Round Rects Are Everywhere
folklore.org
folklore.org
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/7389110/64139289-3...
I still prefer the sharp corners.
I just wonder why developers can have design color palettes like solarized; yet Microsoft imposes its will and subjugates everyone to the same godawful blueness. F** the blueness because I know some corporate peon had conversations like "Yellow is too cautionary, orange is too obscure, red is too angry, purple is too edgy. Blue is safe."
> (looks at username)
Username checks out.
Strangely enough, I stayed in an East Asian hotel (I think with Tibetan influences?) and I remember the corners of the room all being rounded. It just felt better, more soothing? It would be hella expensive to get a craftsman to round all the corners in your room here in the west, you could do it with plaster but it wouldn’t last more than a decade and wouldn’t add any resale value.
E.g. keyboards have a flat or nearly-flat surface so they can be easily cleaned by wiping without leaving any germs behind in a groove, or on an edge.
I suppose something similar makes sense in an environment that could produce radioactive dust.
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/analysis/featurehow-to-choo...
"There are some obvious considerations: all underwater nuclear lights should be crafted from stainless steel with rounded and smooth surfaces for easy decontamination, and have no sharp or jagged edges to reduce the risk of workers tearing safety gloves or clothing. "
I have some experience plastering. Round corners are somewhat easier than sharp ones. The plaster/joint compound tends to pile up quickly in corners and it is hard to skim it thin.
I've always felt it was one of those details that a plasterer could show off their skill, and you are right, it softens the corner in a very pleasing way.
It's funny. Here in the United States, I find houses with bull-nosed interior walls discomfiting. Something about all the rounded corners causes me mild distress. I find it much more comfortable being in houses with sharp-edged meetings of walls.
And also drives home that I don't give one iota of care about rounded vs square.
Windows 10 does a pretty good job too if not for the mess that is finding yourself in a universe of completely different UI paradigms that suddenly lurch from one to another, especially when navigating settings.
I hate how modern widgets don't have shading. They're trying to be modern but it just feels very lazy.
Note how buttons suddenly became twice as big and there was margin/padding everywhere since Windows Vista/7. It's getting ridiculous how much space UI wastes.
Absolutely none of these properties matter for icons, of course.
[0] Or at least some curve with similar tangency properties.
To my subjective eye, squircles often do look slightly better in cases where the corner radius is large-ish.
Round rectangles are everywhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28679496 - Sept 2021 (26 comments)
History of Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7062706 - Jan 2014 (1 comment)
Steve Jobs and Rounded Corners - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3096927 - Oct 2011 (1 comment)
The story of round rectangles - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1636358 - Aug 2010 (77 comments)
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
And watch out, there’s a bear behind you.
An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
That's true for both biological bear population dynamics and movement patterns and for quantum tunneling bears :)
Only if you accept that as true axiomatically.
I agree that every time one of these anecdotes comes up, it’s a shock to remember. Of all the narcissists we have running the world, he’s the one I’ll most fondly remember.
But Jobs is who made the boxes something that non-nerds wanted to have in their homes. There were dozens of computer companies at the time, some (not many, but some) of which had Woz-level engineers (e.g. Jay Miner and team at Atari). But only Apple survived.
Someone once said there would never have been an Apple if there had been only one Steve, and I agree.
Was he a jerk sometimes? Yeah, definitely. But he's not the first genius who's been a jerk. At the extreme, Isaac Newton was a horrible person.
Luckily, we had a spare: Leibniz (and others) covered much of the same ground as Newton.
Other people did other stuff. Once calculus was around, much of Newtonian physics would have come naturally sooner or later.
Eg even just re-doing an analysis of Galileo's free fall experiments with calculus would have gone a pretty long way.
Jobs was obsessed with the customer experience and that was what made him a great CEO.
Did he cared more about the product or the customer than his own people? This is something that you should ask the people that worked with him.
No need to ask around, lots of people who worked for Jobs have gone on the record as saying he was the worst person they have ever worked for. If you ran into him (or worse, had to present something to him), you never knew if you were going to get Nice Steve or Angry Steve. Nice Steve would thank you for your work and politely inform you of changes or refinements that he wanted you to make. Angry Steve would verbally berate you in front of your manager and peers.
He had a set of close associates that he never or rarely treated badly, it is not hyperbole to say that most everyone else got the brunt of his wrath.
Straight from Woz, if you don't want to take my word for it: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/08/steve-woz...
The problem is all the people using him as a reason to praise narcissism itself. And almost never even in people that are genial, since very few people are genial.
At which point we realized they are just a fad like any other design ever was and went to sharp corners and flat design. And back to round corners, and back to sharp, and back to..
Hell, I can see this circle of hell happening in front of my very eyes. I think a year ago someone at Chrome had the brilliant idea to "refresh the design" as happens so often in big organizations and suddenly the tabs got round and we got little round corners around the navigation bar and..
When Google fully-rounded the corners of a rectangle, they added even more margins and paddings. When texture comes back in style, I bet we'll see even more margins and paddings.
The hack is injecting that code in the Finder. A way to do that is to store the WDEF inside the desktop file on a floppy disk. Then, inserting that floppy would be enough to give new windows that look.
