Keith Ohlfs, NeXTSTEP Designer, has passed away | Hacker News Reader

Keith Ohlfs, NeXTSTEP Designer, has passed away

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Rest in peace, Keith. I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the NeXTStep interface and general look.

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Anyone notice some visual parallels between the icon aesthetic since El Capitan and Keith Ohlfs's icons?

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This guy recreated the NeXT icons (with some creative liberties):

http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1380

http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1410

no wonder, as MacOSX/OSX/macOS is the direct successor of NEXTSTEP (the OS), when Steve Jobs came back he managed that Apple buy his company. From Interfacebuilder (nowadays XCode) to Mail, several things in early MacOS X 1.0 server looked similar to the previous NEXTSTEP version (decorated with a MacOS 8/9 theme). http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html

Compare yourself, see the "Apple MacOS "X section:

http://toastytech.com/guis/indexapple.html

And if you've ever wondered what the NS in the Obj-C libraries stands for...

Do you know of an icon set conversion of those that would work with gtk3? Even most icon themes that work with gtk2 are incorrectly structured for gtk3, with wrong icons display for, say, +/- controls. Using the ugly Adwaita set because it's the only complete and working one. The Haiku icon set also only works with gtk2.

Every new release of (mac)OS( X), I rush to see whether the Grab.app creepy eye camera[0] has been replaced, and every time I breathe a sigh of relief. Sadly though, a few versions ago it stopped following the mouse cursor.

0. https://imgur.com/a/xT3Od

Nice easter egg! I just checked it myself. Although the eye doesn't "follow" the cursor, it still animates when you move the cursor, if you choose Capture -> Selection or Screen, but not if you Capture Window.

El Capitan here, creepy eye is still creepy and following my cursor around. Don't have Sierra machine to test at the moment.

still present in sierra.

It doesn't follow the mouse pointer.

Does anyone know of a macOS equivalent of xeyes?

You have to select "selection" mode, the others modes don't follow.

My (20 seconds) experience: In "selection" mode there is an eye and it moves when my mouse moves, but it does not follow the mouse pointer. For example, I could move my mouse to the right, and the eye will go both left and right, or I could move my mouse up and down and the eye will still go left and right.

Me too! It's one of the first things I check when upgrading. I was worried it wouldn't survive the first Retina version of Lion and then the flattening of Yosemite, but nope, it's still going strong. I hope they're leaving it in as an Easter egg intentionally.

I had no idea that Grab.app was still around, because Preview.app does mostly the same thing. I'd guess it is hanging around as a backward-compatibility thing.

I remember speaking with him once, not knowing he was at a competing company, and first, thanking him for the excellent UI I had the pleasure to use (I had a NeXT machine on my desk for about 8 months at a job I was at); then asking him if he was available for work (he wasn't).

Gracious guy, and I believe today that the NextStep v3.3 GUI was about the perfect GUI even today; I miss it.

I have to agree. To this day, I still prefer the NextStep UI to the OS X UI.

There were giants in the earth in those days.

Yes, it was called "NeXT Cube 040 Turbo with NeXTDimension board" and it had a Motorola 68040 @ 33Mhz, with a hardware accelerated NeXTDimension board that could run 24bit or 32bit color and had a dedicated i860 or i960 CPU running the Display PostScript interpreter on the card itself.

I think, you could take such beasties all the way up to 128MB RAM.

His NeXTStep user interface also strongly influenced Windows 95.

For a long time Keith had a web site called pixelsight.com. It used a NeXT computer and the display postscript rendering to generate images from options you could select on the web page, you could use it to generate buttons and other types of icons. It was probably one of the first uses of a web server as a front end for a program.

I was extremely lucky to be able to work side by side with Keith at Montage Studio. I am grateful for all Keith has taught me and all he has shown the world. I will always remember the late nights we spent together. My condolences to the Ohlfs family. Rest in peace Keith.

I loved his folders and icons. For a number of years I used the NeXT icons on my windows box at work. RIP good sir.

For some reason, the string around the folder icon seemed brilliant to me. It was the kind of thing you could only do in the kind of giant icons they had on NeXT.

The converted font did look pretty good on Windows. I wish I knew who I got it from, but this is way back in 96. I still have my NeXTSTEP and OpenStep discs. The ugly blue of the current plain icons makes me long to figure out how to put them on my Mac again.

The NeXT interface was wonderfully designed. Back in the day, its competition was Openlook and Motif, plus the classic Mac desktop and whatever Windows and OS/2 had at the time -- it was really a wonderful, integrated, beautifully executed desktop that made sense soon as I first sat down to use it.

Haa 52, damn young...

NS icons were unique, just enough shine and hue to compliment the "dull" (some would perfectly non distracting) widget theme.

Thank you for the dreamy eyes you got me.

I worked with Keith at WebTV and besides being a fabulously smart person to work with, he was also a super nice and gentle soul. Rest In Peace Keith.

Anyone happen to know the cause of death? 52 is quite young.

Heart attack.

That's very sad. He was a hero of mine in the NeXTStep era. I always figured I'd run across him sooner or later but time ran out...

Hm, do you guys know any doctors that custom tailor lifestyles and treatments for the sedentary lives of software engineers?

I often times find my inquiries dismissed because I'm young and slim.

The Apple Watch has done well for me. Closing the activity rings gamifies exercise so I actually do it. I caught that you're thin, but to illustrate how much activity that is, I've lost 12lbs in about 4 months. I was skeptical about the Apple Watch but I was reeled in reading that Jim Dalrymple lost 40lbs closing activity rings.

As far as doctors go, your average MD only knows how to traverse a sometimes complicated diagnostic tree and prescribe medication or refer you to a specialist. They look at you and say you don't have a problem.

You might consider seeing a Doctor of Osteopathy (DO). Their discipline focuses on nutrition and on ensuring your body is functioning properly. Which results in treating problems at the source rather than mitigating symptoms. And they can always break out the prescription pad if needed.

My wife has benefited greatly under the care of her osteopath. For example, she had eczema from her fingertips to her shoulders on both arms. Her osteopath put her on the GAPS diet, which cleared it mostly in about a week. To get rid of it completely the doctor put her on the Autoimmune Paleo Protocol. After about a year, she resumed a normal diet and has been fine. An MD would have prescribed steroids on an ongoing basis, likely for the rest of her life. And eventually prescribe more meds to treat the side effects of long term steroid use.

I am not a doctor, but speaking from experience, the one thing you want to be strict about is sleep.

Get plenty of sleep and make sure your sleep routine is mostly the same every day of the week.

The NeXT had such a clean aesthetic, even on the original B&W displays that were limited to just four shades of grey. I still use the house icon from the later color systems on my Linux desktop.

I cobbled together a NeXT-compliant Intel box in '95 so I could get NeXTSTEP 3.2 installed. What started it all? An old BYTE magazine article that featured a screen capture of NeXTSTEP. It looked so good that I just had to try it out firsthand.

This thread makes me feel like I'm on the old slashdot, in a good way. :)

Still have my Turbo NeXTstation. Beautiful UI, beautiful machines.

Would be interesting to read a book related to this topic. Not about how to design user interfaces, but something that would tell more about designers like Keith and their work. Examples and then commentary by the designers. Any pointers?

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