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Comment by grogenaut | Hacker News Reader

I had to reproduce wx-widgets on a new platform (PS3) as a port. Doing so and reading the original UI guides for Mac it's amazing how much research went into things like click targets and mouse zones for buttons, scrollbars and nested menus. Windows is lacking here but once you notice it it informs you why many 2010 era js native widgets like nested menus were hot garbage. I spent a month getting the feel on nested menus right by adjusting zones, and a similar amount on scrollbars targets and zones. I dredged up those original mac guides and they were very helpful.

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> I dredged up those original mac guides and they were very helpful.

which are mostly from NextSTEP as described in the "NextSTEP user interface guidelines" first published in 1992 and later by Sun as "OpenStep User Interface Guidelines" in 1996

(pdf) https://gnustep.github.io/resources/documentation/OpenStepUs...

Depending on what the OP mean by "original", these could very well be the Mac guidelines from 1984, which significantly predate NeXT's (which were also heavily inspired by the work of the Mac team for obvious reasons).

You mean Xerox Star user interface from 1981? :)

video from 1982

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q

that notoriously Steve Jobs saw and copied for the Lisa?

> which were also heavily inspired by the work of the Mac team for obvious reasons

[citation needed]

Nope... This was pre-next... This was for the original mac which I tried to code for when I was 8 or so probably around 85 as we had a very earlyac my dad was extremely excited about but left to me and my mom to learn as he couldn't type.

my previous comment about it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34531184

Apple has always been good at copying and (sometimes) improve things.

But mostly they have been good at selling stuff to the richest segment of the population.

Similarly to what Prada did with bags (before becoming a luxury brand focused on women, Prada made bags for the Italian Royal Household).

There's no shame in it, but I don't get why people try to credit Apple for things that have not been invented by Apple.

In this particular case, Xerox and NextSTEP did a lot of research on the matter, that Apple benefited from, because their core business was that: research.

VSCode's popup menus are hot garbage because they don't take those guidelines into account. You try to move the mouse, move one pixel in the wrong perfect direction and the popup disappears.

https://css-tricks.com/dropdown-menus-with-more-forgiving-mo...

Electron....

Yep, I spent an insane amount of time in the aughts to emulate native-feeling menus in JS with submenus and proper focus behavior for both keyboard and mouse.

If only browsers had used the past two decades to provide a comprehensive set of well-behaved, uniform, native-feeling UI controls for 95% of the use cases. Instead web devs still spent a lot of time reskinning and re-implementing basic controls.

In many cases they did I'd argue... They just weren't pretty enough.

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