In 1982, a young Mac developer turned Jobs into a UI designer—and accidentally invented a new technique.
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The Mac calculator’s original design came from letting Steve Jobs play with sliders for ten minutes
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Its possible. Steve Jobs took his first job at age 13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Childhood
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Which is something they teach in Strategy 101 at business school, and goes to show that a) contrary to popular belief, it is possible to learn something useful from an MBA program; and b) most MBA graduates don’t.
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Websites and apps are the wrong environment to seek pixel perfection, you need to try and adapt to different devices and user preferences gracefully. You may be happier working with print production.
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It was also one of the reasons for the creation of Interface Builder, the old method of directly creating GUI design for NeXT and macOS.
Interface Builder, as a separate app Jobs could run, was integrated directly with Xcode a year before Jobs’ death. As a separate app, you’d also often get fans of some software to send localized versions of your app’s GUI (stored in nibs) to the developers unsolicited. It was neat!
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Reminds me of a video I saw recently about pitching to Nintendo, iirc from a Retro dev (of Metroid Prime fame). If I'm remembering right they'd rather see some basic playable concept they can interact with and get actual feel for than like a fleshed out but non playable presentation.
Early Aqua was an eyesore in its own way, as was Ive's initial flattening in other ways (...which itself was arguably a needed break from the skeumorphism gone wild by then). I'd expect a lot of changes over time just as those languages got.
Heh I remember taking business classes and thinking (and using as examples in discussion) that Apple follows most of these teachings. At this point I just read MBA blame as shorthand for people that are just bad at business. Or you could more generally blame it on late state capitalism and shortsighted selfishness/greed. That's not from the MBA, it's just people being dumbasses!
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Back before NeXT and OS X, in the days of Classic Mac OSes, ResEdit served much the same purpose.
With ResEdit, you could lay out your UI elements graphically, then address them by ID from your code (using, say, Think C or MPW). This allowed for rapid development and prototyping. However, ResEdit was also a lot of fun for end users - they could get in there, customize those resource forks, and mess with things. Changing icons or substituting images in applications was a fun way to "customize" your system.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Designing a web page or app that gracefully responds to different devices, sizes, and settings is its own kind of pixel perfection. Although also incredibly difficult to get just right.
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Software engineers should not design UIs. Otherwise, we'd still be stuck with 8-bit colors.
That said, I wish we could see what the original design was like. We all assume Jobs' final design was the best, but it was simply the one that survived. There may have been good ideas that were tossed out.
That said, I wish we could see what the original design was like. We all assume Jobs' final design was the best, but it was simply the one that survived. There may have been good ideas that were tossed out.
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A good example of design without words too, sometimes designers, people, users, they cannot articulate what they are looking for in words, and must go through a visual or aural process to figure out how something should look, sounds, feel.
Something AI chatbots will never be able to do for us.
Something AI chatbots will never be able to do for us.
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I hear where you are, I do. Android development in and of itself is a massive pita, I find (too many decades of development and design under my belt). If you're coming from web design, then structured/contained hierarchies of widgets should be second nature to you. There is a bit of a learning curve with a new language, but at the very least you can build a visually perfect app for all platforms (Linux, mac, windows, web, ios, android) with a single code base. I'm talking about Flutter on top of google's dart.
You parent-child items just like you would in html, and each item has handlers you can provide for things like hover or click. I've written several and it gets even more fun the more I work with it. Default ui values are sensible, design params are intuitive (aria? style classes and tailwind andncss and nm and..ugh, gross) by default and only become as noisy as you need them.
Give it a look. Huge community, many many articles, great tooling within its own dedicated (and great) ide. I swear within a few hours of a starting you could have a working visual (likely not functional) ui running on your desktop, phone, and web.
Something to think on
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"influential software designs often come by committee"
And the saying goes "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and it really shows in too many products these days. Look up "death of industrial design".
And the saying goes "Too many cooks spoil the broth" and it really shows in too many products these days. Look up "death of industrial design".
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Teaching people how to fish and giving them ownership of their environment…
Why have we lost this, have surrendered it to big corp?
