6 ms·

Some of you will present this tale as proof of Job's restless devotion to perfecting the Macintosh down to the last detail. I see it as an anal retentive bully

Some of you will present this tale as proof of Job's restless devotion to perfecting the Macintosh down to the last detail. I see it as an anal retentive bully having his way. For all we know, the original calculator app might have looked great. It just wasn't how Steve would have done it. So instead he wastes his programmer's time with tedious changes. (The fact that he wasn't finished with just one round of revisions tells me either Steve couldn't communicate what he wanted, or wasn't sure what he wanted.) Was the calculator app really that much better in the end? And were the improvements worth all that effort? Only the original mac team would know. Who knows--The original calculator could have looked better.

patsplat 11y ago
Funny, I read this as "interfaces are best designed in a declarative fashion".
danso 11y ago
I, too, am skeptical of the Jobs design hagiographies...but this was one of the more palatable examples. In a bigger company, this should've gone to a design team...did Apple pre-Macintosh have a design chief? If not, then the calculator UI is one of those things that could've easily slipped into the low-priority queue, and there's only a limited amount of "oh-fuck-it-it's-good-enough-for-me,-the-developer" features that a consumer-facing operating system can tolerate before it begins to looks like amateur hour. To be fair to Jobs, it can be profoundly difficult to communicate visual design principles. At least when given the opportunity, Jobs sat down and actually put his hand to the design work. It's debatable whether Espinosa spending his time building a parameterized-calculator-constructor was worth the opportunity cost, but at least Jobs made use of it, which is more than you can say for a lot of executives. On the other hand, this seems like something that could've been hashed out on a whiteboard or napkin... Anyway, I think the real hero here is Espinosa, a programmer who took charge of documentation and the user manual, and went about his work by dogfooding his product (Quickdraw in this case).
- rjsw 11y ago
  From the date on the linked page this was before Susan Kare joined the Macintosh project, she did most of the visual design of it.
- macintux 11y ago
  Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred. 1982! The most sophisticated graphical interface at that point might have been The Print Shop for Apple II....except now I see it wasn't released until 1984.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    > Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred. How so? Pencil and paper were readily available in '82, what else would you need?
kmill 11y ago
Is it surprising that someone might not be able to communicate exactly how they want a calculator to look? It's perfectly believable to me that a person could have their "ideal calculator" in mind, but, having had few opportunities to practice, would have a hard time communicating to a programmer the needed changes. Who knows--The original calculator could have looked like the one in Windows. (And why can't it be both relentless devotion to perfection and anal retention? Some people just happen to have refined tastes and the power and intelligence to wield it.) (Then there is also the question of form vs function, about which I'm getting a hint of you being more on the function end of things. All these questions of "better" and "worth it" can only be answered within some value framework.)
- normloman 11y ago
  I'm not on the function end of things. Form makes a measurable difference. But some of it's subjective. Steve might have had the perfect calculator in mind, but perfect for whom? We knew so little about usability in those days - it's likely his employees could have come up with something just as good. Just not "his" idea. And if you're leading a team, you can't think like that. You must recognize that other people have good ideas too (That's why you hired them!) Furthermore, if he wanted to communicate how the calculator should have looked, he could have DRAWN it.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    In your rush to attach the pejorative label of "bully" to Jobs, you've missed the point of the story. The developer made a tool which let Jobs rapidly iterate through a number of ideas until he saw what he liked. There's no reason to believe he knew what he wanted until he could experiment in a low-friction manner for himself. That's what the dev gave him.
    - blackbeard 11y ago
      This. You can't iterate through something without parameters and do the same. Look what happened to me: http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg
leejoramo 11y ago
> Only the original mac team would know. Are you aware that the stories on folklore.org are written members of the "original mac team"? In linked story -- by none other than Andy Hertzfeld -- describes Jobs as acting "in his role as our esthetic compass".
- normloman 11y ago
  Yeah I couldn't tell if "esthetic compass" was a nice way of saying asshole.
hn9780470248775 11y ago
Furthermore, the design is terrible - it is skeuomorphism taken too far. Here we are with a ~$2000 calculating machine of enormous power equipped with a keyboard of perhaps 100 keys, and we are reduced to awkwardly clicking a visual representation of a $5 desk calculator of minimum functionality?
- Someone 11y ago
  $2000? You wish! $2495,—, and that was in the USA. The keyboard and (optional) numeric keypad worked, too. That gave you a calculator that had a better keyboard than that $5 one (did that exist at that price point in 1984?) and, admittedly, less functionality and lower speed (but you could copy-paste results into the scrapbook within a minute or so, often even without switching floppy's) Also, this, the puzzle and the control panel (setting the desktop pattern!) were so cute that they ate time like flappy bird or angry birds in their heyday. But most importantly, the thing had to look that way to make ordinary people the step towards a GUI.

