might have noticed those keys are all close together and convenient for one-handed use:
> Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.
I completely understand people like Andreas from SerenityOS and the idea that there was a time that was a peak of GUI simplicity yet usefulness for power users.. In their case it's the Win2K aesthetic but I think OS9 is pretty close to that level of streamlining.
As amazing as OSX seemed when it was launched, I partially blame OSX and the whole "make everything round and groovy and graphical goodness" trend that started us down the path of making GUI's 'form over function'.
This is bleeding over from OS into power-user-oriented software like CAD and engineering tools and most everyone hates it. The whole "lets take away buttons and make the ribbon icons bigger and more graphically pleasing" to make products look more modern is a cancer for power users and productive people who just want access to everything as best and fast as possible. It's a delicate balance that I do indeed believe peaked well over a decade ago.
This reminds me: There was pretty interesting community of Linux users customizing X11 desktops in the late 90s and the very early 2000s... When the first screenshots and demos of OS X and Aqua came out, almost immediately, people tried to imitate that.
The frustrating part is that OS X was NeXTStep under the covers, and that had the late 90’s look down better than any OS. http://toastytech.com/guis/ns332.html
I ran windowmaker on my linux systems around 2000 to get that same look, but I had serious NeXT envy.
Yeah I remember when putting your desktops on a cube and spinning it around was a thing. Compositors also had a bunch of weird and interesting effects.
It started as apple's knockoff but quickly spun out of control with amount of stuff you could setup with compiz/beryl.
Then people figure out most of it while very cool is not all that practical.
That's what always annoys me. I have a computer that's easily 100x or 1000x more powerful than my 1995 desktop yet so many actions have noticeable lag.
Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
When you resized a window on classic Mac OS, your program had to actually like, draw the new window. Your program is spinning in a loop listening for events, you get a window-resize event. So you allocate space for the new bitmap, calculate what you need to display within the enlarged view, and then draw it. Did the user drag another window over your window, and then drag it away again? You get an event for that. Gotta draw what was there all over again.
This is all very close to the metal. On early 68K Macs, this is driven by QuickDraw, some very tightly coded assembly routines in ROM. Invoking them is only 2 bytes of code, as they're simply CPU opcodes (trap instructions). Render this string at this point size with this font at this X, Y location. Redraw the menu bar. Draw a rectangle. And so on. If you sequence these Toolbox invocations correctly, as a great master programmer of coroutines who never mistreats a handle as a pointer, you can render a complex scene with hundreds of polygons and a full screen of text in 200 milliseconds at 8 MHz.
But it takes thousands of lines of hand-holding the machine to do it.
Today, all of this is typically handled by instantiating a window object which draws into a private framebuffer which the system composites. That right there is tens of megabytes of RAM overhead. Then you use a thread to handle the UI and a thread to draw and etc. There's almost no boilerplate to just show a window. Perhaps one line of code. And it doesn't get overwritten by intrusive neighbour windows. Creating frameworks that can do all that bookkeeping in a flexible and general way (don't forget you want to be able to render vector fonts for any Unicode language) has a tremendous overhead.
Well, you see, they've traded end-user performance for productivity. This is why it only takes a team five times as large to deliver the same functionality as a comparable program from the 1990s, and that team can make a buggier initial release in merely twice the time.
There might be something in what you are saying but it's not really like that.
The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, endless network services, launch services, anti-malware background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the human body.
Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... But you just have much more features these days and stability and security increased a lot. If that is not added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.
One might expect all those extra services and capabilities would make application development faster, though. Less for application developers to worry about, since the OS and built-in services do way more than a typical 1990s OS—and any that aren't helpful, ought at least not be getting in the way. So, sure, the situation for our industry's even more embarrassing than my original post implied.
However in support of Apple's M1/M2 macs, I dont have this problem so much!
Apart from Electron based apps...
Which is why I find the wide spread love of VS Code so befuddling!
It's fine.. but so laggy when redrawing windows, switching tabs and so on!
Maybe it doesn't seem slow when in isolation, but compared to a GUI editor like Sublime Text, it's very noticeable!
But yes - your broader point stands and drives me nuts!
Somewhat gone are the days of upgrading your computer and everything being noticable faster because the software is the same!
(to be fair, the M1 upgrade from Intel was impressive)
These days to have a decent experience (as a self confessed geek with high standards) you need an M1 Mac or on Linux and Windows a modern CPU, decent GPU and as much RAM as you can fit!
