The Original Macintosh: Calculator Construction Set | Hacker News Reader

The Original Macintosh: Calculator Construction Set

folklore.org

44 pointsjumpcut14 comments

Sounds like Steve Jobs was a terrible micromanager. At least in the realm of UI design. Now maybe he had to be, if there was not enough UI experts on his team. But in any other situation, I can imagine Jobs' antics getting tiresome (and inefficient.)

Nobody was a UI expert at the time.

Wrong. Jef Raskin wrote the book on interface design. And he was on the original Mac team.

Love it or not, but this masochistic attention to details is what sets up Apple from the rest in the public eye.

Attention to details and micromanagement are not the same thing. You can have one without the other (Just hire devoted UI designers and hold them to a high standard).

And before we forget, the first macs failed to take the tech world by storm, and it wasn't until the iPod that Apple became silicon valley's golden boy.

Are you sure about your last point ? I was a kid so I can't be too certain, but the graphical (photo, movies, a bit of architecture, not 3d though) industry was heavy on Macs quite early on. Even music studio used Mac workstations (with additional audio hardware).

Apple was big in the 80's, no doubt about it, but they were small potatoes compared to the behemoth they are now.

As their market.

Macs had success in the education markets and among artists / filmmakers / musicians. That's a small market. Despite their advanced hardware and mature interface, early macs lost to PCs because PCs were cheaper and more open (software could run on any IBM compatible machine rather than just macs).

Xcode 6's additions to Interface Builder allow for similar tools to be built now. Here's a great NSHipster article that details a modern take on the Calculator Construction Set:

http://nshipster.com/ibinspectable-ibdesignable/

I'm surprised it has taken them this long to get something like that into Xcode.

First point I would like to make is that if they had UI standards in place, then this guy wouldn't have had to waste so much time getting it to look right.

My manager does this all the time. He gives me very incomplete specs, if any at all, and always has a bunch of things he wants changed on the first draft. I usually feel that his changes ruin some of the aesthetics I was going for, adds in more complexity, and runs slower. I'm a minimalist, and lets just say he loves buttons everywhere ala Photoshop style.

I barely fight for my designs anymore because this collaboration style gives him more power and because he will get most of the blame if it fails.

First point I would like to make is that if they had UI standards in place...

This was 1982.

Especially when talking about Apple, I'll guess they had visual guidelines (Mac OS X ones were very extensive) before other people thought about it.

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