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Busy Being Born

folklore.org

50 pointsSomeone8 comments

I mention this because I keep running into people who have never heard it, but the "infamous" Apple visit to Xerox resulted in a licensing agreement where Xerox was paid in pre-IPO stock for a license to use the elements that they had developed. (Xerox had not developed a "GUI" but had certain elements. AS this article documents, there were 6 years of work that led to the first GUI in the Lisa, though of course some of the innovations were licensed from Xerox most of it was not.)

By the way- When Apple did go public, it was a massive event, and big news. It was the biggest, most successful IPO of all time. It was bigger, for its day, than Google's or Facebooks were. (Though of course coming much later those were bigger in absolute terms.)

I find the evolution of the menu bar fascinating. It's really interesting that the menu bar kind of started as command buttons attached to the windows.

It's interesting that over the last 30 years the Mac has been evolving back to the old version. Almost all apps now have toolbars that replace the functions of the menu bar. People have stopped using the top menu bar. As a software developer, I regularly get feature requests for functions that already exist, because there is no toolbar button to activate them, and people don't look at the menus anymore.

The latest beta version of OS X, El Capitan, even has a setting to hide the menu bar.

I've always thought that the menu bar at the top of the screen was so fundamental to the Mac experience, but it seems we've gone full circle, back to the original idea of command buttons attached to each window...

I wonder if some of the change is simply due to increasing screen sizes and resolutions

The original Mac had a 9" screen. The menu bar was 20 pixels tall, about 6% of the total screen height, and about a quarter of an inch tall. It was necessarily close and obviously related to anything on screen.

I'm writing this on a 30" screen with a resolution of 2560x1600, and the menu bar is still 20 pixels tall. The menu bar is far away from whatever my attention is on at any given moment, and it physically takes more time to get the mouse cursor there if I'm going to actually use it.

NeXT fixed this problem by adding an extra mouse button (NeXT machines therefore had two mouse buttons instead of one like Macs) and moving the menu to that button. Voila – the menu is instantly available at all times. Note that the right mouse button was not used for anything else, it was exclusively reserved for showing the menu of the active program.

The menu bar seemed like a compromise to work with a 9" screen. By time 15-17" screens were common, it was of questionable utility. Now in the age of giant screens, it is absolutely a liability. There's so much room for a Windows-style bar now. Mousing all the way to the top is ridiculous nowadays. I love what Apple does usually, but they are slow to change, especially with UI quirks that are "Apple first" like the menu bar or the no-right click, etc.

Ironically, I am more able to appreciate what the Windows team brought to the GUI after a long time of believing the Apple team got it right first (and better.) There's something really logical about attached menu bars and and dumb buttons (minimize, maximize, close). The Start button and task bar combo still holds up. I don't think the NT team really got the praise they deserved from the tech community. A lot of what they did still stands up today as really good design, imo.

Bill still does a little programming. He's got an app in the App Store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/photocard-lite-by-bill-atkin...

Pity they dropped the proportional scroll bar, then everyone else copied them. Not sure how they reasoned it would confuse people.

I would guess the confusion comes from this: the larger your document, the smaller the drag part.

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