“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription

Hi, thanks for your work. Regarding: "I’ve listened to this bit many times and I’m pretty sure Tesler says ‘foils’, and I guess he’s using the term in its architecture‐related meaning of “a leaf‐shaped curve formed by the cusping of an arch or circle” — But I welcome any correction from native English speakers."

He surely talks about preparing the "transparency" foils for presenting them using the overhead projectors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(projection)

"A transparency, also known variously as a viewfoil, foil, or viewgraph"

That's how the presentations were done at that time, using the:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overhead_projector

The good side was that you were able to prepare the foils before but then annotate any (i.e. write or draw on it) during the presentation, which had its own dynamic -- it could have been a result of the interaction with your viewers -- like while you were answering some question.

The foils were even used in the very talk you transcribed: https://youtu.be/OW-atKrg0T4?t=1295

Regarding the foil reference, it’s actually a reference to something that technology has made obsolete. Back then people used to use overhead projectors for presentations, and the sheets of transparent film were called foils. There were sometimes hand drawn with markers, people could have used LisaDraw to print foils. Later on programs like Aldus Persuasion and Microsoft PowerPoint were used, but for a long time their output was printed rather than used directly like most people know today.

This was also replicated by IBM CUA standard so Microsoft Windows had it from day one, too.

The current HIG still says "Use an ellipsis whenever choosing a menu item requires additional input from the user", but doesn't elaborate on this. Even Apple seems to have abandoned their earlier conventions and mostly just resorts to "use an ellipsis if the control will show another window/dialog".

Apple's guidelines used to make it clear that (a) if the only additional input was a simple confirmation, it shouldn't get an ellipsis, and (b) if the whole point of the menuitem/button was to show a window, then it doesn't need 'more input', so it shouldn't get an ellipsis.

Both of these are violated by the Mac's built-in applications in Mac OS X, which is a shame.

> The color that is most difficult to distinguish is light blue, which should be avoided for text, thin lines, and small shapes.

In hindsight kind of ironic given how much light blue/blue is used in 'modern' interfaces.

Yes, when it comes to icons, pictures, non-trivial logos etc. the "pixel" style has always been the most effective way of coming up with something that will look appealing even with minimal effort. Even on modern screens, a properly-upscaled, pixel-based icon usually looks a lot better than the symbolic, vector-based look you most often see today, while taking a lot less time and effort to create. You can see this very well on other user interfaces from the 1980s and 1990s too, it's not exclusive to the Mac.

(And there's a sensible reason for this, too - the "pixel art" style is unique in letting you set a uniform ceiling on high-spatial-frequency content and subtle color changes within a picture, while preserving unbounded choice within these constraints.)

I have a soft spot for System 6, because it is the epitome of the classic, classic version of Mac OS--black and white, minimal, but with all the essential elements of a modern GUI, before all sorts of new complexities started to be added in in System 8 through OS 9.

This is kind of how I feel about Windows 95. I remember when there was only DOS, and then Windows 3 came out, and then Windows 95 which seemed like the very perfection of UI. Since then it seems to have gone downhill. Not very many true innovations, which is partly why I started experimenting with desktop Linux and finally switched to Mac OS X 10.4, because it felt like the final evolution of the desktop. Nowadays, nothing seems quite ideal, but Win95/98 will always seem like the epitome of desktop UI, the perfect union of form and function. Probably just nostalgia and rose colored glasses though in all honesty.

I still despise the Dock. I even figured out how to hack it to make it invisible so I could use DragThing instead. Over time those hacks stopped working and DragThing ceased to exist (or at least I think it did) so now I just live with the stupid Dock. Thanks Apple.

Well, there's always that quote from Bill Gates when Jobs accused MS of stealing Apple's GUI design:

“Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” - Bill Gates

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/824084-well-steve-jobs-i-th...

So the reality is that they copied it, it just didn't happen in some magical visit to wonderland.

Not a story it's a fact of history. Xerox PARC is the lab where Xerox invented several parts of what defined computers up to today (the window oriented gui with mouse, the laser printer, ethernet,...They're even credited for invented the wysiwyg text editor, so basically Word), inventions that were then completely ignored by Xerox while the other companies around jumped on them. Bill Gates is much more open about how the Microsoft and Apple gui was copied / stolen from Xerox, but then again he and Microsoft never had the "we are the first / we invented it" thing that is so important to Apple mythos.

Reading about Xerox parc is super weird though because it feels like the place was handled the way you expect a publicly funded place to be, being so open to share their finding with competitors and all. Truly a golden era, today those are much more closed, even places like MS Research.