7 ms·

A beautiful OS that is far more enjoyable to use than todays inconsistent, schizophrenic UIs.

flenserboy 5y ago
Apple failed miserably by not only not choosing the NeXT interface (which was a joy to work with), they kept the outline of the Classic Mac OS interface while getting rid of the good stuff (spatial Finder, etc.).
- orhmeh09 5y ago
  What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?
  - bitwize 5y ago
    It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just like real objects. Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of human psychology in such a deep way to make computers easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting worse with the iOS-ization of everything).
    - handrous 5y ago
      iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with folders having a kind of visual physicality—tapping a folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with dimension and location. The down-side was that they were limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers, you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when using folders, now—iOS6 and earlier was the only OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after some light config of the a11y features). 7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff. The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.
  - MiddleEndian 5y ago
    Spatial Finder was the ultimate example of "It just works" from Macs in the past. Unless you knew what it was doing (always opening folders in the same place), it was something that would be hard to articulate as an advantage over other operating systems. The tradeoff against that of course was that you could not open the same folder in two different windows. With OS X, Finder implemented Miller Columns[0] (as taken from NextStep), so that ended spatial Finder, since windows could no longer be associated with particular folders. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Miller Columns as I find the easy hierarchy great as part of the "operating system is the dev environment" approach, but if I worked on more chaotic art projects perhaps I'd like spatial finder more. Either way I use Windows now and most of the alternative file managers don't seem to integrate into the OS well, so I get neither lol 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    Lots of true-blue Mac partisans were crazy salty about the loss of the spatial finder, but I never gave a damn. I want my file-browsing window to maintain a consistent presentation as I navigate. I don’t need each folder to open another window; that makes me crazy, and was one of the things I hated about OS 9 when I moved to the Mac in the late 90s. To me, the shifts under OS X — mostly, the unixy (BSD-y) underpinnings but also changes like the abandonment of the spatial Finder — made it WAY better.
    - Jetrel 5y ago
      Yeah - that was the thing. To traditional mac users, the finder wasn't a file-browser, full stop. It was a document viewer. Each folder was a document. What would have been really nice would have been to get a clear, visually-distinct instance of both; to get a really clear "this is a file browser" tool in the finder, and a really clear "this is a folder" tool in the finder. They're both really useful tools to have - what was awful wasn't gaining a file browser, but was how they mixed file browsing and folder viewing into this awful pea-soup thing that damaged a bunch of the value points of both tools. I really like having a file browser, but there's a LOT of value to having something that treats folders as individual, stateful documents.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        It's an interface wrought in the era of 720K floppies where there was a limit to how much hierarchy you would need to plow through to get somewhere.
        setpatchaddress 5y ago
        This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser interface. Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the workspace to actually do anything. They always went to the command line to copy/move files and do other file management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was mainly a proof of concept.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    The spatial finder was really 2-3 promises: • Every time you opened a given folder, it always opened in the same, physical place on the screen. Same size, same spot, same view options. Always. • Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the previous one to the front, instead. • the act of opening a folder would always consistently draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder. Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great, "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful aspect of human memory. It has to be absolutely consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can always find things instantly based on where they are, physically. It's like going from O(log(n)) to find something to just O(1). It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed, where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time "searching" for something, because you know exactly where you put it when you left it there. Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on this front; some are better than others, and there's probably some "learning differences" science on this, but as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this are really, really good. -- The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time in code editors, and in photoshop. Something that could have been a great compromise, which I think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been having a much stronger separation between two concepts, that in OS X are (practically speaking) really blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file browser". A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder" behaviors, but a file browser would have looked dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the benefits of opening multiple document views, without the confusion. The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open is you never can tell which one is the master copy for setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is, but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the right side of the screen, and have another on the left side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your memory, but when you go looking for the one that was ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got stored was the other one.
- em-bee 5y ago
  but they did choose the NeXT interface. not so much visually, but having worked with the original NeXTstep, OpenStep, very early and later versions of OS X and also various linux GUIs and windows, i have to say that at least the early versions of OS X were quite faithful renditions of the NeXTstep GUI. all the pieces of functionality were recognizeable, and the interface was just as comfortable to work with.
bogwog 5y ago
I non-sarcastically switched to Window Maker (https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/) on my main desktop for a little while out of curiosity and was very impressed by the experience. I even installed GNUStep and made a crappy little GUI for an old software renderer I had with the Project Center IDE (http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html) which is surprisingly powerful and full of features. Sure, it was all old and ugly by today's standards, and a big step backwards overall from the Plasma desktop I was used to, but it felt really good to use. The whole GNUStep ecosystem is crazy impressive too, and idk the history around it, but I assume interest for it died off a long time ago. Which is a shame, because having that development environment on a modern (free as in freedom) desktop would be awesome. Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other bloat. But apparently development for GNUStep is still alive (last stable release was ~2 months ago), so maybe there is still hope that it will take off one day!
- marcodiego 5y ago
  Take a look at this: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
- pak9rabid 5y ago
  Awesome! I ran WindowMaker religiously back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have very fond memories of how elegant and snappy it was compared to other popular window managers & desktop environments of the time.
- incanus77 5y ago
  I used Window Maker back in the 90s, and now that I’ve gotten back into Linux on Pi and other hardware, I use it again as my preferred desktop (usually on DietPi). It’s just fast, clean, and easy to configure, as well as port or copy the configuration wholesale.
- em-bee 5y ago
  i used window maker too. it was actually after i had a chance to work with the real NeXTstep interface, that i started to get disappointed, because as nice as window maker looks, it is not NeXTstep and the quirks and differences in behavior were just irritating.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
It very much resembles early TWM / Solaris / Athena based GUIs. They still exist! You can install TWM. I've used MWM since the late 80's* (mostly on AIX for about a decade), and am glad it is still easily installable on Ubuntu 20.04 That's the cool thing about Linux, you don't NEED your GUI to be a noisy nightmare (looking at you KDE). All my menus are context mouse menus. I don't do start menus, 1 level deep, with fewer than ~8 items, otherwise i'm using CLI or launching it via Xterm. Of course, apps are still at liberty to look like crap!
Apocryphon 5y ago
BeOS really gave it a run for its money, though.
- em-bee 5y ago
  BeOS looks awesome, and it certainly would have made a great successor to MacOS, but unfortunately it didn't even reach as many people as NeXTstep did. I am hoping that Haiku keeps up its pace and becomes a viable alternative

