Recreating Aqua is the easy part. Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another. Apple's visual OS design was never that far ahead of the curve, but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.
In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.
> they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel, making the entire computer feel more like one integrated system than a toolbox filled with differently branded tools.
Browsing the web on non-Apple platforms was annoying for a few years, with web designers aping the skeuomorphic design-language of whatever the then-current MacOS X release was. Besides cargo-culting, there was no justifiable reason for brushed aluminum or linen web page backgrounds, though I'm sure it looked really great on the designers Apple computer. If you, dear reader, did this when you were younger, I hope you have grown as a person and a designer.
> [...] unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
i no longer use luxurious wood, linen, and metal textures. these did serve a purpose at the time, though. skeumorphic design was a guidepost for a far less digital-literate user.
One of the early DAWs (long forgot the name of it) had an interface that recreated the look of a flatbed with animated reels. It ran on an old monochrome green/black monitor. I saw this in the mid-90s and was already used to seeing a waveform in timelines, so this thing really felt ancient. Apparently, the makers felt sound editors would be unable to grasp a new interface???
Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).
Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
Funny! Users see knobs and think that it sounds better!
Like @walrah says, knobs don't obviously fit mouse movements. I could imagine a touch screen version that makes sense. Sliders match more closely. Little up/down arrows are too small. Utilizing the scroll wheel could make sense.
Finally, a digital number would be easier to read at a glance.
Still, I like analog knobs (sliders are ok). I bought a little Arturia keyboard with ten knobs. Which I haven't figured out how to assign...
I remember researching X11 Input Extensions, when KNOB was a device category. Used those on a VAX.
> Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.
I mean, you know that objectively there is no difference, so to me this would seem like a good filter for what part of your userbase isn't worth listening to their opinions on sound quality. Sort of like "audiophiles" who insist that their $4000 gold plated power cables make things sound better. If you're just trying to shamelessly sell them something you dive in full force, if you actually care about making an objectively better product you give their opinion the lack of respect it deserves.
> If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?
Sliders. Spinners. Anything that can be cleanly interacted with using the inputs available on a computer. Knobs are wonderful in the real world. Virtual knobs I'm operating with a mouse or touch input (screen or pad) suck.
I love all the knobs on my eurorack gear but I hate having to interact with the virtual knobs on the emulated forms of them in VCV Rack. Especially if they don't have clear markers on them indicating position. I own multiple MIDI controllers that are more or less just a bank of knobs specifically to make these things usable.
When I got into developing audio plugins a while ago (wow, what, 20 years ago) the library I used had rotary knobs that needed a rotary mouse motion to control them, although it had the nice feature that if you clicked on the knob the further you dragged away the slower the knob moved.
Since then I've switched to a library where even with rotary knobs you drag up and down to adjust them, which seems easier for most folk.
The advantage that rotary knob widgets have is that they are compact and you can see instantly what the value is set to.
I wouldn't even consider a spinner. They're utterly contentless.
> but they managed to convince developers for their platform to stick to their guidelines rather than reinvent the wheel
This attention to detail and "one integrated system" leads me to my favorite MacOS story:
- Windows and Linux machines would always DHCP for IP addresses
- MacOS would see if you had connected to the network before and just reuse the old IP you had under the assumption that is was probably still valid
- This worked most of the time and if you turned on a Mac and Windows laptop at the same time, the Mac would have a working IP first
As someone pointed out, this was probably one of the reasons why MacOS users would often say it just "felt better" than Windows. The fact that Mac owned both hardware AND software and treated it as a holistic system led to an overall better user experience.
It was one of the worst laptops I have ever owned. The screen died right after the warranty expired. It would take multiple reboot to get the HDMI to properly register so I could use it as a desktop ... to the point I said fuck it and just tossed it.
There's gotta be a bit more subtlety going on here. DHCP leases include a lifetime:
$ ip address show dev br0 | grep -m 1 valid_lft
valid_lft 69133sec preferred_lft 69133sec
It's possible that older versions of macOS persisted the lease details across reboots and reused unexpired leases on subsequent network reconnections.
I am also fairly sure that I have never personally seen any evidence of any OS doing this, including macOS, including when it was still called Mac OS X. I suspect macOS simply brings up its networking stack earlier in the boot process, so the network connection is more likely to be ready and waiting by the time the desktop loads.
Using the same lease is better but still could cause IP conflict if the lease was revoked and reused (though I guess that’s much rarer)
that said I do agree with you that the behaviour was probably not as described or at least not present in current systems because it would wreak havoc on public wifi etc
I’ve never dhcp being any sort of bottleneck so I hope their just doing the regular dhcp thing
If they implemented it well, they could have just sent an arp and check if it was already taken.
Then again, I haven't ever been limited by the speed of DHCP servers... Windows is just dog-slow for a lot of things, so yeah, macos just "feels better" generally. I doubt it was related to just this IP thing.
> Recreating all the applications you would use day-to-day to fit the design language specified by Aqua is another.
This is (maybe tangentially) something I don't understand about the software market today; how come only Microsoft and Apple seem to be in the market for building a suite of native deskop applications, while other companies make one-off applications? Why isn't there a successful company building and maintaining a suite of common alternative desktop applications?
This is also why most "windows style" themes fall flat: you can copy the window decorations, button backgrounds, and icons, but unless your applications are designed to look and work like the OS your mimicking, it'll all just look weird and off.
At this point "operating systems" in a commercial sense are so large that only relatively new entries can afford to rebuild their stock applications to fit the current UI theme (ChromeOS comes pretty close but you'd need to appreciate Google's design to enjoy that). macOS, Windows, and even Linux to some extent all have decades of old software to support so they can't redesign their core GUI stack without breaking everything.
In the days that an internet browser wasn't considered a core part of the operating system, there just weren't as many places to get the design wrong or off-template without Q&A noticing.