I have the same feelings about VS Code. JetBrains is working on a competitor (Fleet) that is running on the JVM and renders using Skia. But everywhere I keep seeing it get flack for not being web-based...
+1. I can't speak to Windows but I suspect it's similar: if you're running a well-implemented native app (ex. Pixelmator) the responsiveness is entirely there and in fact significantly better than it was in the 90s. Even fairly graphically heavy apps have no issues resizing and otherwise being real-time interactive.
I would hazard that the vast majority of "jank" you see in desktop apps today is due to cross-platform code. A large portion of this is webviews (ex. Slack), but some of it is also poorly-implemented shims between the platform's native APIs and shoehorning that into some cross-platform library (ex. Photoshop).
I recently used a legacy win32 app at work, on a windows 10 laptop. It looked old, even though the buttons etc got styled the win10 way. Since the app had some issues, I wanted to rule out a compatibility problem with modern Windows, and ran the app in a windows XP VM on the same laptop. Unfortunately the same issues arose, but I was really surprised by how snappy the app felt. Everything was just immediate, sub-windows popped up instantly. Sure, the machine was an order of magnitude faster than the typical XP machine back in the day, so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but still it was one of these revelations that we just seem to be taking one step forwards and at least one step back every time we improve something.
Modern macOS is a significant counterexample to that claim. Most of it is janky. Zooming and dezooming the Finder is not something a 2.5 years old MacBook Air (€1200) can keep up with smoothly, for instance. Opening a Save dialog takes over 3 seconds, and expanding/collapsing the file explorer in it is comically janky.
That's simply not true. A 2019 MacBook Air has no trouble with any of these things. If you're having trouble with these, something is seriously wrong with your computer.
Ah, I misunderstood what you were referring to. Now that I understand, I'm less surprised. For some reason I was thinking File I/O.
The Early 2020 MacBook Air is a joke from a CPU/Graphics perspective - even compared to other Intel Macs.
I still think something's wrong with your computer, as I have worked with multiple of that model and they weren't nearly this bad (even accounting for screen recording) - perhaps your cooling is worse?
Is this any better in performance? Looks like rust bolted to a system webview (chromium in the case of Windows) instead of electron (chromium bolted to v8)
Yup that’s the answer, and cyber security, we had to add thousand of code lines in order to circumvent login properties and such, in order to make software more secure (and less private)
Sure, under the hood Electron is powered by Chromium V8 (which also powers Node.js), which is written in C++. But that is just the basic packages and services available to all Electron desktop and Node.js apps.
It's not slow. It's just that modern OS's redraw at every intermediate size between the initial size and the final size. The name of the setting in Windows is "Show window content while dragging", you can disable it and all your windows will be 100x snappier than Mac OS 9.
> Like, try it, resize outlook right now (just stretch the side left and right). You'll see so much jank and jitter. How is something like that not instantaneous?
Outlook is old, old code and still does things network I/O in the same thread as window repainting. I wouldn't treat it as a reference of anything other than how much Microsoft has struggled with the baggage from a bunch of mistakes they made in the 90s.
If you use Safari, Apple Mail, or almost any other macOS app, it is instantaneous — and unlike the older Mac apps like the Finder which did the rubber-band overlay until you released the mouse button, that means things like Safari seamlessly reflowing the entire Mac OS 9 emulator the whole time.
See, the whole problem is that you're running Outlook, probably on Windows. A light-weight Linux desktop is not slow. If anything it's a bit faster and snappier now than those older systems were on their historical hardware, since it can save a lot more disk I/O via caching in RAM.
Some of that you can tune down as it’s trying to redraw at every single step in between.
Sometimes there are accessibility options that speed it back up (don’t redraw until mouse let go) - I know you can turn off animations but not sure you can disable that one.
That's a distinction without a difference. Running JS is slower than native. The user of JS cares about the real world speed of emulating a quadra machine, which is shown as very slow at this webpage.
This conversation went on a tangent. It started off with people complaining about modern GUIs then moved onto Outlook and then someone rushes to blame JavaScript / Electron. JS runs 50-80% as fast as native, which is more than fast enough thanks to Moore's law, for virtually any GUI application. The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
The MacOS 9 demo as shown, is impressive, but it is far from optimized, given that it is a side project. But it's impressive all the same that it's emulating a full Mac environment in the browser. Read the developer's own comments on it: https://blog.persistent.info/2022/03/blog-post.html
The discussion was to answer, "And why is everything just so slow!"
