Commenters divide on whether consistency or distinctiveness matters more
4 Sep 22 11:27 PM · 1d ago · 3 comments · 1 source · development 4 of 4
Discussion emerges over whether macOS should prioritize consistency with web and existing user training over platform-distinctive custom UI. One commenter prioritizes consistency and web familiarity; others express nostalgia for System 7 and old-Mac aesthetics that stand apart from web norms.
“I place no value (actually, a slight negative value) on the ability to do things in the UI that are so fancy that no other system can easily emulate them.”
mchermBrent Simmons Developer, Inessential authorApple Platform vendor
The whole story postscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
What people said 18 voices · verbatim
-
Apple is in a weird place. They clearly wanted the Mac to die around 2017. They were doing everything they could to effectively sabotage the platform, from letting hardware just sit on the market for too long, not fixing the broken keyboard for years, stripping off all the ports for the Mac. The only stuff coming to MacOS were basically ports of…
-
N
interesting take on native versus non-native user interfaces on macOS: https:// inessential.com/2026/09/22/tha t-about-wraps-it-up-for.html the obvious response is that it’s funny to have to ask if people care if software they’re using looks and behaves the same as other software they’re using. they don’t. of course they don’t. they use computer…
-
I think that was largely a coincidence. There were also a lot of ex-NeXT and ex-early-Apple people who really understood design that reached retirement age in the last 10-15 years. If you were 30 when NeXT was founded, you'd be 65 in 2020. My impression was that Apple wasn't good at explaining to new hires *why* things were the way that they were…
-
P
https:// inessential.com/2026/09/22/tha t-about-wraps-it-up-for.html
-
I fully agree with your assessment. It started to go downhill fast in 2012-2013, coincidentally right after Tim Cook became CEO. I can support this with first hand anecdotes from Apple employees from that time: So one of the first things Tim Cook did was kick out Scott Forstall (extremely underrated guy, definitely read up on him) in 2012, who at…
-
> Apple's Music.app feels like a web view (is it?) I think Music.app might actually be one. They have a [web version](https://music.apple.com/) that looks nearly identical, and the “Home” tab simply doesn’t load without an internet connection! (Which is annoying, because some things that don’t need internet—such as recently played—are on there.)
-
I wish there were, but they all seem to fall in the uncanny valley in some ways. I have an old attempt of mine at doing an X11 window manager with System 7 titlebars and a global menu bar. It looks pretty good, but I never finished it, and I really don't feel like converting it to a Wayland compositor.
-
the web one appeared years later. I believe that the macOS and Windows apps are fully native using something called JetUI/JetEngine. Until you get to the old iTunes store, that's obviously web.
-
I'm pretty sure a lot of the design was enforced by Jobs (either through respect or intimidation) since when he died bad decisions started to creep in, picking up the pace over the years.
-
Aw it would be so good if someone could just write a Mac OS 9 like GUI and slap it on top of a FreeBSD fork or something. ;)
-
> I found it doesn't scale well to complex projects or play nicely with version control. I'm not surprised. That's probably a sharp edge I just didn't hit because at that point I was flying solo (so my projects' complexity was limited in that way) and my idea of version control was a `.sit` file and a changelog backed up to an external hard drive…
-
I care a lot about usability in my UI interfaces, and I put some value on consistency (but it should be consistent not just with other Mac apps but also with "the web", which is where I spend much of my time, and with "old stuff" which I have spent years getting trained on). I place no value (actually, a slight negative value) on the ability to do…
-
> the level of developer effort was higher for the stock Mac app This seems to be the case for native desktop GUI development *everywhere*. It is genuinely easier to cough up an Electron app on Windows than it is to go through the ceremony of WinUI2/3 or even Win32, unless you really want to fill in `struct` after `struct` and pass a dozen…
-
The project manager GUI metaphor seen in CodeWarrior and other Mac development packages like Lightspeed C / Pascal is a decent way to get started, but I [found](https://www.metamage.com/text/relix/origins.html) it doesn't scale well to complex projects or play nicely with version control. > if there were a really good Mac OS 9 theme for Plasma, I…
-
Yeah, bad engineering was creeping in even while Jobs was still at the helm. Those of us watching it happen described it as Apple "hiring random Joe off the streets to write code", and slowly supplanting the dedicated and highly skilled engineers. Interesting point about the retirement falloff, I hadn't considered that before.
-
Rounded corners in Cocoa windows go all the way back to 10.7. In windows that display an emulated screen, I resorted to adding a "bezel" around it so that the corners would clip the bezel and not the screen pixels. There's no reason a delightful look-and-feel has to be chained to a baroque implementation.
-
> It even cuts off corners of images. Who thought that was a good idea? So say we all!
-
Nice catch! I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't spot that. :-)
All 4 developments of Apple's macOS UI loses its design edge as Liquid Glass looms →
Hacker NewsLobstersMastodon