Pre-iOS Mac App User Interfaces

[AphoticD]

Thinking back to a time before iOS took off, there were a number of Mac software developers doing creative work with user interface design. I feel that the Leopard era had some of the finest Mac UI design and Core Animation gave developers a huge amount of freedom to leverage GPU accelerated UI layers.

Here are some of my favourites of yesteryear:

1. Delicious Library

2. The Hit List

3. Toast Titanium

4. Bento

(screenshot credits to Google Images)


What were some of the more interesting UI's you can remember?

 

[YaBe]

Apple itself with Garage band and the "wood" sides....

 

[1042686]

Propellerhead was/is great.

 

[bobesch]

Here a few dinosaurs, that made their way from PPC to ElCapitan without both any changes and hiccups ...
Kudo to the programmers!



Inspiration 8IE:
great Mindmapper, Outliner, Diagram-Maker, that syncs with PalmOS . Comes with a lot of old-style os9/win95 graphics, but you can just drag&drop any graphic into the mind mapping-sheet to your convenience...
Dragoman (extinct):
Drag&Drop all kind of graphic/PDF for fast conversion
iCombiner (extinct):
Drag&Drop Pdf-files and graphic-files to combine them to a new file.

 

[AphoticD]

Propellerhead was/is great.

Nice recommendation. I started with Reason 2.5 (and Rebirth) on my B&W G3 running OS 8.6 back in '01 and then moved it onto an iBook G3 800Mhz which handled Reason beautifully. Reason was always inspiring to use compared to other similar sequencing apps at the time (like Fruity Loops on Windows).

I remember the first time I learned that I could flip the rack and virtually patch together gates and LFOs on the rear panels, the interface just blew me away.

I'm not sure if it still exists, but on the old version, I discovered you could actually grab the rack screws and start turning them counterclockwise until they fell off (i think it was only on Subtractor IIRC).

[doublepost=1510792372][/doublepost]

Here a few dinosaurs, that made their way from PPC to ElCapitan without both any changes and hiccups ...
Kudo to the programmers!

View attachment 735939

Inspiration 8IE:
great Mindmapper, Outliner, Diagram-Maker, that syncs with PalmOS . Comes with a lot of old-style os9/win95 graphics, but you can just drag&drop any graphic into the mind mapping-sheet to your convenience...
Dragoman (extinct):
Drag&Drop all kind of graphic/PDF for fast conversion
iCombiner (extinct):
Drag&Drop Pdf-files and graphic-files to combine them to a new file.

That's great to see reliable forward compatibility like that. I've learned that it takes a huge amount of forethought to create compatibility between 10.4 to 10.13 and everything in-between, so I can truly admire this.

In my case, I have essentially blocked off specific code (mostly for bells and whistles) while running on the older OSes and then allowed the code and calculations for environment changes like HiDPI to run on the newer machines. I have also found there are certain features which only work from 10.5 to 10.6, so this is another "platform" to support.

 

[weckart]

All this skeumorphism got Forstall the sack.

 

[AphoticD]

All this skeumorphism got Forstall the sack.

It wasn't the post-Google Maps blunder?

I love all the skeuomorphic design myself. It gives software an almost tangible quality which flat stark design can't provide.

 

[Altis]

All this skeumorphism got Forstall the sack.

Say what you will of skeumorphism, but the Forstall-era UI was very easy and clear to learn and use.

 

[weckart]

Say what you will of skeumorphism, but the Forstall-era UI was very easy and clear to learn and use.

I love skeumorphism. It's the flat and dull/cartoonish style that Ives has forced through that I would love to bury. In dung.

 

[bobesch]

I love skeumorphism. It's the flat and dull/cartoonish style that Ives has forced through that I would love to bury. In dung.

Well, I like both - but when GUI resembles a well-known physical device I'd prefer it over a flat-style.
But there were also some really ugly interfaces loaden with wood-skeumorphism all over the place or kind of silvery, plastic-like, curved-shaped all-in-one-windows wasting either a lot of space or stick everything into a single window. I'm really happy not to see such things anymore ...
(The wooden bookshelf is something, I just can bear, but remembering some Windows-related Ulead or Pinacle consumer video-solutions still makes me sick today.)
Looking back to my first Mac-experience with Leopard in 2009 I can't remember anything annoying in design at all. Even the temporary leather-Ponderosa-calendar-design is something I do like much ...

 

[YaBe]

I miss the bare metal look on the finder.... back then many app had their own identity, nowadays they all look alike.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Bad skeumorphism....

Bad "modern" GUI...

 

[YaBe]

Nice recommendation. I started with Reason 2.5 (and Rebirth) on my B&W G3 running OS 8.6 back in '01 and then moved it onto an iBook G3 800Mhz which handled Reason beautifully. Reason was always inspiring to use compared to other similar sequencing apps at the time (like Fruity Loops on Windows).

I remember the first time I learned that I could flip the rack and virtually patch together gates and LFOs on the rear panels, the interface just blew me away.

I'm not sure if it still exists, but on the old version, I discovered you could actually grab the rack screws and start turning them counterclockwise until they fell off (i think it was only on Subtractor IIRC).

