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Comment by normloman | Hacker News Reader

Some of you will present this tale as proof of Job's restless devotion to perfecting the Macintosh down to the last detail. I see it as an anal retentive bully having his way. For all we know, the original calculator app might have looked great. It just wasn't how Steve would have done it. So instead he wastes his programmer's time with tedious changes. (The fact that he wasn't finished with just one round of revisions tells me either Steve couldn't communicate what he wanted, or wasn't sure what he wanted.) Was the calculator app really that much better in the end? And were the improvements worth all that effort? Only the original mac team would know. Who knows--The original calculator could have looked better.

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I, too, am skeptical of the Jobs design hagiographies...but this was one of the more palatable examples. In a bigger company, this should've gone to a design team...did Apple pre-Macintosh have a design chief? If not, then the calculator UI is one of those things that could've easily slipped into the low-priority queue, and there's only a limited amount of "oh-fuck-it-it's-good-enough-for-me,-the-developer" features that a consumer-facing operating system can tolerate before it begins to looks like amateur hour.

To be fair to Jobs, it can be profoundly difficult to communicate visual design principles. At least when given the opportunity, Jobs sat down and actually put his hand to the design work. It's debatable whether Espinosa spending his time building a parameterized-calculator-constructor was worth the opportunity cost, but at least Jobs made use of it, which is more than you can say for a lot of executives.

On the other hand, this seems like something that could've been hashed out on a whiteboard or napkin...

Anyway, I think the real hero here is Espinosa, a programmer who took charge of documentation and the user manual, and went about his work by dogfooding his product (Quickdraw in this case).

From the date on the linked page this was before Susan Kare joined the Macintosh project, she did most of the visual design of it.

Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred. 1982! The most sophisticated graphical interface at that point might have been The Print Shop for Apple II....except now I see it wasn't released until 1984.

> Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred.

How so? Pencil and paper were readily available in '82, what else would you need?

Is it surprising that someone might not be able to communicate exactly how they want a calculator to look? It's perfectly believable to me that a person could have their "ideal calculator" in mind, but, having had few opportunities to practice, would have a hard time communicating to a programmer the needed changes.

Who knows--The original calculator could have looked like the one in Windows.

(And why can't it be both relentless devotion to perfection and anal retention? Some people just happen to have refined tastes and the power and intelligence to wield it.)

(Then there is also the question of form vs function, about which I'm getting a hint of you being more on the function end of things. All these questions of "better" and "worth it" can only be answered within some value framework.)

I'm not on the function end of things. Form makes a measurable difference. But some of it's subjective. Steve might have had the perfect calculator in mind, but perfect for whom? We knew so little about usability in those days - it's likely his employees could have come up with something just as good. Just not "his" idea. And if you're leading a team, you can't think like that. You must recognize that other people have good ideas too (That's why you hired them!)

Furthermore, if he wanted to communicate how the calculator should have looked, he could have DRAWN it.

In your rush to attach the pejorative label of "bully" to Jobs, you've missed the point of the story.

The developer made a tool which let Jobs rapidly iterate through a number of ideas until he saw what he liked. There's no reason to believe he knew what he wanted until he could experiment in a low-friction manner for himself. That's what the dev gave him.

This.

You can't iterate through something without parameters and do the same. Look what happened to me: http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg

No, you missed my point. Why does it matter what Steve Jobs liked? The tweaks in this story seemed to stem from Job's personal preference, and not any usability concerns.

The personal preferences of Jobs were possibly the single biggest contributor to making Apple the most successful consumer technology company in history.

No one is going to argue he wasn't a rampaging narcissistic asshole. Even so - it makes no sense at all to ignore how much he steered the look and feel of Apple products, and of late 20th/early 21st century design in general.

He was the only person working in computing with a consistent interest in design. Microsoft and IBM had zero interest, DEC had a minor interest in making nice-looking minis and mainframes, and the 8/16 bit micros often had some product design applied to the casing.

No one else was thinking about software and GUI aesthetics at all.

> Furthermore, if he wanted to communicate how the calculator should have looked, he could have DRAWN it.

The problem here comes in the nitty gritty details. Short of a pixel perfect drawing, there's no easy way to convey what you want in specifics. And then there's the difference between the mind's eye, paper and screen. What looks good for the first two might not work on the third. Getting a parameterized version to modify allowed him to drop the paper/speech part and go straight from mind's eye to screen.

It actually reminds me of a proof of concept of the eventual Interface Builder from NeXTStep and XCode.

> Only the original mac team would know.

Are you aware that the stories on folklore.org are written members of the "original mac team"? In linked story -- by none other than Andy Hertzfeld -- describes Jobs as acting "in his role as our esthetic compass".

Yeah I couldn't tell if "esthetic compass" was a nice way of saying asshole.

Furthermore, the design is terrible - it is skeuomorphism taken too far. Here we are with a ~$2000 calculating machine of enormous power equipped with a keyboard of perhaps 100 keys, and we are reduced to awkwardly clicking a visual representation of a $5 desk calculator of minimum functionality?

$2000? You wish! $2495,—, and that was in the USA.

The keyboard and (optional) numeric keypad worked, too. That gave you a calculator that had a better keyboard than that $5 one (did that exist at that price point in 1984?) and, admittedly, less functionality and lower speed (but you could copy-paste results into the scrapbook within a minute or so, often even without switching floppy's)

Also, this, the puzzle and the control panel (setting the desktop pattern!) were so cute that they ate time like flappy bird or angry birds in their heyday.

But most importantly, the thing had to look that way to make ordinary people the step towards a GUI.

Funny, I read this as "interfaces are best designed in a declarative fashion".

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