Apple failed miserably by not only not choosing the NeXT interface (which was a joy to work with), they kept the outline of the Classic Mac OS interface while getting rid of the good stuff (spatial Finder, etc.).

orhmeh09 5y ago
What made spatial finder good stuff, to you?
- bitwize 5y ago
  It presents the contents of your disk in a manner congruent to how the human brain deals with physical objects: each file or folder can be found in exactly one place, and its on-screen location remains the same unless changed, just like real objects. Apple was the only computer company taking advantage of human psychology in such a deep way to make computers easier to use. To some extent they still are, but for decades the Macintosh was pretty much the only computer truly approachable by normies. Mac OS X compromises that approachability in a few fundamental ways (and it's getting worse with the iOS-ization of everything).
  - handrous 5y ago
    iOS did something a little similar through iOS6, with folders having a kind of visual physicality—tapping a folder would "slide" the screen "apart" to reveal it underneath, leaving a clear way out (tap any part of the outer Home Screen, which is still visible at the top and bottom) and making the folders feel like a place, with dimension and location. The down-side was that they were limited to only a few content apps, since scrolling would have ruined the whole effect. Then, iOS7 ditched the whole thing for more-traditional folders (if you've watched the quite-computer-"illiterate" use computers, you know this means they're always gonna feel lost when using folders, now—iOS6 and earlier was the only OS+platform I've ever seen that I'd enthusiastically recommend to my approaching-100 grandma, and expect that she'd do kinda OK at using it unassisted, maybe after some light config of the a11y features). 7 broke a bunch of other excellently-discoverable stuff. The replacement for the unlock slider was especially far into obviously-a-large-step-backwards territory.
- MiddleEndian 5y ago
  Spatial Finder was the ultimate example of "It just works" from Macs in the past. Unless you knew what it was doing (always opening folders in the same place), it was something that would be hard to articulate as an advantage over other operating systems. The tradeoff against that of course was that you could not open the same folder in two different windows. With OS X, Finder implemented Miller Columns[0] (as taken from NextStep), so that ended spatial Finder, since windows could no longer be associated with particular folders. Personally, I'm a huge fan of Miller Columns as I find the easy hierarchy great as part of the "operating system is the dev environment" approach, but if I worked on more chaotic art projects perhaps I'd like spatial finder more. Either way I use Windows now and most of the alternative file managers don't seem to integrate into the OS well, so I get neither lol 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  Lots of true-blue Mac partisans were crazy salty about the loss of the spatial finder, but I never gave a damn. I want my file-browsing window to maintain a consistent presentation as I navigate. I don’t need each folder to open another window; that makes me crazy, and was one of the things I hated about OS 9 when I moved to the Mac in the late 90s. To me, the shifts under OS X — mostly, the unixy (BSD-y) underpinnings but also changes like the abandonment of the spatial Finder — made it WAY better.
  - Jetrel 5y ago
    Yeah - that was the thing. To traditional mac users, the finder wasn't a file-browser, full stop. It was a document viewer. Each folder was a document. What would have been really nice would have been to get a clear, visually-distinct instance of both; to get a really clear "this is a file browser" tool in the finder, and a really clear "this is a folder" tool in the finder. They're both really useful tools to have - what was awful wasn't gaining a file browser, but was how they mixed file browsing and folder viewing into this awful pea-soup thing that damaged a bunch of the value points of both tools. I really like having a file browser, but there's a LOT of value to having something that treats folders as individual, stateful documents.
