Result: now you can resize a window from any side, like Windows. which means it gets a selling point to upsell W95 customers to W98.Īpple borrows the adaptable UI stuff from Copland and backports it to MacOS 7. Gaining, oh hey look, what a coincidence, a multithreaded Explorer, because window contents are rendered in HTML. To fight this MS rewrites bits of the Windows Explorer in IE. Why? Because NT 4 is late, and not ready for consumers, but also, because at the time, MS is fighting the US DoJ over monopoly claims, because MS is bundling IE with Windows. Win98 is the same basic OS as 95, but with UI tweaks. Important point #2: this is Jobs aping a Microsoft tactic. This is not some minor trivial point of graphical design. Important point #1: this is adding a lot of customisability to the MacOS UI that wasn't there before. (All this while the new NeXT team are porting OpenStep to PowerPC and building a VM to run Classic in, stuff that has no customer impact or benefit yet. the multithreaded Finder from Copland, and the Appearance control panel that allows skinning of the OS, which MacOS couldn't do before. Jobs cancelled Copland, the planned MacOS 8, and directed the internal Apple team to start salvaging what could be taken from Copland into what was really MacOS 7.7 or something, renaming it to MacOS 8 in order to make it look big and important. (Note: that's why the space is important. The primary reason was to replace MacOS with Mac OS. Apple was in big trouble, bought NeXT, and Steve Job came back. Continuing either of them into the space past the end of the other would imply priority and that was a bad thing the classic MacOS UI thought about this. but in a brilliant bit of UI design, it was at the intersection of the vertical and horizontal scrollbars. Up to System 7.x you could only resize a MacOS (note, again, no space that was important) window from the bottom right corner, where there was quite a big widget for this sole purpose. Which fails to consider what happened in that timeframe. > You might consider the era of thick borders as a 5-year blip on the timeline from 1997 to 2002. There was no "after" MacOS 9 (no space) was the last version. > and they weren’t present after Mac OS 9. Yes, but there are reasons for that which I will go into. I think you are not considering why they were present in the historical context. > The thick borders took up valuable screen space and weren’t necessary.ĭefine "necessary". This strikes me as very much a 21st century sort of comment, which looks at the "what" and totally fails to consider the "why" and the historical context. These widgets came with guidelines for how they should be sized and placed, something which is missing from a lot of modern UI toolkits. On the other hand, Mac OS 8 came with a fresh batch of standardized widgets (Appearance Manager) which made all the apps look better. I remember the Mac OS 8 era as a bit of “excess” that got cleaned up somewhat with the arrival of Mac OS X. This often meant that controls which were supposed to be visible would be partially covered by another window’s border. 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. Modern Mac OS X is actually quite efficient, with zero-pixel window borders on three sides, and narrower scroll bars. Try running at a more modest 800圆00 or 640x480 and it will seem less efficient. 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.
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