macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

Mac OS X and Windows had their best design language from 2007 to 2011. Windows Aero and Mac OS X Aqua during these days were truly beautiful graphical shells. Everything since has been a barren wasteland of boring, overly white flat GUIs. The squircle-ifying (and on Android, circle-ifying) going on is just another step in this path towards the eternal uniformity of the heat death of fun, intuitive UIs.

The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite.

On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day.

Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.

I'll die right there with you on that hill.

For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers.

All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels.

The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion.

Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.

Cheers.

I'd say Vista introduced or changed—for the better—a ton of Windows paradigms, most of which still endure. User account control, dwm.exe and the WDDM, improved user profiles, the ribbon UI, and more. Vista had the most pervasive changes to Windows in the past two decades, from UI and UX to fundamental OS primitives, APIs, and syscalls.

Disdain levelled at Vista is unfair—it was a heavyweight OS that needed better hardware than was really commonplace at the time.

As for money now being the end game... I have no words. The stupid Weather app (sorry, no, WebView2 wrapper) on Windows 10 and 11 is exasperating.

What it really needed was more than the intel 915 all too many prebuilts cheaped out using, which intel strong-armed MS into certifying as 'vista ready' when it absolutely wasnt.

What is the Intel 915?

An underpowered integrated graphics that was ubiquitous at the time but not really up to the task.

Microsoft relented to Intel and allowed it to be classified as "Vista capable" despite not being able to run WDDM.

This is a decent writeup of the situation:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-e-mails-re...

I think this offers some interesting thought experiments in [tech] leadership:

* what would you have done in Jim Allchin's position? He disagreed once finding out but ultimately trusted his team's judgement and stood by their decision (isn't that exactly the manager you want to work for?) Yet, look at the results

* hypothetically how do you think Steve Jobs would have handled it, by contrast?

* but Windows is a whole ecosystem with many stakeholders, while Apple is not, so the balancing act between Intel and HP is much more delicate. (Apple ultimately ditched Intel, right? But could Microsoft?)

(edit: clarify some wording)