It’s amazing to me how much more usable those UIs are. Not to mention how much more performant they’d be than modern Electron garbage.

But forget about Mac OS 9, we don’t even have native OS X or Windows interfaces anymore. Doesn’t help that Apple dropped the ball on following their own UI guidelines.

You might like helloSystem, it's explicitly based on the original Apple HIG:

https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/developer/ux-guidelines.h...

I almost didn’t scroll down and spot the video. What an amazing amount of effort…

Yes, the resolution could be higher but for me almost all of the apps (except Zoom) looks great. I would love to have that option today. Old design is much thinner and clearer. Buttons are buttons, they're visible and easy to click, almost every decoration is minimal, they're not taking unnecessary space just for sake of it. This is why I didn't like anything after Windows 7, this is the reason why current Gnome is is just wasteful. I much prefer simplicity and "smallness" of Gnome 2 UI hence I'm using Mate as my daily driver

"I still miss the crisp lines and clear affordances of actual buttons and other elements of that time..."

If you go into System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and turn "Increase contrast" on, it adds clear lines around almost everything, which is the closest I've found to that. I tried it for a while, but I found it too harsh in the end. It would be nice to have a setting which was inbetween the two extremes.

And without click-tracking telemetry, how can the software vendor measure engagement and optimize the user experience in a data-driven fashion?

I don’t get the “I can’t tell what’s clickable” complaint. I just opened up spotify and it’s obvious what’s clickable and what isn’t. Same for gmail. I don’t remember having any issue learning how to use these either.

And it's usable on 1024x786. I didn't by my big hires screen for that!

"542 lines of code" (a configuration file), "best viewed in tahoma size 7"... cringe.

In my defense, it was 2001-2002, I mostly had MS Paint at my disposal, and I was 14 (and not like a smart 14).

I used BeOS as a daily driver for a few years back in the day. It was a great OS, wonderfully smooth and powerful. But I was forced off of it because of the lack of applications. Applications make or break an OS. Microsoft had to learn this lesson several times already (windows phone, windows rt).

Qnx was pretty unique. We no longer have any RTOS with a desktop GUI sadly

You might like https://cancel.fm/ripcord/ . I haven't tried it, but it's a QT client for Slack/Discord

I rarely used Windows, but I remember Trillian was one of the first applications I truly hated for exactly this reason.

Check out https://shrugs.app, but development appears to have stalled according to the blog.

At least Slack has an API where you could potentialy build one yourself. I wish that were true for Teams…

Yeah, watching that video really reminds me how poor slack performance is.

It genuinely feels like it could fit into a couple of MB of RAM back in those days and been super snappy. I literally do not use slack for anything that IRC wouldn't do back in the late 90s, with the exception of threads, embedded images, and emojis.

It is crazy how close but how far IRC was. Session persistence, notification support even when offline, better admin UI was really all it needed. And probably be totally centralised.

Guess its a react or angular or vue app.

You might like helloSystem:

https://github.com/helloSystem/hello

Not the greatest UI, but you can show 2 conversations at the same time by command-clicking on a person/channel (or right clicking on a second person/channel and choose "Open in split view").

MacOS 9 had vector TrueType fonts and text antialiasing. It was still blazing fast on a G4.

> Low-res bitmap icons, bitmap fonts, no antialiasing, no composition, etc.

I don’t think that high-res icons, vector fonts, aliasing and composition meaningfully effect today’s hardware — we can and do have GPUs barely sweating on even much more demanding functionality and these are mostly parallelisable/easily cacheable things. If anything, they take up some GPU memory.

What makes some of today’s apps resource hogs is the different abstraction level which can be useful (accessibility was absolutely not something important back then and even today it is not without lack), cross-platform, but often much more leaky than it could be.

There is a nice Win9x style theme for GTK+3 that works quite well IME. And the look is quite faithful to the original (with some minimal changes for, e.g. modern headerbars).

I kind of like having one window per application. I already have 15 different applications open at the same time, I don’t need them to have 4 windows each.

macintoshjs co-creator Christian Bauer's personal website is appropriately 90s-website-y and full of goodies (recommend the Japan travel pics particularly!) https://www.cebix.net

It was common for mice not to have wheels. In fact, the mouse that came with the computer shown only had one big button. People needed to be able to actually click on the scroll bar to use it.

They seem to be about the same size as scrollbars on Windows 10. Also I'd argue they're way more accessible than the tiny scrollbars that auto-hide on modern MacOS which are very difficult to click on.