> The web has a reputation for being slow, thanks to a traditional lack of GPU acceleration as well as 25 years of legacy code attached to its Document Object Model, that are pretty gnarly for browser vendors to deal with. That has nothing to do with JS itself.
That's not exactly true, though, as many discussions here on HN have demonstrated. The web is not slow due to, "a traditional lack of GPU acceleration." The DOM is the execution environment of JS in the browser. This isn't a discussion about JS in any other environment.
While you may have a vested interest in JS, that doesn't change its properties. Please, let's get back to the actual discussion.
I think it’s the compounding effect of digital clutter over time. It’s easy to create digital things and the tendency to keep adding features never stops.
Minimalism is a good thing for an OS as it really makes it easier to use.
Another thing to note: there’s a lot or duplication in modern software. For instance, each OS file browser has a search bar to help find files. But tragically, the browser also has one, and so do many websites in the browser. So we have a recursive, ever-expanding set of search bars—yuck.
And also tragically, so do many apps have built-in file browsers. Ideally there should be one mechanism to find things, one mechanism to organize things, etc. It should be simple but flexible, and apps shouldn’t have to roll their own, they should be able to gracefully use the one provided.
We’re at a weird point in software where the browser is basically the OS for many people. ChromeOS was an interesting thought but it’s more like a limited-feature OS designed to sell Google services.
We need to take a step back and kind of assess the situation more—and then make a nice little OS :)
I've lived to see the day where someone made an American Psycho business card reference and a follow up comment would - in context mind you - be able to reference Paul Allen as both the movie character and the Microsoft founder.
NeXTSTEP was peak traditional UI. Everything since has been gradual degradation. And I include with that Apple's butchering of what made MCCA on NeXTSTEP so amazing.
An Excel 4.0 was peak Excel. It brilliantly chose axis limits for you in scatter graphs, rather than wasting two minutes of your time every time you created one. Create new data series in the formula bar. Write your own functions and macros without consulting documentation. (I had to create my own ATAN2 (quadrant sensitive two-variable input arctangent. Ironically, when it began appearing as a standard function, it was called ATAN2!)
>People of this opinion will probably enjoy using the latest version of XFCE4 on a Linux or BSD environment.
Mate desktop might also be something they'd enjoy. I personally recommend the Ubuntu-Mate version since it inherits a lot of the papercut fixes from when it was used in Ubuntu as Gnome 2.x. I was very excited to hear that the lead developer of Ubuntu-Mate was working with Debian to port those changes over.
I would prefer we leave the window borders in the 1990s but I do wish we'd stop hiding controls in overflow menus when we have more pixels available than ever before.
I appreciate that dropping a user in a window with 150 unlabelled icons is intimidating for them, but needing to hover over the magic space or find the correct icon abstraction of "junk drawer" to find core features is hardly intuitive either.
I lived through these times, and I thought OS X was a huge improvement over MacOS, I'd never want to go back! Software in general has gotten more bloated and slow since the '90s, but I don't blame it on the OS.
I didn't have too many major complaints about working on MacOS, but I've always preferred windows. I used Windows 3.1 before MacOS. It's probably since I used Windows first, but I've always preferred the Windows approach of window management. Whenever using a Mac, I would always end up with a jumble of windows and I'd frequently click the wrong one when and it would pop to the front and hide what I was looking for. Then the wrong application's tab strip would be visible. Arrrgggh! It was a common point of frustration for me when using Photoshop and Illustrator since there are a number of similar Windows.
In Windows 11, I like that there is reasonable support for dark UI and multiple desktops. I haven't used OS X that much in the past 10 years, so I can't comment on the improvements that have been made since then.
Wow, what a blast from the past. I was only 9 at the time this was released and every bit enamored with the world of computers. My dad owned a data recovery business that also developed software. I was home-schooled and would visit his office frequently after class as I loved looking at all the hard drives and also loved the "computer room smell". There was also the office tradition of playing a game of Bungie's Marathon (which ran natively on Mac OS 9) before closing up shop. It wasn't too long after I would be saving up for my first tangerine iBook.
Reminds me of a fake MacOS website that we naughty students used to load up on IE on Windows machines at school and then full screen it, which would make it look like it was converted to a Mac.