The Finder would open the resource fork of that file to get info about files on the floppy and keep it open. When you opened a window, the Finder would ask the Resource Manager for “WDEF #0”, and the Resource Manager would find it (or rather, a WDEF pretending to be ‘it’) in the desktop file. Writing a Trojan for that OS wasn’t very difficult.
Why would Bill say this? Why would his ellipse optimization not be trivially applicable to a quarter-circle?
Also, the question had just been sprung, and literally no one had ever done this before.
The probable answer is that he thought about modeling the rectangle with rounded rects with a single mathematical expression. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15073696
That's probably impossible (as rounded rects are not continuous) but also completely unnecessary as you can handle the quarter circle segments and line segments separately.
Possibly, but that is tricky in the presence of blitting modes such as XOR; the movement you accidentally draw a pixel twice, it would get flipped twice (nowadays, with anti-aliasing, it gets really tricky, but they didn’t have that problem yet)
You may want to draw the four circle segments in one go, too, as that allows you to share large parts of the computations for what pixels to touch.
And you can, in fact, draw the four circle segments in one go, since they will all be mirror images of each other. If, instead of the absolute coordinate of the pixel, you compute the offset from the starting point, then you can compute it once, negate it as needed, and draw 4 pixels on each step.
╭─────┐
│ Yep │
╰─────┘(And natural things aren’t rectangles at all!)
Pyrite would like a word!
other platforms should add more of this.
Also, Susan Kare didn’t know about vector graphics. That’s why all her icons ended up pixelated! But it was… quite iconic at the time.
It was because she had only two colors to work with, black and white, and only two icon sizes, 16x16 and 32x32.
Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson only got 32x32 B&W icons for their own portraits:
https://www.folklore.org/Steve,_Icon.html
> Icons were only 32 by 32 black or white pixels, 1024 dots in total
Susan posted more examples here:
It was only when I later re-read the comment I replied to, with the part about Bill Atkinson not knowing about the border-radius feature in CSS, that I realized what was going on.
At least I hope my note about the pixelated icons may have been of interest to a few.
Thanks for keeping me on my toes!
I remember with great displeasure the bad old days of creating a 3x3 table for every container and jamming a rounded corner gif into each of the four corners to create this effect.
So if it is software, then it's very low level and with darker blacks than anything else on screen, and has a super tiny bezel right at the corner. I'm pretty sure it's a cutout.
This is the key line to me. It turned out it could be done and in less than a day. Even very smart and talented people sometimes need a jerk to tell them to make it happen. Sometimes it backfires and sometimes it doesn’t.
It is similar to how subtle gradients look striped and dirty on many websites if displayed with only 24-bit color: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/issues/91316
The round rectangles are still perfectly round.
But in the example given, the outline becomes fainter on the rounded sections, because gamma isn't taken into account.
In other words, the shape is perfectly correct, but the antialiasing is buggy.
(It also has nothing to do with gradient striping -- that's an unavoidable artifact of 24 bit color that has nothing to do with gamma. It becomes more noticeable if you don't dither, which generally isn't done in 24 bit color, or when compression is bad, like low-quality JPEG.)
But the way posted here would much much faster than that!
This was 1984, so wouldn't have been long after the original Mac but was maybe influenced by it. As far as I know, no other 8-bit computers have rounded container characters like this. I later used PCs, and the CGA text mode had its nice 1/2 line variants, which were good for variety, but they were square so I never found them as appealing as the rounded ones I knew from the Amstrad.
the underlying algorithm to draw an octant of an arc may have been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm
You "just" need to draw 2 octants of an oval at each corner of the rectangle, plus the remainder of the 4 sides of the rectangle, and correctly account for fill/edge flags while doing so. This likely leveraged the existing "region" code in the Apple QuickDraw, but to be sure you'd have to get down into the code or find a more complete commentary.
And then I go off and think some more and outdo myself.
> Bill returned to Texaco Towers the following afternoon, with a big smile on his face. His demo was now drawing rectangles with beautifully rounded corners blisteringly fast, almost at the speed of plain rectangles.
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/ak/images/overview/close...
https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/ak/images/overview/close...
Those don't look like squircles to me. If they are squircles, they're so close to simple rounded rectangles that there's no meaningful difference left.
The keys could, maybe, be squircles, but I'm having a very hard time seeing the outline, the touchpad, the outline of the keyboard as anything other than rounded rectangles.
Try for yourself here: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bfqku2rcw0
That works well for squares (a = b), but for rectangles the corners aren't round anymore, they become elliptic, as in https://www.desmos.com/calculator/bzxyu6ygz3. That doesn't like as nice in my eyes, but more importantly I have the impression that the rounded corner of Apple's rectangles are circular, not elliptic. I don't have any Apple devices, but in screenshots like https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:4800/format:webp/1*oBI... it seems to me the corners of rectangular elements are very much not elliptic. Or certainly not nearly as obvious as in my second Desmos link.
So I don't understand what's really going on. It doesn't seem to me Apple's rectangles really are superellipses.
(And actually the squares in that screenshot look like simple rounded squares to me, not squircles/superellipses. The sides look too flat for squircles. I could be wrong though.)
…which hopefully was still a non-rounded rectangle.