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Comment by Mikhail_Edoshin | Hacker News Reader

Jobs wasn't there when they added this in 1991. And it was pretty convenient to use, by the way. I admire your adolescent spirit that manages to see penises in such things. The "spotted" pattern is called "affordance" and it's meant to indicate this thing is to be dragged. The similar pattern was used on windows title bar where it looked like stripes in larger areas and dots in smaller. Later generations forgot what it was for and lost the subtle art of good user interface.

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The dots are a "signifier" that the end of the bar "affords" being dragged by the cursor. Signifiers are the part of an interface that show the user an affordance exists, whereas affordances are the things that can be done. A button affords being pressed, its shape and colour signify that it is a button.

Yes, "signifier" is the right term, thank you.

Did you really just post a comment trying to tell Don Hopkins what an “affordance” is—incorrectly, I might add? There has to be some kind of Dunning–Kruger prize for comments like that.

From a baby's perspective, nipples are the ultimate user friendly affordance.

That was why Ted Selker's Thinkpad with two red Joy Buttons on the keyboard was so engaging. Mammals are hard-wired to interact with them from birth. Too bad OS/2 or any software since Douglass Engelbart's NLS/Augment in 1968 couldn't deal with multiple cursors like God intended.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21757797

>Vis-à-vis mamelons, Ted actually build a prototype Thinkpad keyboard with TWO trackpoints, which he loved to show at his New Paradigms for Using Computers workshop at IBM Almaden Research Lab. [...]

From the thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21757139

>TrackPoint is basically a joystick.

I think Squeak Nebraska can handle multiple Hands. I admit BubbleOS's Yeso doesn't have any provision for multiple pointers either.

The esteemed user interface designers at Apple should have had enough common sense, adolescent spirit, and focused vision to manage to see they were designing something that looked like a grinning penis with a rash on the tip. This is why we have focus groups and #MeToo. Otherwise you end up with things like the Gavin Belson Signature Box III, Slack Penis Swastikas, and Trump-Pence Logos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KbRA2RjhgQ

https://technabob.com/blog/2018/12/01/gavin-belson-signature...

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/nicolenguyen/slack-new-...

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/ins-outs-new-trump-pence-logo/

I can understand why Jobs cut the Control Strip, despite its dominating but sexy name, and prior art in international interface design (Kontrollstreifen), when he returned to focus on saying no, and put bullets into OpenDoc's and the Control Strip's heads.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/focusing-is-about-saying-no-s...

More info from Wikipedia on Apple's Control Strip and its earlier use in widely deployed international interface control systems, aka Kontrollstreifen (Control Strip), Todesstreifen (Death Strip), Handlungsstreifen (Action Strip), and Pieck-Allee (Pieck Avenue):

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

>The Control Strip was initially released in 1994 with the PowerBook 500 series of notebook computers and the PowerBook Duo 280 subnotebook computers, at that point shipping with System 7.1. Later on it was made available to desktop and portable Macintosh computers, beginning with System 7.5.3.

>Apple removed Control Strip in 2001 as a consequence of its move to Mac OS X. Apple initially attempted to integrate the Control Strip’s features into the Dock. After this was found to be too clumsy, most of its features were again duplicated in the menu extras of 10.1.

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

>In the West, the control strip became known as the "death strip" (Todesstreifen) because of the shoot-to-kill orders given to the border guards. The East Germans preferred to call it by the more euphemistic name of the "action strip" (Handlungsstreifen). It was also nicknamed the Pieck-Allee ("Pieck Avenue") after East Germany's president Wilhelm Pieck (1949–60).

> Apple initially attempted to integrate the Control Strip’s features into the Dock. After this was found to be too clumsy, most of its features were again duplicated in the menu extras of 10.1.

Ha. The Control Strip is back today, it just lives in the Touchbar now. You can search in System Preferences for "Control Strip" and you'll be taken to a pane where you can modify the items in it. Notably less phallic, though.

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