Except it was just a webpage designed to look like a Mac with some very basic GUI features.
It was an extremely popular prank, I just can't remember the name of the website now.
the smell being dust, or ozone? Working in a computer repair place when i was ~19 ruined my sinuses forever. I have a lot of old hardware kind of sorted in cabinets, and whenever someone needs some old hardware i have to either dust mask or take an antihistamine.
So asking me for something to fix a broken old thing usually involves me making a cross face, handing you whatever it is, and then taking a nap after washing my hands twice.
I'm not exactly sure the origin of the smell. Perhaps its the silicon/plastic they use on the electronics? Maybe even the heat combined with all the rest of the components produces that unique smell that I love so much.
I managed to get over most of the nostalgia in my life. After a certain age, I feel it’s a bit counterproductive and not a net positive.
But old Macs hit me hard and it’s something I can’t seem to build an immunity to. The aesthetics, the simplicity, the cohesion of the metaphors… so good.
That's because it's never just nostalgia. Sometimes things were better in the past. Take Google search for example. Everyone on HN knows it used to be better and that it's been getting worse every year. Of course, a lot of that was not (originally) Google's fault because spammers get more sophisticated every year, but I think Google deserves a share of the blame because they have a conflict of interest by running the ad network so many spammers use.
I still believe Classic Mac OS (culminating with OS 9) was way easier and more pleasant to use. Everyone knows the story though: it didn't keep up on the back-end. Application crashes would frequently bring down the entire operating system. Multi-user security was non-existent (you were basically always running as "root").
But when Mac OS X came along they abandoned the dedication to ease-of-use and focused on power user features to go along with a more modern (UNIX-based) kernel and userland. That led to the computers we have today: for more complicated, mixed metaphors, and borderline unusable by grandma.
Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives?
I have countless instruments at my disposal in VST form, 3D software like blender, DAW to write music in, stable diffusion to help with the creative process.
Sure, grandma can still use the old computer. That's not the point. I see people constantly make this conflation here on HN. It's the idea that you can't have new technology while keeping the benefits of old. It's rubbish! What made the Classic MacOS great and easy to use were its solid, fundamental principles. We have abandoned those principles for convenience's sake.
>Can’t grandma still use the old computer while we all use our new computers with new software that’s enriching our lives?
Sure! And so can Uncle Joe and Aunt Mable! But why should they have to?
We used to have this thing called 'sane defaults' and configuration options, which allowed people to set things to their preferred level. Why is it now suddenly that everything is hardcoded to behave one way? Nothing is allowed to be configurable?
So much of this is about configurations and not about the age of the software being used.
Consider how little testing most software apparently has before release. If that's not going to happen, why would they put the effort in to making it configurable?
I don't share any of the nostalgia about old Macs most of HN seems to have. They weren't around me in my childhood, and even trying to get anything meaningful done on classic MacOS in the modern times on an emulator is an exercise in frustration because of how poor the support for Cyrillic characters is.
But! I do have a similar feeling about old Windows versions. The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser (not yet ruined by the existence of touchscreens) and much more thought out. They actually felt like extensions of your mind, not something you have to fight all the damn time.
Two things frustrate me immensely about modern computers: the dumbing down of everything, and the insistence on using touchscreen-inspired UI controls and patterns where they don't belong. The third thing, that kinda encompasses the second one, is the erosion of affordances. Is it a label? Is it a button? Is it a text input? You never know!
It has more to do with what you were brought up with than any intrinsic merit, I'm sure.
Being a Mac die hard I despised DOS and Windows 3.11. But I remember seeing Windows 95 and being as impressed as my young self would allow itself to be while still exhaling my Mac superiority fumes.
The UIs of both the system and the applications were denser
I’m not so sure about that. The pixel density was lower so apparent size was the same for the “denser” UI. A 14 inch vga monitor in the late 90’s would run 800x600, where a modern 14 inch laptop runs 1920x1080.
Doesn't a "14-inch" CRT monitor have a smaller viewable area? I remember LGR saying that at least. So, 800x600 at 13" yields 76.92 dpi.
The once extremely common 1280x1024 19" monitors are 86.27 dpi.
My modern 14" laptop has a resolution of 3024x1964@2x. That's an effective resolution of 1512x982. And it's 128.78 dpi, ignoring the retina thing. But then the thing to keep in mind is that you usually sit closer to a laptop screen than to a monitor. I have no trouble reading 11px font on that screen from my usual viewing distance.