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      It's an interface wrought in the era of 720K floppies where there was a limit to how much hierarchy you would need to plow through to get somewhere.
      - setpatchaddress 5y ago
        This is an oversimplification. Unix trains people to think in terms of requiring deep directory hierarchies because the Unix implementation cannot exist without them (I'd argue some of this is due to historical cruft becoming enshrined over the decades). The OS X Finder never managed to bridge the gap between the elegance of the old Finder and the raw utility of the NeXT browser interface. Something else, anecdotally: NeXT people never used the workspace to actually do anything. They always went to the command line to copy/move files and do other file management things. My takeaway was that the workspace was mainly a proof of concept.
- Jetrel 5y ago
  The spatial finder was really 2-3 promises: • Every time you opened a given folder, it always opened in the same, physical place on the screen. Same size, same spot, same view options. Always. • Only one instance of a folder could be open at once. If you tried to open more than one copy, it would bring the previous one to the front, instead. • the act of opening a folder would always consistently draw an animation zooming from the icon you'd double-clicked on, to the final open copy of the folder. Of these 3 promises, the first one was the insanely-great, "magical" one. It ends up tapping into a really powerful aspect of human memory. It has to be absolutely consistent on the OSes part to work (nobody can EVER move your cheese), but if it is consistent like that, then it feels like it unlocks a weird superpower, because you can always find things instantly based on where they are, physically. It's like going from O(log(n)) to find something to just O(1). It's like having a "cluttered" (but personal) toolshed, where nobody else would have moved anything around. If you have that guarantee, you don't need to waste time "searching" for something, because you know exactly where you put it when you left it there. Humans for some reason all have extremely good memories on this front; some are better than others, and there's probably some "learning differences" science on this, but as far as I can tell the floor for this capability is really, really high. Even those of us who are "bad" at this are really, really good. -- The second item, "only one instance open" is the one that had genuine downsides. Opening multiple views of the same document is a very useful paradigm, which I do all the time in code editors, and in photoshop. Something that could have been a great compromise, which I think apple really dropped the ball on, would have been having a much stronger separation between two concepts, that in OS X are (practically speaking) really blurry/similar: a "folder view", and a "file browser". A folder view would have retained all the "spatial finder" behaviors, but a file browser would have looked dramatically different, and allowed you to have all the benefits of opening multiple document views, without the confusion. The problem with multiple "actual folder view"s being open is you never can tell which one is the master copy for setting the position/view-settings/size. One of them is, but the OS doesn't give an indication. So it really screws with that positional memory thing - you'll have one on the right side of the screen, and have another on the left side, and your brain will "pin" both of those in your memory, but when you go looking for the one that was ephemeral, you can't find it, because the one that got stored was the other one.
em-bee 5y ago
but they did choose the NeXT interface. not so much visually, but having worked with the original NeXTstep, OpenStep, very early and later versions of OS X and also various linux GUIs and windows, i have to say that at least the early versions of OS X were quite faithful renditions of the NeXTstep GUI. all the pieces of functionality were recognizeable, and the interface was just as comfortable to work with.