Why have we lost this, have surrendered it to big corp?
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I read it as one of the youngest they've ever had, not specifically one of the youngest at the time. Bit of a weird sentence though.
Because depending on how you define "employee", some of their manufacturing plants in China have probably had younger.
There's always another 14 year old, Tom Williams, who Apple had to contract through a Canadian labour hire company to get him on board. The kid started calling John Sculley's receptionist every day for 18 months to get a job, finally getting a meeting with Sculley and then a job.
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A less-charitable interpretation is that Jobs' final design choices weren't actually any better, but giving him the direct agency to make those decisions themselves removed any room for him to bikeshed/nitpick the (somewhat arbitrary) choices about linewidth, background and positioning.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Easily being able to see where you are in a document, for one. Perhaps the permanent scroll bar size could be a bit smaller, but I much prefer to have one always visible.
Scroll bars are also useful for quickly scanning through very long documents or lists. I probably use the scroll bar to navigate on iOS more often than macOS, for instance when I want to view photos taken around a specific date. It's much faster to just drag the scroll bar unless your library is fairly small, even with acceleration. (It's just really difficult to actually grab the scroll bar without a bit of practice, which is unfortunate.)
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According to this article, Jobs didn’t complain when Hertzfeld built the final version based on his earlier choices. As anyone who’s read Jobs’s biography knows, he would never let his caprice yesterday get in the way of his caprice today, which suggests that his decisions about the calculator, while arbitrary, were made with not a small amount of conviction.
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Ugh. I said something similar when presented with 9 hours of training to use a new ticketing system at work.
Sadly I'm too far down the totem pole to matter.
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There is another interpretation of this set of events.
Not that Jobs had a problem communicating his vision, nor that he had to see see it as a whole to really understand what he wanted, but rather Jobs as a control freak.
By doing the design himself, his ego got attached to the result, and this suppressed his endless criticisms.
I've had ego based development environments like this... Where I needed to get higher ups involved early on in some key areas so they would achieve a kind of mental ownership (or tribal membership) in the result, and thus both defend it more vigorously and not kill it by a thousand trivial attacks (most of which I'd already delt with by myself in the early design stages).
Not a pleasant or supportive environment... Software Development as a political process, rather then trust and respect for the person closest to the design who has spent lots of time thinking about it.
Note design and or code reviews are something entirely different and, when done right (with egos kept well in control) are great.
Not that Jobs had a problem communicating his vision, nor that he had to see see it as a whole to really understand what he wanted, but rather Jobs as a control freak.
By doing the design himself, his ego got attached to the result, and this suppressed his endless criticisms.
I've had ego based development environments like this... Where I needed to get higher ups involved early on in some key areas so they would achieve a kind of mental ownership (or tribal membership) in the result, and thus both defend it more vigorously and not kill it by a thousand trivial attacks (most of which I'd already delt with by myself in the early design stages).
Not a pleasant or supportive environment... Software Development as a political process, rather then trust and respect for the person closest to the design who has spent lots of time thinking about it.
Note design and or code reviews are something entirely different and, when done right (with egos kept well in control) are great.
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In that case I will trigger the scrollwheel/touchpad to activate the scroll bar for orientation.
Got me on that one. There's nothing worse than scratching your touchpad like an 80s Hip Hop DJ just to get to the end of a document.
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I would add a third and separate skill: communicating why something is right. I can't tell you how many critiques I've endured that basically come down to something like: "because my shade of green is just better". When you are working with competent people, that class of answer is just... soul sucking.
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Why does someone have to be younger?
If you collect the 10 earliest and youngest employees at Apple at the time he would've been one of that set.
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Calculators on macOS seem to breed interesting stories.
The story of the graphing calculator that shipped with the power PC macs is still my favourite in all of computing.
It was written by someone who didn't work for Apple but just snuck into the building each day.
True story!
Edit: It also contains one of my favourite quotes ever:
The story of the graphing calculator that shipped with the power PC macs is still my favourite in all of computing.
