This library of UI components allows modern macOS 12 apps to travel back in time

IT House, December 25 (IT House) -- Spotify and Slack didn't appear 22 years ago, but driven by curiosity and interest in the evolution of the user interface, graphic designer Michael Feeney painstakingly reimagined several modern macOS 12 apps to see what they would look like in the Mac OS 9 era, according to MacRumors.

To achieve "(mac) OStalgia", Feeney first went back in time, analyzed the Mac OS 9 environment with the SheepShaver simulator, and then created a library of UI components that he could reuse throughout the project.

He then selected a number of apps that were critical to his daily workflow, including Spotify, Slack, Zoom, Figma, TextEdit, and Google Chrome, and mac OS 9 processing of their user interfaces. The results of the Feeney project are impressive, as you can see in the video below.

As for what stands out most in terms of the difference between user interface and user experience, Feeney says.

"While design and user interface trends have certainly changed a lot over the past 20 years, the behavior and appearance of apps (and aesthetics aside, to some extent) are still very similar. After all, it's really hard to replace behaviors that are already installed, such as visual feedback on hover, scrolling to get more content, double-clicking to launch an application, and so on. Basically, because our operating system still acts in a similar way, so does the user interface and user experience of many of our applications. As part of the operating system, both the user interface and the user experience have been greatly improved, and one of the areas is in terms of accessibility. The advent (and improvements) of full voice control, integrated screen reader, dark mode, and more is undoubtedly the highlight of a review of Mac OS 9. ”

It House learned that the Mac OS 9 system was launched on October 23, 1999, featuring out-of-the-box Internet support, including Internet explorer, email client, text-to-speech, and Sherlock 2.0 , a built-in tool that lets users search their computers and the Internet, as well as a direct source for Spotlight in macOS. Apple stopped development of Mac OS 9 in 2001, which was replaced by Mac OS X.

Feeney's Mac OS 9: UI Kit is free to download for use by the Figma community and individual projects.