Ironically, the original design of Spotify (before it launched in the US) actually looked like a ripoff of Limewire.

I’m guessing this was on purpose to try and transition the P2P crowd over to streaming.

The crazy thing is that you can get at least two windows in Zoom. It's my favorite feature and the reason I prefer it over any of its competitors. However, it's for some reason hidden and handicapped. You need to turn it on and even then it will only work when you have two screens. IMO it should be enabled by default and work even if you only have a single screen. I use it every day, but usually have both windows on my main screen. It's especially invaluable when someone screenshares and you want to see people's faces at the same time.

> "Flat design" is a disaster

The original flat designs, Zune HD and the Zune software, Windows Phone 7, Windows Media Center, was incredibly usable.

All those were produced by small design teams at Microsoft, and for, relative to an entire OS, small projects. (Settings aside Windows Phone 7 for a bit, which IMHO actually had very few distinct UI elements.)

Heck Windows Phone 7, to this day, is unlike anything else on the market, It is still going to be more responsive, and look cleaner, than almost anything else out there.

I am not sure why someone decided "flat" means "no button border", that is where I think it all went wrong.

Oh and also people who think flat means getting rid of text! Windows Phone 7 loved text, text was everywhere!

> and there was also no expectation whatsoever of "touch friendly" controls so everything was a lot more tightly-spaced than today

Well if Apple’s Execs are to be believed, touch-screen Macs aren’t in the pipeline, which is aces with me because that’s what my iPad is for.

So given that the preeminent pointing devices on a Macintosh are still the mouse and trackpad, I could do with them tightening up the spacing again and walking back the last 10 years of nonsense.

We don’t have to go back to Snow Leopard, certainly not Platinum; but widgets and theming that are consistent with how a Macintosh is used and the hardware it actually runs on would be preferable.

Yes and the touch friendly paradigms waste way too much space on platforms that don't even feature touch, like Mac.

Let's not underestimate neuroplasticity. Children can figure out almost anything. If you want a true test of UI intuitiveness then you ought to give the computer to an elderly parent or grandparent.

Anecdotally, my 70-year-old father and several of my elderly uncles & aunts had a much easier time figuring out Classic Mac OS. Modern macOS and iOS are much more complicated. While they still use these systems, they do so in a much more superficial way and they tend to exhibit what (for lack of a better term) I would call a "fear response." That is, when attempting to do a novel task they refuse to experiment and instead resort to asking for help immediately. Classic Mac OS was much better designed to encourage experimentation and avoided surprising the user (in a negative way) as much as possible.

> I have never seen anyone argue Mac OS was anything but beautiful but I guess there’s a first for everything.

Well, allow me to be number two, then. In my opinion, macOS is bland, unclear and the general UX is peculiar to say the least. I dislike the concept and the design of the system bar at the top and the blur effect they add to some UI elements (which Microsoft copied for their latest Metro design language) just looks excessive to me. The iPhone-i-fied controls that have been added to macOS are a step back, in my opinion, because now there's a giant system status popup that looks like you're supposed to touch it but Apple doesn't want to introduce touch screens to macOS.

The thing the macOS-ecosystem does well is integration, which is arguably much more important than just design. I rarely use any tool on Windows that follows Microsoft's guidelines, whatever those are this month, but on macOS the UI designers seem to be focused on integrating well with the looks of rest of the system. This has the unfortunate side effect of putting some of developers using the macOS design language on other platforms as well, fragmenting the system even further, but for macOS users this is a great benefit. Even an awfully ugly system (like the BeOS look which some people love, but also the Gnome 2 "3D" look) is still much more usable than most "modern" designs because you know what to expect from applications running on that system.

You can disagree with me, and that's alright. Any design is liked and disliked by different people. I personally enjoy the simplicity and elegance in designs like the SerenityOS UI, but I can definitely see why others hate it.

But, if you truly have never met heard anyone say that they didn't like macOS' design, then you're part of some very different social circles than I am.

Two things.

- The UIs of the 90s were made with mice and keyboards in mind. The designers' minds weren't yet compromised by the existence of touchscreens, both on phones and Windows laptops.

- IT companies were building tools to empower users and actually competed with each other fiercely. It was important to make sure your UI doesn't suck, because otherwise someone else will. This competition required the companies to put users' needs before their own.

