NeXTSTEP was widely regarded as visually striking and innovative for its time, particularly for its clean, minimalist design and advanced graphical capabilities. Key elements contributing to its perceived beauty included:

3D chiseled widgets: Beveled buttons and controls with subtle shading created a dimensional, tactile appearance.

Full-color icons: Large, detailed icons (uncommon in late 1980s GUIs) enhanced visual clarity.

Consistent typography: System-wide use of Display PostScript enabled professional-quality fonts and anti-aliasing.

Transparency and compositing: Advanced graphics handling allowed overlapping windows and semi-transparent elements.

Current discussions still praise NeXTSTEP's design as better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and macOS.

>NeXTSTEP was widely regarded as visually striking and innovative for its time

Widely? You seem like the only one carrying the water for nextstep. I'm sure they had some advances but overall it's a very ugly UI.

It inspired Win95. It inspired the original Netscape browser's UI (toolbar etc is very NeXTSTEP-inspired, not surprising because it was developed on a NeXT box). It inspired the Mac OS X and the iPhone, although both have degraded since then. As things exist today, NeXTSTEP from 40 years ago (!) looks much nicer - and way more usable - than today's flat UIs.

Being the inspiration for a bunch of better products don't mean that it was inherently good itself.

LLM output comment