I never knew I’d care so much about the Mac’s settings design until I stumbled upon “Frame of Preference”

“Frame of Preference” is a beautiful website that chronicles the history and evolution of the Mac’s settings design in exquisite detail with interactive features.

You never think much about modifying the Mac’s system settings in a central place, organized into various sections. In System Settings on your Mac, you can click various switches and toggles, drag sliders and so forth to change various options. But there’s much more to managing system settings than meets the eye.

The Frame of Preference website chronicles various versions of the Control Panel, System Preferences and System Settings apps. It’s a point of reference for not only developers specializing in user interface designs but anyone interested in Apple’s approach to managing dozens of system settings.

This website details the Mac’s settings over the years

The site covers a history of the Mac’s settings spanning 1984 to 2004. The evolution of these settings interfaces is covered in exquisite detailed, showcasing how the aesthetics have changed over the years. Some sections even include a nice closeup of a Mac accompanied by a video tour of its settings.

William Gallagher, AppleInsider:

And that focus on the settings or control panel is an example of how a detail illuminates the whole. You can see Apple itself growing and changing, you can see the aesthetics of different designers over the years. Plus you can be reminded of WindowShade, the Mac OS utility from back before it was macOS, and back before it was OS X. It was a utility that let you roll up a window into its titlebar, and roll it back down again when you needed it.

The site even lets you interact with each Mac’s settings by clicking the Details button and choosing actions that play as video sequences. You can also do this in the emulators that the website runs through infinitemac.org.

Old Mac OS versions used an app called Control Panel to manage various system features and setting. With the introduction of Mac OS X in 2001, Control Panel was replaced with a new app, called System Preferences, before itself being supplanted by System Settings in macOS Ventura in 2022.