6 ms·

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

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.

mk_stjames 4y ago
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.
- Cockbrand 4y ago
  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. I do agree on all other points :)
  - ihatepython 4y ago
    Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.
    - Cockbrand 4y ago
      You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I edited my post above.
  - mk_stjames 4y ago
    Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the first iPod. They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit. As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
    - tobr 4y ago
      Original iPod did use Chicago though! Then when they got color screens they switched to Lucida Grande.
      - philwelch 4y ago
        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.
- resters 4y ago
  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.
- ralphc 4y ago
  I have several Macs that run OS 9, I pull them out just to use the UI at times, I enjoy it so much. It all flows and works together so well.
klodolph 4y ago
Sure, but— 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.
- david422 4y ago
  Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish there was at least a way to make them customizable.
  - natemwilson 4y ago
    You can turn on Increase Contrast from the OSX System Preferences Accessibility section. I do that for this exact reason.
    - david422 4y ago
      Trying it now, thanks!
  - klodolph 4y ago
    By “new trend” are you talking about how the borders got eliminated in Mac OS X in 2001? That trend is old enough to buy beer. Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows had a chunky brushed-metal look.
    - 4y ago
amelius 4y ago
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.
- suction 4y ago
- acdha 4y ago
  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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432 http://morrick.me/archives/8432
dmix 4y ago
I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple: https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manager#Appearance_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...
- JonathonW 4y ago
  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.
- munificent 4y ago
  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.
  - psczvnadfjk 4y ago
    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.
  - tobr 4y ago
    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.
toasteros 4y ago
Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?
- asveikau 4y ago
  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.
- retrac 4y ago
  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.
  - sho_hn 4y ago
    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.
    - kitsunesoba 4y ago
      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.
WirelessGigabit 4y ago
Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...
- philistine 4y ago
  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.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Nope, other 16 bit OSes and UNIXes have them.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    i see to recall america online was fullscreen on macOS 8 and 9.
  - retrac 4y ago
    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.
    - jameshart 4y ago
      HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the menu by just… saying ‘hide menuBar’ in its background script.
      - klodolph 4y ago
        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.
azinman2 4y ago
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.
- eyesee 4y ago
  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.
  - azinman2 4y ago
    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. Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.
    - fzzzy 4y ago
      DragThing
      - azinman2 4y ago
        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.
        fzzzy 4y ago
        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.
truetraveller 4y ago
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.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > 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.
  - truetraveller 4y ago
    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.
    - kccqzy 4y ago
      > 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.
oaiey 4y ago
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.

mk_stjames 4y ago

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.

Cockbrand 4y ago
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. I do agree on all other points :)
- ihatepython 4y ago
  Pretty sure it was Charcoal and not Geneva.
  - Cockbrand 4y ago
    You're right, I mixed up the two font names in my head. I edited my post above.
- mk_stjames 4y ago
  Huh, TIL. I had always thought it was always just up-res'ing variations on Chicago, up thru and including the first iPod. They look pretty similar but now that I look it them side by side I see it a bit. As much as it is the style, it's also that kinda.. not-True-type still-a-bit-pixelated edges look that is the nostalgia factor, I guess.
  - tobr 4y ago
    Original iPod did use Chicago though! Then when they got color screens they switched to Lucida Grande.
    - philwelch 4y ago
      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.
resters 4y ago
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.
ralphc 4y ago
I have several Macs that run OS 9, I pull them out just to use the UI at times, I enjoy it so much. It all flows and works together so well.

klodolph 4y ago

Sure, but— 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.

david422 4y ago
Not a fan of the new trend of zero window borders. I wish there was at least a way to make them customizable.
- natemwilson 4y ago
  You can turn on Increase Contrast from the OSX System Preferences Accessibility section. I do that for this exact reason.
  - david422 4y ago
    Trying it now, thanks!
- klodolph 4y ago
  By “new trend” are you talking about how the borders got eliminated in Mac OS X in 2001? That trend is old enough to buy beer. Although for a while (starting with 10.3?), some windows had a chunky brushed-metal look.
  - 4y ago

amelius 4y ago

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.

suction 4y ago
acdha 4y ago
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432 http://morrick.me/archives/8432

dmix 4y ago

I love the purple color used in the "Platinum" interface theme in Mac OS 8/9, even the scrollbar is purple: https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png https://i.imgur.com/WwFdpJH.png They even offered a crazy "Memphis" art themed option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSLWbFUG_ig "High-tech" wasn't very pretty either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBUgDnPT8Ps https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manager#Appearance_themes https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Appearance_Manage...

JonathonW 4y ago
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.
munificent 4y ago
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.
- psczvnadfjk 4y ago
  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.
- tobr 4y ago
  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.

toasteros 4y ago

Are there any decent implementations of this UI for Linux?

asveikau 4y ago
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.
retrac 4y ago
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.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  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.
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    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.

WirelessGigabit 4y ago

Except for the lack of a proper fullscreen function...

philistine 4y ago
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.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nope, other 16 bit OSes and UNIXes have them.
- genewitch 4y ago
  i see to recall america online was fullscreen on macOS 8 and 9.
- retrac 4y ago
  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.
  - jameshart 4y ago
    HyperCard was a fullscreen app. A stack could hide the menu by just… saying ‘hide menuBar’ in its background script.
    - klodolph 4y ago
      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.

azinman2 4y ago

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.

eyesee 4y ago
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.
- azinman2 4y ago
  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. Back even then I used my desktop heavily too.
  - fzzzy 4y ago
    DragThing
    - azinman2 4y ago
      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.
      - fzzzy 4y ago
        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.

truetraveller 4y ago

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.

philwelch 4y ago
> 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.
- truetraveller 4y ago
  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.
  - kccqzy 4y ago
    > 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.

oaiey 4y ago

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.