I think arbitrariness is a good way to put it.

Was in an era when full colour bitmap graphics were becoming effortless to draw on screen, so let’s make EVERYTHING a high res texture! That will prove how modern and powerful this machine is! But now, it’s less impressive so the sheen doesn’t sparkle as much.

Where as maybe the older 1bit display of an old Mac isn’t trying to sell you anything thru UI fancyness. The fact that it’s not impressive technically is maybe less of an issue when it was obviously not the thing they wanted you to focus on.

Reminds me of NeWS [0] which was a Window Manager driven by PostScript. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

Agreed. The more idiosyncratic aesthetic features, the more something is marked as associated with a point in time.

Cf. shaker furniture and Amish furniture vs. mid-twentieth-century furniture.

Which era of Aqua are we talking about here? I generally group Mac OS X design into four broad buckets:

• 10.0 - 10.4

• 10.5 - 10.9

• 10.10 - 10.15

• 11+

Wasn't only the first of those actually called Aqua? I don't recall exactly when Apple officially retired that designation, but it was well before the current era.

Internally, even the current UI is referred to as Aqua. Or more specifically, aqua and darkAqua, depending on if dark mode is desired.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nsappearanc...

I don't know, but I've seen some people use "Aqua" to refer to the design through 10.4, through 10.9, or through the present day.

I was referring to the earlier iterations, with "shiny" buttons, lots of gradients, etc.

11+ to my eyes has more of a "timeless" potential. It's a bit more utilitarian, less showy and particular.

The early Aqua look and feel was informed by the industrial design of the Macs running it. Consumer Macs were very colorful up until about 2003 and had a lot of the texture effects the Aqua L&F was emulating.

I don't think "modern" flat UI designs will fare any better with time, and maybe even worse. Already, the earlier variations of flat UI (Windows 8, iOS 7, OS X Yosemite, Material 1.0) to my eye look more dated than Aqua during its prime (OS X 10.6-10.9) does.

You should look at them on a monitor from that year to get the right impression in either case. Aqua especially will look weird on a modern actually-good LCD or OLED.

Aqua had a lot of aesthetic positives. 3D skeuomorphism blends more easily with the real world compared to flat UIs, which lack presence and make computing feel less tangible and more disposable.

You could easily manipulate the scroll bars in Aqua, which is a useful feature that has been lost in recent updates.

And it was just plain fun and relatable, while flat UIs are more corporate and functional.

Flat reminds me of 1950s/mid century corporate design - inoffensive, but claustrophobic.

There's a happy medium, though. Overly-photorealistic controls are actually counter-productive, especially when incompetently chosen. For example, at the height of Apple's cheeseball skeuomorphism was Game Center, which featured such things as "velvet" card-table surfaces with "painted" labels on them... but those labels were actually controls in some cases. Now who sits at a blackjack table and tries to interact with the paint on the velvet in front of him?

Another example was the "LCD" display at the top of iTunes, depicted as having a transparent cover over it with a sheen and highlights. Unbeknownst to most users (I suspect), some of the labels in that display were actually clickable controls. WTF? I've owned numerous audio components with displays behind clear plastic windows, and I've never tried to poke at one with my finger.

I think mid-'90s GUIs hit the right combination of graphical (not photographical) with universal visual cues. Buttons had only three or four monochrome shades, but had beveled edges whose shadows inverted when the button was "depressed."

I'm glad to see some backlash against the lazy obscurity of "flat UI," and a return to some proper demarcation of controls.

Generally agree here. However the Apple icons of the pre-flat-design-era, even the really skeuomorphic ones, were always pretty great; I always thought they summed up most of their respective apps pretty well. For instance, for Gamecenter, the icon for it before iOS7 was quartered, with a chesspiece, baseball bat, rocket ship and dart board in each quadrant.

They really didn't need to change it. It's now just 4 coloured bubbles, which symbolises...what? I always thought it was just so...random. It's the most irreverent icon of the iOS home screen since iOS7.

Oh yeah, I'm not lumping icons in with controls. Their icons were fine.

Oddly, Game Center is missing from my phone, so I'll take your word that the new icon sucks. I like to scorn the Photos icon: a multicolored Spirograph. Why?

I agree - I love the old '3d' interfaces, and Aqua in particular. The new 'cell phone' interfaces are just a PITA. Really hard on my old eyes - no real indication/border around buttons, no color cues, often not even a place to grab the window and drag it around. Everything is just the same drab shades with no differentiation between elements.

As the 'cell phone' folks get older and eyesight gets worse, I think we'll see things shifting back. I basically don't use a cell phone for anything except 2fa cuz the silly lil screens are too hard to read.

I think I have some cognition issues, and can only read eink and off of crisp OLED. Love touch screens, pointers etc. But don't much like Apple iOS style.

heh - I have fat fingers on top of everything else, so touch screens always turn into "where did I leave the #$%#$%^ stylus" :-D

TBH - I work from home, so I'm never more then 20 feet from real monitors. So I just use the phone for 2FA stuff...