patsplat 11y ago

Funny, I read this as "interfaces are best designed in a declarative fashion".

danso 11y ago

I, too, am skeptical of the Jobs design hagiographies...but this was one of the more palatable examples. In a bigger company, this should've gone to a design team...did Apple pre-Macintosh have a design chief? If not, then the calculator UI is one of those things that could've easily slipped into the low-priority queue, and there's only a limited amount of "oh-fuck-it-it's-good-enough-for-me,-the-developer" features that a consumer-facing operating system can tolerate before it begins to looks like amateur hour. To be fair to Jobs, it can be profoundly difficult to communicate visual design principles. At least when given the opportunity, Jobs sat down and actually put his hand to the design work. It's debatable whether Espinosa spending his time building a parameterized-calculator-constructor was worth the opportunity cost, but at least Jobs made use of it, which is more than you can say for a lot of executives. On the other hand, this seems like something that could've been hashed out on a whiteboard or napkin... Anyway, I think the real hero here is Espinosa, a programmer who took charge of documentation and the user manual, and went about his work by dogfooding his product (Quickdraw in this case).

rjsw 11y ago
From the date on the linked page this was before Susan Kare joined the Macintosh project, she did most of the visual design of it.
macintux 11y ago
Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred. 1982! The most sophisticated graphical interface at that point might have been The Print Shop for Apple II....except now I see it wasn't released until 1984.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  > Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this story occurred. How so? Pencil and paper were readily available in '82, what else would you need?

kmill 11y ago

Is it surprising that someone might not be able to communicate exactly how they want a calculator to look? It's perfectly believable to me that a person could have their "ideal calculator" in mind, but, having had few opportunities to practice, would have a hard time communicating to a programmer the needed changes. Who knows--The original calculator could have looked like the one in Windows. (And why can't it be both relentless devotion to perfection and anal retention? Some people just happen to have refined tastes and the power and intelligence to wield it.) (Then there is also the question of form vs function, about which I'm getting a hint of you being more on the function end of things. All these questions of "better" and "worth it" can only be answered within some value framework.)

normloman 11y ago
I'm not on the function end of things. Form makes a measurable difference. But some of it's subjective. Steve might have had the perfect calculator in mind, but perfect for whom? We knew so little about usability in those days - it's likely his employees could have come up with something just as good. Just not "his" idea. And if you're leading a team, you can't think like that. You must recognize that other people have good ideas too (That's why you hired them!) Furthermore, if he wanted to communicate how the calculator should have looked, he could have DRAWN it.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  In your rush to attach the pejorative label of "bully" to Jobs, you've missed the point of the story. The developer made a tool which let Jobs rapidly iterate through a number of ideas until he saw what he liked. There's no reason to believe he knew what he wanted until he could experiment in a low-friction manner for himself. That's what the dev gave him.
  - blackbeard 11y ago
    This. You can't iterate through something without parameters and do the same. Look what happened to me: http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg http://i.imgur.com/rCHiZyR.jpg

leejoramo 11y ago

> Only the original mac team would know. Are you aware that the stories on folklore.org are written members of the "original mac team"? In linked story -- by none other than Andy Hertzfeld -- describes Jobs as acting "in his role as our esthetic compass".

normloman 11y ago
Yeah I couldn't tell if "esthetic compass" was a nice way of saying asshole.

hn9780470248775 11y ago

Furthermore, the design is terrible - it is skeuomorphism taken too far. Here we are with a ~$2000 calculating machine of enormous power equipped with a keyboard of perhaps 100 keys, and we are reduced to awkwardly clicking a visual representation of a $5 desk calculator of minimum functionality?

Someone 11y ago
$2000? You wish! $2495,—, and that was in the USA. The keyboard and (optional) numeric keypad worked, too. That gave you a calculator that had a better keyboard than that $5 one (did that exist at that price point in 1984?) and, admittedly, less functionality and lower speed (but you could copy-paste results into the scrapbook within a minute or so, often even without switching floppy's) Also, this, the puzzle and the control panel (setting the desktop pattern!) were so cute that they ate time like flappy bird or angry birds in their heyday. But most importantly, the thing had to look that way to make ordinary people the step towards a GUI.