And tangential to that: "developer experience" wasn't a thing. Writing software was an engineering job done by people knowing what they're doing. The bar was set pretty high. Compare that to now, when it's almost encouraged to be a junior developer and pile libraries into your project without ever looking under to hood to assess the compromises you're making. And the way the code looks and builds is considered more important by many than the end result that ships.

> when just using these OSs was unintuitive to anyone but a tech enthusiast

That's very far from my experience. I know a fair amount of people who had no trouble going from DOS -> win 3.1 -> 95, 98, XP, but starting from Vista using their computer became much harder and much more external assistance started to be required. I know no one who is learning how to use computers as easily with, say, Win 10 or the latest Macs, than people 15 years ago ; when I give classes most non-CS college students are more computer illiterate than people around me when I was in junior high.

The problem with modern UI design isn't necessarily about new designs being uglier than old designs. Windows 11, macOS Monterey, GNOME 3, and KDE 5 all look nice in my opinion, and I cringe when I see old screenshots of Motif and CDE.

The problems I have with modern UI/UX design are as follows:

1. It is often tailored to the needs of mobile interfaces instead of the needs of desktop computing environments, often resulting in certain UI interactions being more complex with modern applications than with older applications that were designed for desktop users. For example, hamburger menus make sense in environments such as smartphones where room is scarce. However, I believe they are inappropriate in desktop environments, yet they are becoming more commonplace on websites (even when browsing on a desktop) and in applications. Another example is a trend in newer versions of GNOME and macOS where the title bar is fused with the toolbar. While this does save space, it makes it harder for me to rearrange windows on the desktop since I must look for empty space in the combined tool/title bar to click to drag (and sometimes not all empty space in this area drags the window), while this was never a problem for me with traditional title bars.

2. We've lost certain affordances that were present in the 1990s versions of Mac OS and Windows that aid in usability. It's harder to visually distinguish between clickable and non-clickable portions of a window in many modern applications. Scroll bars provide useful feedback while reading content that doesn't fit within the window, yet it's a common trend in modern UIs to hide the scrollbars, and when they do show up, they are often very skinny, making it harder to scroll with them (yes, trackpad gestures and scroll wheels make this less of an issue, but not everybody has nice trackpads or mice).

3. The rise of applications that refuse to adhere to platform guidelines, preferring to be "special snowflakes" for branding reasons, engagement metrics, developers' convenience, or cost reasons (it's cheaper to make an Electron app than to make separate UIs that conform to each platform's respective guidelines). The notion that applications should follow a platform's UI guidelines is increasingly fading away, and is being replaced with the attitude of, "You should be grateful that you are able to use this application." The Web, with its lack of UI guidelines and its emphasis on siloed applications instead of interoperability among applications, is taking over the desktop, with unfortunate consequences for the future of desktop computing.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of taking the substance of UIs from the 1990s and having updated color themes, icons, and fonts for them. I personally believe the pre-Yosemite Aqua interface of macOS and the Windows Vista/7 interface were great examples of modernized UIs that were desktop-tailored and retained or even enhanced affordances that were present in previous versions of these interfaces. I feel we lost a lot when the industry shifted to mobile computing and decided that desktops should look and feel more like smartphones and tablets instead of continuing to improve on the desktop computing experience.

MacOS is beautiful and while it may be possible I do not believe anyone, except maybe a tiny percentage of tech users who used windows 9x or old school Mac as their first interface, objectively looks at it and thinks it’s ugly while the old beige UI was the last truly beautiful interface.

That is some bizarro world stuff. Even Windows 10 is actually fairly pretty in its interface even if it is super bloated.

(a) ... when it comes to status and self-presentation people tend to ignore their intelligence and education.

I don't know. I kind of prefer Windows XP as the many-windowed-application style died out by then. Now the only major example I can think of is Gimp.

- Finder

- Applications not actually being terminated when clicking on the close icon

- lagging / unreliable context menu opening with middle-index-finger on apps in dock bar

- the concept of installing something by moving it from an icon on the left to an icon on the right

- or when you can't start apps due to connectivity issues

- app removal is totally opaque and sometimes requires to download a custom uninstallation tool (adobe creative cloud f.x.)

MacOS and its applications relegate far too much functionality to hidden "power tools." Often its impossible to know what is clickable in macOS.

Windows XP features were easy to discover. Scroll bars were not hidden. Buttons looked like buttons.

Command vs. ALT/CTRL bindings are vastly superior in Windows. The MacOS method of using the Command button is different for the sake of being different, not for any actual productive reason.