And yes there is an issue with some Windows laptop manufacturers shipping their laptops without the correct DPI set in the system, thus everything becoming way too small with default settings, and thus designers designing those gigantic UIs to compensate for that.
Me too. I think it's because Macs were around when I was a child, and they seemed to represent all the possibility of the future. At the turn of the 90s I connected to bulletin boards before I'd heard of the internet, and it seemed like whatever sci-fi future was ahead of me, these machines were pointing the way.
Same. And, for me, it's the little happy Mac icon at startup... seeing him takes me back to such specific moments in my childhood. Playing Oregon Trail in my friend's basement... damn.
I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98. Likewise, it wasn't the blinding white of light-mode in macOS/Windows today. The purple used was soft and pleasant, unlike the harsh yellow of folders in Windows or the harsh royal blue of Windows progress bars.
Plus, everything had lots of contrast without feeling harsh. One of the things that bugs me about modern UIs is the lack of contrast. I don't need a high-contrast mode, but it would be nice to get back to the contrast of 90s operating systems.
>I've always loved Apple Platinum (the Mac OS 8 and 9 interface). I'm not a UI/art person, but the gray color they used always seemed so clean compared to the dull gray of Windows 95/98.
I feel similarly. The Win9X gray is just a touch too dark, it reminds me of a dark overcast day or something.
Platinum's shade of gray is great, and the shade that they switched to in Windows 2000 is also very good. For this reason on the Windows side of the fence I've always considered Win2K's UI the peak of Win9X-type UIs.
The win9x default gray was from an age where you didn't necessarily have the option to use an arbitrary shade of gray - meanwhile Macs had full control of the hardware (as they still do) and could pick any old color.
That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
> That said, you _could_ customize all the colors in Win9x if you liked, which you couldn't do with Macs.
Well, until Kaleidoscope[0] was created way back in 1991, followed by Apple's own Appearance Manager[1] in Mac OS 8.5 in 1998, both of which allowed all-encompassing theming that could stop just short of changing colors or radically change your UI's appearance. Windows wouldn't get an equivalent until the addition of visual style themes in XP in 2001 (which still had to be hacked to allow arbitrary third party themes) and was by predated the third-party WindowBlinds[2] by three years.
To date I've not seen OS theming that was as capable as Kaleidoscope was. Kaleidoscope schemes could change practically any aspect of the Mac OS UI (e.g. moving titlebars to the bottom or left/right edges of windows) which led to the creation of some extremely creative and zany schemes. Even the theming systems of modern Linux desktop environments which are built with customization as a central tenant aren't as capable as Kaleidoscope was.
This is really impressive and goes way above and beyond the normal "emscripten an emulator into a browser" shenanigans.
There's seamless file copy in/out, and a really clever setup where accessing the same subdomain as someone else puts you in an AppleTalk zone together.
If you open the developer console, it is revealed that the experience is provided by SheepShaver, a traditional desktop emulator (packaged presumably with Emscripten) running in the browser. :)
The integration portions are pretty nice, no doubt.
"Sosumi is an alert sound introduced by Jim Reekes in Apple Inc.'s Macintosh System 7 operating system in 1991. The name is derived from the phrase "so, sue me!" because of a long running court battle with Apple Corps, the similarly named music company, regarding the use of music in Apple Inc.'s computer products."
Oh the memories! I've spent countless hours on MacOS 8 and then 9 IIRC, running QuarkXPress to do professional desktop publishing. Mostly on a beige Powermac G3 tower. I still have that computer somewhere in a garage, don't know if it still boots and still has my software of yore installed.
Our physical tools of the trade were Iomega Zip drives and Iomega Zip disks (100 MB then 250 MB IIRC), Apple II Extended keyboard (the M3501, with ALPS switches: incredible keyboards for the time), HP LaserJet printers (600 and then 1200 dpi) and Sony Trinitron CRTs.
Man, I miss all those Ambrosia Software games (Apieron, Barrack, Escape Velocity, etc). I love how many are pre-loaded there, but the few I tested all seem broken.
> Also, you can still get EV Nova on a Mac as far as I'm aware.
There's also an open-source clone, Endless Sky [0], and a recently-Kickstarted project to re-create EV Override for modern systems, Cosmic Frontier: Override [1].
