Here's the biggest OS X mistake Apple never made: The original plan UI was to take the old crusty crap interface from OS 8* and drop it on top of the core. Thankfully Steve Jobs called the entire UI team a "bunch of idiots" and they used the beautiful tech demo mockups as the foundation for OS X as you see it today. Close call, huh?This wasn't a close call. The design problems at Apple during the years that Steve wasn't there, just goes to show you the boring nature of most programmers and coincidentally, most geeks. They just don't know how to make things look beautiful and more importantly, they don't want things beautiful. Geeks want features, even if it's badly implemented. That's why they can never understand or predict the popularity of anything Apple sells.View 6 replies to this comment (most popular has 16 diggs)-2 diggs by StanislawLem just nowI for one am not a geek. I care about usability over all else. While the old Apple UI looked a little drab, it was supremely functional and could be easily themed with the Kaleidoscope theming app. The OS X UI is missing a boatload of features present in classic. There was an old article on Arstechnica that I came across which summarizes this pretty well: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.arsView 3 replies to this comment (most popular has 20 diggs)+4 diggs by Mardala just nowTry running OSx on a pentium II 233 with 128 mb ram with a GeForce I. Most GUIs were pretty dismal if you compare to what we have now. They did have designers back then too. View 2 replies to this comment (most popular has 7 diggs)+7 diggs by solid12345 just nowI had a conversation with a friend who is a web designer, myself being a graphic designer.I complained that clients want me to program them a website as well as design it. He complained they want him to design a website as well as program it. We both agreed clients are assholes who can't recognize sometimes it is better for 2 men to do the job instead of expecting us to be a jack of all trades, specialty people!View 2 replies to this comment (most popular has 3 diggs)+2 diggs by jabelar just nowYeah, it is pretty much impossible to "engineer cool". Coolness has to be inspired and driven by vision. A committee of engineers won't come up with the right thing. Usability can be improved a lot through thoughtful design process, but still not an engineer's forte. I'm an engineering design manager, so I know ...so that explains why linux is so uglyIt isn't so much about looking good as it is to being functional. True OSX has a LOT of eyecandy, but its simple things. For example if you put a computer to sleep in windows/linux, and you wake it up (by say opening the lid) it takes a little while and you can tell that it is opening up. A friend of mine didn't even realise that the apple went to sleep when he closed the lid. Actually he realised that it went to sleep but he just thought it was standard computer behaviour. I had to prove to him that my ubuntu could keep downloading something even with the lid closed (to show that a task kept on running). The closing and opening of the lid is so fast and smooth on a mac that a user cannot even tell when exactly it is waking up. I'm not saying this is a good/bad thing, it just is. All I am saying is that it is how everything fits together. BOTH my parrents have gone from regularly calling me up to fix their computer (windows usage) to never calling me about a computer problem (since they got a MacBook Pro). That says it better than anything else by far.Alright, I'm sort of confused I guess. All 5 of us Mac users that were interested in knowing about Apple's future projects know that there was a precursor to OS X based off of NeXT that was not OS X at all (and had a cooler name, Rhapsody). I assume that's what they're talking about here, because that WAS around the OS 8 days, whereas obviously OS X was developed in the OS 9 era. I think I still have several builds of it even. For developer purposes only. Of course.
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