The Anatomy of a macOS App

That first os screenshot made my heart sink; a reminder of how far we've fallen.

How I wish our operating systems still looked like this. Utilitarian, useful. No rounded corners and bubbly icons, reducing the useful space more and more each year.

The incredible quality of Mac hardware is the only thing keeping me from jumping to a thinkpad / omarchy setup.

I'm no fan of modern macOS, but I don't think that screenshot is great. There's too many lines everywhere and too little color, making it unclear where to focus your eye.

(What I am a fan of is Leopard-era Aqua, which is reasonably information dense but uses depth and color to help focus your attention.)

Rounded corners are a utilitarian feature. Human vision is based on edge detection and corners unnaturally activate it more than necessary. It's basically like being continually poked in the eye.

https://folklore.org/Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.html

The link tells the story how Bill Atkinson sped up drawing primitives on early Apple devices.

It does not support the claim that corners are in any way special for human vision. I’m very skeptical on that. AFAIK motion is most easily perceptible.

Ah well, the evidence for my claim is that I just told you. This particular claim is not a Steve Jobs story, but he would agree I think.

I did tell a true and previously unreported Steve Jobs story on reddit the other day and was voted to -10 and someone told me I was off my meds. In conclusion, Steve Jobs is a land of contrasts.

> AFAIK motion is most easily perceptible.

That's how it works for predators, but you can see things that are still if you're focusing on them. It's important to see corners in real life because they actually can poke you. Like a paper cut.

Count the pixels! Percentagewise, the window decorations and menu bar in that screenshot take up a lot more space than the modern equivalent does at 5K. If you're comparing it to to the current 14" Macbook Pro, it's closer, but Macbook Pro still wins - and still continues to hold its own even if the classic Mac is producing a 1280x1024 display. And this even though the Macbook Pro is the space-constraised pocket version! (Also note: you haven't even investigated the scaled display options yet)

Disclaimer: I have a desktop Mac, and I'm assuming the pixel counts are the same for the laptops.

(The window corners weren't always round, but there was a bit of rounding to the screen corners there from day 1: https://infinitemac.org/ - this really struck me when I first saw it, coming from the Atari ST.)

Computers are not just for business and corporate use. Believe it or not, some people use their computers for fun stuff.

I do feel like we’ve gone too far from utilitarian though. I’d like to see more practical UI design.

> It does not support the claim that corners are in any way special for human vision

Your binocular field of vision is a round rect: https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/neuroscience/chapter/vision-ce...

It's a good point, I wouldn't have thought about it in terms of percentages, but I'd like to actually make use of the extra screen real-estate.

Most of the information on the screen is the useless 101101, nothing utilitarian about it

I've been on a 13" MBA for years as my daily, and I'm convinced that the usable screen real estate in macOS 26 is a significant downgrade. The window bezels feel like they're 1cm thick, as if they're meant to be finger-accurate rather than mouse-accurate. Probably telegraphing what's to come

They should be designed as tools, first and foremost, imo. Not toys, not content consumption terminals. There are dedicated devices for those purposes

Oops, very good point - I should have specified I am still using macOS 15.

I love macOS, but definitely do miss the days of a more utilitarian look. The old Unix GUIs like CDE hold a special place in my heart.