Seems like it's not running at the highest bit depth, or something funky with the emulator is causing the Finder to display low bit depth icons. On a real machine and on qemu-ppc on my machine OS 9 displays icons that are more shaded and detailed.
Impressive that it runs in a web browser, but it seems that it has some quirks.
You can change the color depth in the Control Strip in the bottom left corner. It's indeed set by default to "256 Colors", setting it to "Millions of Colors" (=24bit) removes the dithering from the icons.
Brings me back to being a kid playing with Mac OS making folders and colorizing them with labels. This was the first time in my life I ever heard the word "essential" and had no idea what it meant. I used to pronounce it like "assess natal".
I have some words like this too. I still read archive as arch-ive in my head all these years later. Native speaker too, just wasn’t a word I heard a lot when I was younger I guess.
That's the version of Mac I started with, back around the turn of the century, on a 500Mhz G3 Powerbook.
I was in a job that was mostly analysis and presentation and writing, and Win95/98 on a laptop was just a NIGHTMARE of freezes and crashes and excruciatingly long boot times. I had a colleague, though, that was using a Mac (because his background was design), and while OS 9 definitely did crash, too, it was far less frequent -- and boot times were faster. Plus, sleep actually WORKED.
Maybe 18 months later, that firm tanked, OS X came out, and I was keeping the lights on with freelance LAMP work using that same Mac as a dev environment. I'm on OS X to this day.
A desktop where windows remember their positions… so refreshing in today's world, where every window and app has total amnesia and launches in random places.
Oh well, I almost got to play Another World :-) (I recently finished it on PC so it was the first thing to catch my eye).
Didn't work, either on Firefox or Chrome (memory access out of bounds at void powerpc_cpu::execute_loadstore) but I get it, playing AW is not the ultimate purpose of this emulator!
No matter how good anything is, it has to be resigned every year/major version/etc because it is far more "fashion" based whether we like it or not. And fashion is all about creating novelty by changing stuff not for utility but for the sake of generating a different neural firing pattern in our brains so the item doesn't simply fade into oblivion even if it is designed and works perfectly
I am not unsurprised by the fact that Photoshop in this little browser emulated Mac OS 9 starts up faster than modern Photoshop on my decked out modern Macbook. What the hell happened?
Now you just need QuarkXpress loaded on it and use a weird 3rd party font manager to load the customers weird fonts....and then have it simulate crashing every 5 minutes or so.
Civilization 1 runs! I played this for SO many hours back then. I loved that game so much. This VM locked up after 100 turns or so, but man, this really brings me back.
I love projects like these! I don't have anything to add to what others have already said about nostalgia and simpler times, except I watched the Civilization intro and almost started a play-through. The original Civilization tile set is so pleasant to look at.
Oh boy. Those extensions loading. So many times I held my breath when adding a new extension. If it doesn’t then you have to restart in Safe mode, or something.
I won’t miss the extensions. OS 9 was cool. I used it a lot on my lime-green imac.
Very cool to see a working HyperCard app in there (Infinite HD > Multimedia > HyperCard). Some of the animations are painfully slow, but dang this takes me back... and the old Photoshop!!! Just, wow!
Spent a lot of time in this world a few decades ago....
Spent a lot of time restoring candy imacs in p.o.s. applications with OS 9, was always fun getting the PostScript dependencies loaded for Laser-Writers; periphery like plate-makers and Design-Jets, and getting them to see network shares. OS 8, and 9 were both lean as fuck and full of utilities. Back when distros were stable and code was efficient.
In addition to being impressive technically, this is just plain fun. I downloaded a game my friends and I wrote way back in the day [1] and... it worked in my browser. Such a nice blast from the past.
It’s amazing how much more central search is in modern OS’s. This feels more like the original’84 Mac, but gussied up. I like OS6 better. It was 10 years ahead of anything else, except perhaps Amiga, in the hands of a developer. This Mac OS9 actually looks like it came from a low point in Mac’s penetration and power.
The low point was when someone at Apple had decided that dragging a document over a print icon to print the document was an important innovation. That’s about the time I switched to Windows for 18 years.
IIsi was my first self-owned one so I largely started on 7. I discovered 6 from using a PB100 which could fit 6 and Word 4.5 in a RAMdisk persisted through restarts by the PB100's pseudostatic RAM. 6 for me at the time was the modern day equivalent of a distraction-free writing environment. Similar to using an iPad of a couple years ago in terms of how silent and instantly receptive it was to my inputs.