Oh God I am still pretty fat fingered on a phone. But I do like the 'tactile' simplicity. I still think touchscreen UI / OS is in its infancy, and could be better. But am amazed in some ways that it's as good as it is.

Hot take: the current mobile flatness we see all around mostly serves dark patterns schemes and it's anti-user by default. It's easier to hide options within an interface that has no clearly distinction between link and the button, the interactive object and just the decoration. That helps trick users to pick something they didn't want or make them keep the defaults that works against them.

And by the way, may I suggest you try to search on the Internet what GNOME desktop environment developers did to theming with their libadwaita and flat Adwaita design. For a start: https://www.osnews.com/story/133955/gnome-to-prevent-theming...

Thats another pet peeve of mine - web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot. Like I just wanted to activate the window, or grab some whitespace and scroll. Not switch tabs, not maximize the window and definitely not navigate away to some ad or whatnot.

Also, am I the only one sketched out by the javascript ads with the internal 'x' close buttons? Its obviously part of the ad, and not the program chrome/controls. For all I know, it's just a redirect to pwnme.com :-P

> web pages where every pixel is some sort of link/hotspot

Or while trying to copy a link or text on page - you gotta grab it perfectly otherwise everything else gets selected. So you're maneuvering like under microscope at the very beginning or end of the text.

Similar thing I'm experiencing on Xfce: some themes use this very slim window borders which are almost impossible to grab to resize. And since there's no grab to resize widget in the bottom right corner (it used to be once a standard, I'm pretty sure), upper right corner near the close button is the way.

Sometimes its easier to select stuff from the end to beginning... I thought it was my imagination, but then a browser developer wrote about it in their blog or something.

I was always camp KDE - but that libadwaita thing sounds horrible... Maybe Rasterman is due for a comeback - enlightenment desktop looks pretty nice!

libadwaita disallowing themes is not a user-hostile decision (rather an accessibility one), nor are themes impossible. https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2021/09/18/the-truth-they-a...

I think the opposite. The Metro UI of Zune and Windows Phone from more than a decade ago still look so futuristic. They feel like sci-fi screens. The design language may not have been adapted to desktop in the best way, but they look great too IMHO, especially after Windows 11 overhaul.

It is possible we haven't hit the right part of the nostalgia cycle with the OS X Aqua theme.

Classic Mac looked equally good to me 20 years ago.

I wonder what Mac OS X would have looked like if Susan and Bruce had been given access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors instead of chunky bits.

I imagine it would have looked like a very, very well-designed iPhone app: soft and welcoming, yet with delightful new features that became apparent with use, and serious functionality that would stay out of the way until it was needed.

I bet MacPaint would have looked a lot like Paper or Procreate.

1. https://wetransfer.com/paper

You mean System 1.0? The designers of Mac OS X did have access to the power of a G3 and millions of colors :-)

It's a very interesting question, and honestly, I don't know how good it would have looked. I know what a lot of websites (including Apple's) looked like when designers had access to full color, bevels, drop shadows, etc. They looked terrible. I think those technological limitations—no color, almost no RAM, no hard disk—are one reason the original Mac GUI looked as good as it did. There just wasn't room for anything else.

That said, the primary reason why the first Mac OS was so tasteful was because Susan Kare is an excellent designer, and would probably not have made the mistakes I described above. (The Lisa had all those limitations too, and an extremely similar feature set, but if you compare the Lisa GUI to the Mac's, it looks a lot rougher and more inelegant. Kare was not involved with the Lisa, and it shows.)

So who knows. I'd love to see someone reimagine the original Mac OS using a more contemporary design language; would be an interesting experiment.

(Also, if you meant Bruce Horne, he was a software engineer; he wasn't involved with the visual design as far as I know.)

I would like to see a system that acts like classic System 7, too. Less Unix sludge, more focus on a single interactive user. More explorability, more hackability. A computer that feels like your computer.

I'm not sure that the Spatial Finder needed to die; the standard excuses (we have too many files! our displays are too large!) feel knee-jerk and not well thought out at all.

This, but System 6. 7 never looked or felt right, and I preferred MultiFinder.

Heh, I mean, sure? I liked it all, but I feel like the feel of it is what's missing, more than any one specific implementation, if that makes sense?

Sorry, my mistake. I meant the original System 1.0 but instead of a 68000 processor they had a G3 and accelerated color graphics.

And the Bruce I was referring to was Bruce Tognazzini.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini

Dated or just plain worse?

Fully agree. It's the same 'bubble gum' look as Windows XP. What were they thinking with those buttons and scrollbars?