It was written by someone who didn't work for Apple but just snuck into the building each day.
True story!
Edit: It also contains one of my favourite quotes ever:
Edit2: Heavily Ninja'd... that's how good it is... you go read now!
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Wow - thanks for posting this...
In Jan 1994, when they released, I handed in my physics diploma (master) thesis. I could have used the Graphing Calculator, had to make do with Mathematica instead.
The story is the flip side of this famous exchange, I guess. What preceded the exchange (conveniently left out), and prompted the questioner's scathing "...what you have been doing for the last seven years": Steve Jobs' insinuation that Apple engineers had been slacking off for those seven years, and so caused Apple's decline.
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Always fun when the boss keeps changing his mind. But good opportunity to get creative. Boss kept changing the spec. I figured out he was exploring a trade off. Took some extra effort to present a graph. If he changed the spec, I just interpolated on the graph and could give him the answer within seconds. Made him quite happy. Oh well, all on a day's work.
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Great article from Benj the person that brought Hotline back to the light a while back. Btw it’s bustling now with at least 4 active development projects and I got bigredh back from clutches of domain squatters.
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Everyone rightfully hated Windows 8 for hiding features behind gestures, and then a few years later everyone did the same and called it minimalism. Personally, I also think it’s garbage, unusable design.
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not knowing a window is scrollable at all, because the 5-pixel-wide scrollbar has hidden itself. prevents the user from knowing the full picture.
nothing in your UI aesthetic is more important than the content.
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I wonder if Steve Jobs was a sketcher? Even without a software tool, it seems like he could have grabbed a #2 pencil and a pad of paper and done a quick sketch or two to figure out what he wanted. I've worked with people who were sketcher - my dad in particular, he is a professional engineer (his degree was in welding engineering, but a lot of what he has done would probably be more like mechanical engineering), graduated from THE Ohio State University, got and matained a PE (Professional Engineer) state license, and he was always sketching ideas as I was growing up.
Sketching can allow you to get an idea down on paper in 5 minutes - or use a digital sketching tool with like a stylus.
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I used this technique when working on a vibe-coded project. I couldn’t get the AI to make something look how I wanted it just through conversation. So I had it make a separate “lab” page with a version of the design that had sliders for all the parameters so I could adjust it myself. Then there was a “copy settings” button that copied all the CSS to the clipboard so I could paste it back in the chat and say “use these settings in the real thing.” Worked like a charm. And was inspired by Steve Jobs and the calculator.
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One aspect of design that managers don’t seem to understand is that elements affect other elements. So the background colours is too dark. If you lighten it up suddenly the keys look weird. If you change the keys color, the lettering looks odd. And on and on. This is why when the manager says to change that part and you do, they still don’t like it. Letting Jobs fiddle with it himself and deal with this problem himself, was the best solution. Not only did he come up with something he was comfortable with, he learned a bunch about design.
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That drives me nuts too. A seriously dumb design decision.
In Win11's Settings --> Accessibility --> Visual Effects page there's a toggle for "Always Show Toolbars" but of course many, many applications ignore or override that user preference. Grrrr...
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This is probably because on Windows (and Linux) there are many different UI toolkit libraries that are used. I'm sure that preference affects anything using Microsoft's primary, windows-specific dev APIs.
Not so clear it would affect GTK, Qt, WxWindows, Java Swing or JavaFX, or other third-party UI toolkits, which may "roll their own" UI elements. Also, lots of apps these days are being developed with HTML5, and I doubt that setting affects those (it probably would if Edge is used behind the scenes to render the HTML, unless the devs go out of their own way to create their own scrollbars, or use html+css+js library that does).
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In Windows go to settings and switch scroll-bars to always visible. Drives me insane.
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That's been a long-standing gripe of mine: I can always tell when the software engineer also developed the UI. ServiceNow and RSA admin are current examples. Great tools, but to use Jobs' own words regarding the UI: they're shit.
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devil's advocate but the cybertruck is also an example of the CEO having a vision for exactly what he wants and bending or breaking every constraint to make it.
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