[doublepost=1510792372][/doublepost]

That's great to see reliable forward compatibility like that. I've learned that it takes a huge amount of forethought to create compatibility between 10.4 to 10.13 and everything in-between, so I can truly admire this.

In my case, I have essentially blocked off specific code (mostly for bells and whistles) while running on the older OSes and then allowed the code and calculations for environment changes like HiDPI to run on the newer machines. I have also found there are certain features which only work from 10.5 to 10.6, so this is another "platform" to support.

The way the cables attacched on the back was simply stunning!!!

 

[Dronecatcher]

The way the cables attacched on the back was simply stunning!!!

What's fantastic about Reason is (or was) the totally efficiency of it's coding - you had this fantastic skeumorphism built in, even throwaway but stunning extras like the authentic patch bay cabling....and it would all run on the most basic G3. Sadly, seemed to develop Bloat Cancer after version 3...

 

[AphoticD]

back then many app had their own identity, nowadays they all look alike.

Well said.

I guess this is part of my reasoning behind starting the thread. I feel the desktop as a platform, which allows for almost unlimited, freeform design, has taken a backseat and then been manipulated to adopt to the “porthole” designs of mobile UI.

One common practice with all of the designs I have highlighted above (and many modern apps) is they have adopted the unified window with navigation pane, which is a practice introduced by iTunes circa 2001(!?).

I hope developers and designers can see that it’s about time for some new aesthetic thinking!
[doublepost=1510916615][/doublepost]

What's fantastic about Reason is (or was) the totally efficiency of it's coding - you had this fantastic skeumorphism built in, even throwaway but stunning extras like the authentic patch bay cabling....and it would all run on the most basic G3. Sadly, seemed to develop Bloat Cancer after version 3...

On my first recording DAW in ‘01, I had Reason 2.5 running like a champ on a 200Mhz 603 PPC with 160MB of RAM under Mac OS 8.6. Recording directly into Pro Tools FREE via ReWire and although I had to be conservative with not overloading things, it certainly worked and the UI didn’t get in the way on either a UX or CPU/RAM level.

Kudos to the Propellerheads!

 

[Dronecatcher]

I had Reason 2.5 running like a champ on a 200Mhz 603 PPC

I'd forgotten it ran on 603s...what went wrong, where we now require so much raw CPU power to do what we could do on a fraction of that years ago *rhetorical*

 

[galgot]

Bad skeumorphism....
View attachment 736417
...

Hehe funny that one remind me that (good ) one :

 

[AphoticD]

Just look at the quality that Amiga based composers were able to produce with sequencing formats like Soundtracker. It took other platforms years to catch up to this.

Hell, even the Atari ST can still pump out studio grade MIDI sequencing on an 8MHz CPU

 

[Dronecatcher]

Just look at the quality that Amiga based composers were able to produce with sequencing formats like Soundtracker. It took other platforms years to catch up to this.

Hell, even the Atari ST can still pump out studio grade MIDI sequencing on an 8MHz CPU

Amiga and Atari Mod Trackers are on another level...it's an entirely different approach to making music but when you see what those old skool wizards can do it's amazing...a couple of full blown audio productions on a single 720K floppy blasting out of a computer with 1Mb RAM at 7Mhz..

 

[Dronecatcher]

Skeumorphism In Excelsis...

 

[tevion5]

“What’s going on here then?”

 

[AphoticD]

Regardless of how deep / far you want to get into or away from it, we're still pushing age-old (and deep rooted) skeuomorphic concepts like the "Desktop" / "Springboard", "Filesystem", "Folders", etc. Spatial object design is the heart of object-orientated programming. Every programming object is considered it's own entity, related in the real world to a machine with a role and this concept has further strengthened the skeuomorphic connections between virtual and reality, programming and design.

If Jony's piercing, judging eyes say anything it is "Innovation must come before familiarity". That has paid off for you Jony, and you are a forward-thinker.

The beauty of [virtual] design is it is limitless, beyond the real world and beyond our conditioned imagination, however the familiar is our starting point. Over intellectualizing design causes a shift too far from the real world, we lose the connection and we are forced to replace and relearn our existing skills.

Perhaps skeuomorphism is the lazy man's choice for design aesthetics as applying real world objects to virtual concepts allows for familiar user experience connections and acceptable design stereotypes.

 

[z970]

“What’s going on here then?”

Those eyes strike the souls of all who gaze into them.

 

[AphoticD]

Those eyes strike the souls of all who gaze into them.

Jony Ive Chief [Judge of] Design Officer

 

[Dronecatcher]

Perhaps skeuomorphism is the lazy man's choice for design aesthetics

That's why I put the silly photos at post 12 - sometimes I think putting in a mock version of reality is simply through lack of inspiration.
If it facilitates ease of use (like with soft synths) all well and good but virtual bookcases seem superfluous.

Personally, I don't think Jony Ive is an innovator but he is a great artist and like most great artists he's been great at reappropriating from various sources and corraling them into a cohesive design that we think we haven't seen before.