On the other hand, MacOS9's UI style has aged remarkably well:

https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90

(minus the media player, ugh)

I spent large parts of my life with System 7/8/9, but looking back on it now, you'd have thought Apple would have designed a better italics...

Hard to do on such low resolution displays where every single pixel stands out. It would have been better to avoid italics completely in most of the UI.

Around 2000 was peak usability in terms of UI design for both MacOS and Windows.

Modern macOS is remarkably usable compared to that time, especially with a few tweaks in place (Magnet app for window management, three-finger dragging, etc.)

It's really easy to forget how far we've come. Going back to an old OS and trying to get some real work done can be eye-opening.

I'm still waiting desperately for some DE to get back to this. GNOME 4x has in some ways but obviously not in others... Please someone re-make an OS 9-like UI for me.

mlvwm is available and also works on modern *nix. (worked on gnu linux and freebsd at least) https://github.com/morgant/mlvwm

"lickable" I think was the phrase Steve Jobs used for it.

Remember that Apple had just made a killing selling jelly-bean aesthetic iMacs (running classic Mac OS 9, even). The Aqua stuff matched the physical case design of those machines.

It all goes along with the late 90s / Y2K times, intense colours. "Run Lola Run" and Fifth Element and late 90s club culture and whatnot. Nothing restrained about that era in terms of style. It was boom times end-of-millennium and that aesthetic continued even for a bit after the .com crash and 9/11 deflated the tires.

Also as others have pointed out, it had to do with "we can do this now'; the graphics hardware and the software stack (showing off "Quartz" etc)

Funnily enough I was playing with a couple of old PowerMac G4s a couple of weeks ago (actually wiping them for disposal - though I've since decided to keep at least one!)

I realised very quickly that I'd forgotten how good the OS9 interface is, and how well it stands up against today's offerings. Trying out a lookalike theme on Linux [1] is definitely on my todo list:

[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Platinum9

While it was garish its purpose was to stand out and attract attention so the the Mac wouldn't die. It worked. I think the toned down version of Aqua released only a couple of years later for Snow Leopard still looks pretty good today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Leopard#/media/File:L...

I always preferred the 'platform' for the Dock vs. the background we currently have.

I do wish windows rolled up into a bar like MacOS Classic did it.

Looking at that picture I'm reminded of how sursprised I was (still am!) that they used a picture of an actual bare Hard drive on the desktop to represent the internal disk.

Surely hardly any users even knew what a hard drive looked like outside of the computer case, but there it is on the desktop, seemed like a very un-Apple thing to do.

One part is that the original OSX pinstripes-and-water Aqua and the brushed metal look that followed were extremely distinctive, and comparatively short-lived. That combination makes them inherently pinned to their period. The classic Mac OS design was comparatively blander[1], and changed more slowly.

[1] What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?

Colours were pretty crap on CRTs. And greys were better on the eyes than dazzling whites. Even Netscape defaulted to grey.

I took fvwm and a very simple blue bar, trim and simple window buttons. And weirdly now it looks pretty modern and fresh.

Anyway there's always the bizarre windows fisherprice theme, and over used chrome gradients there to help you bring up some bile.

> What was it with 90s and having medium-grey be dominating UI color? And everything having faux-3d bevels?

In the 90s, most large software companies (especially OS vendors) would run usability studies with real-world users at a variety of skill levels to try to make their software as easy to use as possible. Everyone used medium-gray as the main UI background color because it makes colored elements easily stand out, and doesn't affect an element's perceived color. Everything had faux-3D bevels because they make it obvious which elements are clickable, and which aren't.

I… don’t believe this. Reviews of the day were preoccupied with drooling over the graphics capabilities, given that it’s a mostly-objective thing to compare and were often the only visible thing that changed in an OS release. If you look at the embellishments that UI picked up they evolved in lockstep with the capabilities of the hardware. As soon as there was sufficient color depth for shadows, then shadows were added. Once that expanded to sufficient color depth for gradients, then gradients were added. Same with transparency. Once MS Windows got a GPU compositor in Vista we got “glass”.

It's the same thing as with lens flares or god rays in 3D games. There were phases where every game had completely overdone lens flares or god rays. Eventually the madness ends and designers are coming to their senses again (until the next madness starts).

NeXT

...Sun, SGI, OS/2, AmigaOS 2.0 were all "grey desktops" with 3D bevels, Next was hardly standing out there.

AmigaOS 1.x had a blue background color, but this was mostly because home computers were used on cheap TVs at the time, where white-on-blue seems to have been the color combination that gave the least video artefacts and flickering.

Even modern flat design has gone back to (subtle) 3D hints.

As for the medium-grey: I guess that had mostly to do with the properties of CRT displays.

Things first get old, then they become antique

Aqua certainly matched my indigo blue iMac G3 perfectly back then (around 2000?). I sometimes miss these systems... not in terms of performance of course, but the whole experience was beautiful.