Because it was built with the newer design language that Apple was developing - they used it in Quicktime too. I'd hazard a guess that the key difference was that at the time that MacOS 9 came out, you could get something in as long as it appealed to Steve.
It's not that Apple didn't experiment in earlier days, but this was a time when the push to the next OS and design was really strong after so many failed efforts to get a next-gen OS out the door.
A tiny nit — this refers to showing the experience of using a Mac in the mid-90s, but the screen looks like it's the 15" display that Apple released in 2000. Or perhaps I'm wrong, and they had something like this in the 90s?
Oh sure, I remember running OS 9 on my Cube in 2000 before the OS X beta was available. My point was that the monitor frame shown is not consistent with the note in the stickies that indicates a mid-90s timeframe.
One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!
Not a Mac user. Figured this was a new announcement. Clicked and then remembered -- I was at a "System 7" launch as a youngster, 30+ years to get a couple version would be very, very slow.
when mac os X was announced they said "we're done with the versions! forever!" and it took them about 16 years to start incrementing the versions again. I get announcements from a discord server about mac OS checkpoint releases and they're over version 15 now, i think.
edit to add: also when windows 10 came out microsoft was like "we're done with the versions! forever!" and then a couple years later "windows 11!"
I wonder if any company is successfully keeping any of its "forever" promises. ("unlimited gmail storage") -- I guess Costco's hot dog price is still holding strong.
OMG. Original Warcraft was so terrible. But at the time, we thought it was SO COOL. Very simple "guns or butter" simulator. [Also runs slow like molasses in the emulator.]
Nice to see Escape Velocity in there. It's a shame that its distribution is endangered ever since Ambrosia closed up, without selling or releasing the source and rights.
Graphing Calculator doesn't work because it can't find an FPU, and it's the first thing I tried. :/ (also, because it was pretty revolutionary at the time!)
The WindowShade control panel disappeared after MacOS 8. The feature became part of the Appearance control panel at that point. You can customize it on this MacOS 9 machine by going to Apple -> Control Panels -> Appearance and clicking on the Options tab. There you have access to the option "Double-click title bar to collapse windows", an option that lets you use the feature the way it originally worked (before the minimize widget was added to the far right end of the title bar).
WindowShade was amaaaazing. There was something that - for a while, was an OSX equivalent…I want to say ‘ShapeShifter’(?) - but it only worked for versions from like 10.2-10.4.
There was a utility called "WindowShade X" which (messily) hacked the functionality back into early versions of Mac OS X. This developer's utilities had a nasty habit of breaking with every OS update, though, sometimes even making the machine fail to boot, so it probably comes as no surprise that it's no longer available.
The same developers also had a UI skinning utility called ShapeShifter, which is probably what you're getting WindowShade X confused with.
You might be thinking of SheepShaver, a Mac emulator for BeOS and Linux. Its name is a play on the name ShapeShifter, an earlier emulator by the same develope, which was an Apple II emulator for the Amiga.
on the bottom left there's a thing that looks like the color bars from old TV stations, click that and pick your color depth. the one with the checkerboard pattern to the right is the resolution settings.
I wanted access to the college mac lab so bad back then, and eventually got in. Something about those little white screens and the feel of those keyboards was so compelling.
at the bottom of the non-fullscreen browser window there's a rectangle, hover over that, or if on touch, move your finger about 5 words to the right, there's a "settings" button hidden (at least on my monitor) that lets you swap ctrl and command. Doing that lets you press ctrl-I for info, or whatever.
Damn what a terrible UX this is, no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard with ME and XP. This reminded me to keep it simple and stupid proof whenever I want users to actually enjoy what I build, thanks!
I don't know if they were being serious, but as someone who never used a mac back then, I really struggled with this UI. Why do folders all open in a new window? Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner? What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often? Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders? What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar? How do you even turn off the computer?
These are all features that work how I would expect on Windows 98. I'm sure if I had used a mac back then this would all make sense to me, but even as someone who uses modern macs, I was very lost in the old UI.
The buttons that made windows bigger/smaller are not quite that. The button toggles between the natural (smallest) size of a window that is sufficient to display all the contents and the last size other than minimal. It was very convenient for document windows. E.g. you have a spreadsheet with a few rows and columns and lots of white space: click that button and the window shrinks to display only the contents, leaving the empty cells hidden. It's also good for Finder windows that have only a few icons.