bogwog 5y ago

I non-sarcastically switched to Window Maker (https://www.windowmaker.org/ https://www.windowmaker.org/) on my main desktop for a little while out of curiosity and was very impressed by the experience. I even installed GNUStep and made a crappy little GUI for an old software renderer I had with the Project Center IDE (http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html http://www.gnustep.org/experience/ProjectCenter.html) which is surprisingly powerful and full of features. Sure, it was all old and ugly by today's standards, and a big step backwards overall from the Plasma desktop I was used to, but it felt really good to use. The whole GNUStep ecosystem is crazy impressive too, and idk the history around it, but I assume interest for it died off a long time ago. Which is a shame, because having that development environment on a modern (free as in freedom) desktop would be awesome. Objective-C gets a lot of hate, but IMO it's the better answer to a C successor than C++ was, as it's literally just "C with classes" and none of that other bloat. But apparently development for GNUStep is still alive (last stable release was ~2 months ago), so maybe there is still hope that it will take off one day!

marcodiego 5y ago
Take a look at this: https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
pak9rabid 5y ago
Awesome! I ran WindowMaker religiously back in the late 90s and early 2000s. I have very fond memories of how elegant and snappy it was compared to other popular window managers & desktop environments of the time.
incanus77 5y ago
I used Window Maker back in the 90s, and now that I’ve gotten back into Linux on Pi and other hardware, I use it again as my preferred desktop (usually on DietPi). It’s just fast, clean, and easy to configure, as well as port or copy the configuration wholesale.
em-bee 5y ago
i used window maker too. it was actually after i had a chance to work with the real NeXTstep interface, that i started to get disappointed, because as nice as window maker looks, it is not NeXTstep and the quirks and differences in behavior were just irritating.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

It very much resembles early TWM / Solaris / Athena based GUIs. They still exist! You can install TWM. I've used MWM since the late 80's* (mostly on AIX for about a decade), and am glad it is still easily installable on Ubuntu 20.04 That's the cool thing about Linux, you don't NEED your GUI to be a noisy nightmare (looking at you KDE). All my menus are context mouse menus. I don't do start menus, 1 level deep, with fewer than ~8 items, otherwise i'm using CLI or launching it via Xterm. Of course, apps are still at liberty to look like crap!

Apocryphon 5y ago

BeOS really gave it a run for its money, though.

em-bee 5y ago
BeOS looks awesome, and it certainly would have made a great successor to MacOS, but unfortunately it didn't even reach as many people as NeXTstep did. I am hoping that Haiku keeps up its pace and becomes a viable alternative