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There's definitely some ugly bits from that era, but I miss...color.

My favorite example are the icons in the iTunes sidebar, which used to be distinctly colored (and therefore quickly and easily distinguishable!) and then became a dull grey. It looks incredibly bland and it's harder to use.

Now it's split into multiple apps with monochromatic sidebars, which is slightly less boring but no more usable.



I had some firsthand experience of how many people were bothered by the grey iTunes icon change after I released a little hack to restore them. The demand blew through a month of my web hosting bandwidth in a couple of hours, and people kept sending me emails about it for years! Comment from a previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24638381


Thanks! I think I've used that, and a SIMBL bundle for Finder when it became necessary.


Hey I think I used that! That's about 10 years late, but thank you!


I ran into a site I was fixing that used an older css framework.

Buttons had depth and looked like candy…. I really liked them.


Imagine if they kept the monochrome design but gave every icon a different shade of red. It would get us so much closer to the colourful past !




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