This Apple devotion is really something else..
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
That isn’t obvious. With a mouse/trackpad with a good acceleration curve, chances are you can move faster to that menu at the top than to a menu a few cm away because you don’t have to decelerate when approaching the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Follow Apple's logic, reductio ad absurdum, and you'd have to put every single GUI element in the corners of the screen, because how else could you manage to quickly select them with a mouse? That OK button in the dialogue? Top right corner of the screen. Cancel? Top left. Quick, easy, and nobody could ever press the wrong button. It'll make it faster!
Resizing windows already requires moving the mouse with single-pixel precision. In comparison, hitting the menu bar is very easy.
Also, these menus are very consistent in appearance, functionality, shortcuts, etc; moreso than my experience with Windows applications.
I've seen this in webpages too. You load a page and think there's an error but the "login" button is surrounded by so much white space that it doesn't show up in the browser until you scroll down.
https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that, because it was a kind of odd thing at the time...
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Don-Hopk...
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
PIXIE SIMELEC (1972) on PDP-7 and 340 Display emulator:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/
Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class:
Don> One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ...[dramatic pregnant pause]... HyperCard?
Then I told my own story of how in 1987 HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.
More on the "Mile High Menu Bar":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125835
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672
[...]
One of the most effective menu implementations ever for me was Altsys Virtuoso on NeXTstep's right-click (to pop-up the main menu at the mouse cursor), drag-down to Modify, then drag right to "Punch" or "Union" (whichever was the top command) --- it was a command I did a lot and it was almost gestural, kind of lke a well-done pie menu.
FWIW, the current Windows Start menu at lower-left, while not drawn to the corner now allows one to click the corner to open it, lower-right is "Show Desktop" and upper right closes the current maximized window --- only upper left is at the mercy of whatever app is currently running.
One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself.
That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac desktop was a spectacular achievement. But it doesn't excuse anything that came after it, and it doesn't excuse Apple for dropping it instead of evolving it.
Cyberdog for OpenDoc was another interesting approach to a web browser, built out of components you could embed in documents, but Apple dropped that along with OpenDoc too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiUncy5qW0
Looking back 30 years, that demo is unintentionally hilarious, and it makes me wonder what HyperCard would have been like if Apple had continued to develop it as much as it deserved.
>You always want to end a report with some pizzazz, and these days, nothing is more pizzazz than Java. So over here I have a Java applet, and I want to put it into Claris Works. [...]
>It's actually a little bit different than that. Rather than just being FreeHand it's actually Shockwave for FreeHand, and what we're running here is the Shockwave for FreeHand Netscape Plugin running inside of an OpenDoc Part that can run any Netscape Plugin. So because it's -- [applause] -- it's a little complicated...
Bottlenecking every event and pixel through the Stone Age nascent NPAPI to see Duke waving at three frames a second was not the flex they thought it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
I know because I was writing NPAPI plug-ins at Kaleida Labs at the time, and wrote up the problems I found with the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/netscape/Netscape-Plugin...
>The event handler never gets mouse motion or mouse up events, so I had to track the mouse motion and button release manually by checking the button status in the idle callback.
More about NPAPI's history:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661955
At least Sun's HotJava modular extensible web browser picked a lane, and didn't put that many layers between you and your Calvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Steve Jobs explained both eloquently and dramatically why he murdered OpenDoc:
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97
As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
HyperLook, which was written in PostScript for the NeWS Window System, was deeply inspired by HyperCard, and addressed the "All The Way Down" problem, as well as Atkinson's admitted limitation of being chained to a hard drive instead of networked.
All of HyperLook's property sheets, dialogs, popups, help windows, menus, etc, were defined in terms of itself, editable and replaceable.
The PostScript graphics editor was a component you could use in your own stacks to edit graphics, like a clock's face and hands, and you could copy ("capture") any user interface as editable structured graphics, which made it easy to illustrate the documentation:
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/HyperLookManual.pdf
https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLookSimCityManual.pdf
Even the user interface editor itself was a replaceable component, so you could plug in different kinds of user interface editors, or remove it completely to deliver a non-editable runtime system (like SimCity).
The other thing that HyperLook added was another layer in the event delegation system: Button => Card => Background => Stack => Client. The client being what we would call a "web server" or "distributed application" now, implementing what we call the "AJAX" architecture now.
HyperLook (nee HyperNews (nee GoodNews)):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
I developed SimCity and HyperLook together, each one a forcing function for the other, and I'm taking the same approach now with reincarnating HyperTIES, Ben Shneiderman's pioneering hypertext system from the University of Maryland:
https://github.com/SimHacker/Hyperties/blob/main/docs/README...
I recently wrote this about cloning Photoshop, quoting Alan Kay about old ideas that hang on, and Bill Buxton about unworthy design objectives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052665
Cloning Photoshop is such an underwhelmingly unoriginal and unambitious design goal, like photocopying a Roy Lichtenstein painting, or cloning MS-DOS.
Treating Photoshop's interface as the destination squanders the opportunity to rethink how people create images.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
From a personal email about MVC and Morphic, published here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
https://www.billbuxton.com/natural.html
>THE MACINTOSH AS VICTIM
>Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
>User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
>The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
>I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
>Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
Full clip slightly longer, worth watching.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Or they just skipped the testing and focus groups that should have highlighted that before release.
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.