I had the first Macbook Retina and used it for years at a company where it made sense to do so; when I handed it in and left for my own startup life, I was open to either OS (couldn't use Linux as the daily driver since I my industry uses a lot of Windows-only programs), and Windows was just far more productive to use on a regular basis. The only thing I miss is Final Cut Pro, and Sublime Text to some degree (VS Code has been an adequate replacement).

> I’m so tired of this.

... and so do I, as someone supporting a company, looking at why users complain that their shiny new M1 laptops' batteries still sucks. I can tolerate Electron if it's battery-efficient, but everytime we analysed which apps are battery-hungry? Electron apps always tops the list. Not to mention genuine UI concerns like why are some developers insisting on a thin grey font that's genuinely unreadable? And even if it has a decent UI, navigation outside of a mouse-keyboard duo is never there. We have to file multiple bugs on behalf of disabled users because most web devs don't care about accessibility.

In a sense, I wouldn't complain about Electron if these three problems (battery life, genuinely user-hostile UI, poor accessibility) didn't exist (or are few and far between that it became an annoyance instead of being monsters), but here we are. Again, I don't want to waste dev time on inconsequential things like most UI toolkits are insisting. I've worked on apps with Qt and it genuinely sucks, and web development has been genuinely a better development platform (still sucked, but much less), but developing an application predicates on that application not being user-hostile, and Electron (and to be honest, web in general) doesn't encourage the developers to think about these issues.

> I’m so tired of this.

So am I. Not user hostile? Since when is it acceptable to assume that users don't care about efficiency? People care about battery life, people care about responsiveness, and people care about interface consistency. You may be tired, but I'm happy that slowly the tide is turning and people are less friendly to things like Electron that put developer and business priorities before anything else.

I also don’t get the argument that it is a good thing for users to make desktop development open to the glut of web developers we’ve created. Again, that is a developer- and business-centric argument. This feels like saying we all should accept a lower quality of software simply to match an average skill level for a large collection of available programmers. Is it really unreasonable to set our expectations of quality higher than that which an average web developer can (or wants to) achieve?

Maybe people have a preference for software that conforms to a set of often well-thought-of platform UI standards and interoperates seamlessly with their other applications instead of Web applications that don't conform with the platform's standards. Part of what made the Mac and Windows attractive compared to MS-DOS is that the former had UI standards that made it easier for people to use new apps and to interoperate among apps, while in MS-DOS each application implemented its own UI and things like interoperability and accessibility were challenging. The Web is a throwback to MS-DOS-style development, where there are no standard UI guidelines. It's one thing to deal with this when using remotely-hosted Web applications, but it's another thing when an increasing number of desktop apps are essentially locally-hosted Web applications.

The Web is fundamentally a different platform from modern desktop environments; writing desktop applications as if they were Web applications running on beefy servers leads to bad user experiences, just like how Web applications that do not take into account network latency, security, and other aspects of the Web that don't normally apply in native desktop applications leads to bad user experiences.

I'm not saying that Electron is automatically bad. Cross-platform GUIs and other tools have existed for decades due to their labor-saving characteristics, and this is a recurring controversy (for example, Microsoft Word 6 for Macintosh was widely panned by Mac users due to its feeling like a simple port of Word for Windows instead of a tailor-made Mac application, and certain Java GUIs don't fit with the underlying platform's UI standards, though Java does support native UIs). However, I think it's a bad thing for software vendors and developers to take the attitude that users should be grateful for whatever they release, though I admit there is a thin line between expressing dissatisfaction and acting entitled.

As a user, I have yet to find an electron app I have tested and kept using.

There are many tools available as electron apps that I have to use for my daily job that I prefer running in a browser window instead of the buggy electron app such as teams or slack. And I don't see any downside in using the website instead of the electron app, quite the contrary in fact. Even on mobile there are some tools that I prefer to run on the browser, mostly for better control of my privacy.

If you develop on the web, develop on the web. If you want to build desktop app, develop your apps like desktop apps. Users will thank you.

Of course it is user hostile!!!! I should not feel like an intel i-7 processor with six cores and 12 threads in a machine with 32 GB of Ram is sometimes not enough to run a fucking chat application without it stuttering; or ramping up the fan like a fucking 747 during take-off should I decide to use to have a video call on this application.

People say that but I have yet to see a C++/Qt app take more time to develop than an Electron app. Case in point: ripcord, a discord AND slack client, developed by a single person in this stack. In the mean time Slack has rewritten their Electron app from scratch, what, three times for the performance problems it has ?