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WebWord Weblog Posting Posting Date: October 02, 2002 Steal Your Interface: A History (Wired) -- "In this familiar scheme, Apple gets most of the credit for today's graphical user interfaces. New systems like Windows XP, Mac OS X, and KDE or Gnome on Linux are more or less variations on the original Mac interface. But many standard features came from a different, unacknowledged source: knowledgeable users and small, independent software developers. The little guys." (Comments: Thanks Jonathan.)
Reader Comments...
Nice little summary and good to see some of the smaller developers getting the credit. It suggests though that having the trash can / recycle bin change its appearance when there are files inside is a good thing. I've always gone along with the view that it's a bad idea as it encourages users to empty their trash. That then rather defeats the purpose of the trash can if when you do want to go back and restore a file you can't as you've instinctively cleared the can already.
But a lot of those small developers copied popular interface elements from the Amiga Workbench, Irix, Solaris, etc.
True enough, but it's hard to track down the first appearance of some feature, much less determine if the mainstream acceptance of that feature came from that early example. I think it is more often the case that a feature is reinvented. About the wysiwyg menus - showing the actual font for font selections - wasn't that in the original MacWrite? And the spinning watch icon ... maybe they are talking about the tweak of animating that icon, rather than displaying an icon to indicate the system is busy. Because that usage goes way back ... I remember a paper written about it, where they displayed a little Budda icon as a "please be patient" message. Posted by: Isamu on October 3, 2002 11:00 AM
Interesting, that MS does not include *undelete* out of the box. Unless I am missing something ... Posted by: daniel szuc on October 3, 2002 09:46 PM
The Amiga certainly had its share of unique (and patented) UI features. The strength (and weakness from a consistency pov) it held was in the highly customisable environment where any kind of UI could be sculpted — hence many innovative applications were born on the Amiga. Unfortunately the strongest UI for generic desktop applications came third party. Posted by: Chris on October 4, 2002 09:20 AM
I simply miss being able to select more than one menu item at a time... Posted by: Chris on October 4, 2002 09:28 AM
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