If you hold down the Option/Alt key, it will try to resize to the largest possible size, similar to maximize.
>Why can't I maximize a window by double-clicking the title bar? Why can I only resize windows with the little handle in the bottom corner?
Nobody really thought about maximizing by double-clicking, as there was the maximize button available, that maximized not to the screen but to the content being presented (at least that was the intent). Double-clicking on the title bar made the contents of the window disappear while keeping the title bar hovering there. This was great on small screens so that you didn't have to click between windows that had information in them but could hide the top one, read the one below, and go back to the top one without moving the mouse.
As for the little handle, that was for a) the sake of consistency, and b) because that was the one way the OS did things; resizing windows worked just that way. Not sure if that was purely intent or if it was due to system resources, especially in earlier Systems.
>What is the point of the settings dock in the bottom left of the screen? Do I really need to change resolution and colors that often?
I remember using settings much, much more than on current machines — there were a lot of little tweaks one might want to make for performance or ease (changing colors or resolution might be necessary due to a game, for instance, whether for speed or compatibility if it were older).
>Why do I have to browse the whole hard drive to find any of my applications? Why can't I right-click files/folders?
That was simply the way of things, though there were plenty of extensions out there that put application links (or links to pretty much anything) into the Apple menu, which became a catch-all that Apple has pared down (in response?) to almost nothing.
>What is the point of the bigger/smaller window button, why not maximize? Why does minimizing just collapse windows to their title bar?
See above.
>How do you even turn off the computer?
Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so.
Thanks for the replies, I guess a lot of it does boil down to "that's just the way things were".
Although, like I mentioned, all those features do work on Windows 98, which released over a year before Mac OS 9, so I think the parent's comment of "no wonder Windows kicked their ass so hard" does have a point. Windows 98 feels far more "modern" than this, at least in my opinion.
Also, in response to "Choose shut down, and turn it off with the switch when it told you it was safe to do so." That's what I was asking, where do I choose "shut down"? I expected it to be in the Apple menu but it wasn't there. After searching some more I eventually found it in the "Special" menu, still seems like a weird place for it.
Shutting down is used infrequently, so there is some logic in putting it farther away.
Now let's look at a few things that never made it into Windows :)
The desktop was special. If you move a folder or a file there, it would remember the original location of it. Later you could select things on the desktop and choose "Put Away" from the menu to move them back into their original locations. The idea was that you could do that to organize the work the way you do it traditionally: bring the current work on the desk, work on it, then file away.
If this sounds like it would break file references, no, it wouldn't. On Mac applications normally remembered files by their internal ID, so you could rename a file or even move it into a different folder and still find it via the 'recent' files in your app.
Files and folders were "things"; this is why there was always one window for a folder. If you open a file or a folder, the icon of it changed into an outline to show that it is currenly open and there is a full-scale window for it somewhere. If you clicked the icon, it would trace the way to that window.
The window of a folder remembered its settings, including the manual arrangement of icons inside. Together with color labels they made it very easy to organize small sets of files. (I do realize this won't scale to today's millions of files, but I indeed miss it for smaller projects.)
Shut down is in the Finder, in the “Special” menu.
That’s an evolutionary left-over from the first Mac. It ran only a single program at the time [1]. It booted up running the Finder. From there, you could launch a single program. If you quit that program, it launched the Finder again.
Remember that there are a lot of holdovers from the very early days of widespread GUI use — many, many of the things introduced on the earliest Macs are still present in Mac OS 9. This is not a new phenomenon.
- a clear view of what programs are running in the taskbar on Windows vs. the current active program in the top right
The top right current program name has the running programs in a dropdown on click. You can 'tear off' the dropdown menu to create an always-visible task bar, either in the dropdown format or as nice little icons.
This is an in-progress port of the SheepShaver emulator to WebAssembly/Emscripten, https://github.com/mihaip/infinite-mac/issues/34 is tracking the remaining work.
If you're interested in running older Mac software in the browser, the BasiliskII-based sites at https://system7.app/ and https://macos8.app/ may be better bets. They will boot faster and have fewer compatibility issues (especially System 7).
The main thing that Mac OS 9/SheepShaver brings is PowerPC support. There is also a variant of System 7 for PowerPC with more esoteric mid-90s Apple projects like OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX installed available at https://system7.app/?domain=system7-ppc.app.