12 ms·

Make sure you read the article not just the headline - this person actually NAILED it (not ironically): > Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why n

Make sure you read the article not just the headline - this person actually NAILED it (not ironically): > Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Instead of showing an ordinary menu with a list of toppings, show a picture of a pizza with the toppings clustered on the side. Let teen-agers and college students build their own pizzas on-screen. Present a palette of toppings and let people place their mushrooms and green peppers and pepperoni anywhere on the pizza they want. The real pizza is customized accordingly. In other words, computer-aided pizza engineering. > This is precisely the sort of interactivity that computers and networks are good at. > [...] > Of course, this network designability concept easily extends to bouquets of flowers, boxes of chocolates, fruit baskets and the $6.85-billion annual market in mail-order clothes shopping. It would be perfect for all kinds of gift giving.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sct202 7y ago
It's funny they mentioned flowers, when today most online flower delivery services deliver bouquets that are often don't even look inspired by or related to the picture they put online.
- GrumpyNl 7y ago
  You mean like the hamburger shown at the menu and the hamburger you get for real.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  This is true. It's gotten so bad that I don't order flowers online anymore. I can't count the number of times I've ordered flowers online and the bouquet showed up frozen, freezer burned, or dead in a FedEx tube mailed from the other side of the country. Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order. I've never been disappointed this way.
  - notzuck 7y ago
    I've never been disappointed with flower delivery! Keeping my fingers crossed after reading your experiences.
sli 7y ago
That first paragraph you quoted is certainly prophetic but it also feels like it's dripping in bemused sarcasm at the novelty of the internet.
codingdave 7y ago
If that was written in 1994, it was 8 more years (2002) before Domino's had a visualization of your pizza online. I don't know when other chains did it. If you really want to get a sense of how long ago that was, we coded the Dominos Pizza builder in both Flash and Javascript... because not all browsers had great Flash support.
- badrequest 7y ago
  Wait, are you saying you were on the team that built this? Any good blog posts on the subject?
  - codingdave 7y ago
    I worked for the consulting company that partnered with them to re-brand and re-code their web site in 2002, yes. It was long ago and while it was cool to have done a site that gets that much traffic, it was a run-of-the-mill consulting project, so no, there isn't anything written up about it.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      That's one small step for a consultant, one giant leap for pizza eaters. While maybe not interesting from a technical standpoint it might still find a big audience among non-programmers.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Sun Microsystems had pizzatool in 1990: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
  - wil421 7y ago
    Wow looks like a sys admin made that UI. I knew a brilliant sys admin who loved Solaris and still had it running under his desk. All the forms he designed were way too busy and all over the place. More options than anyone could possibly use.
MauranKilom 7y ago
This gets awkward when you would have to distribute unequal pieces of e.g. chicken. Although I guess you could make a live "reverse claw machine" for added entertainment...
- klyrs 7y ago
  Ye gods this is a horrible concept, so let's develop it further. After you've assembled your pizza with the reverse claw machine, you need to direct a spatula under the pizza, and into an oven. When your pizza is done enough, you use the spatula again to drop it into a box. Then you get a box-claw machine which you use to place your fresh pizza-in-box onto a delivery drone. Make sure it's balanced! Finally, you're granted control of the delivery drone, which you can fly to your house. What could possibly go wrong?
  - Igelau 7y ago
    Pizza is being forged. 12 hrs remaining. Get it right now! Cost: 400 Gems
- tedmiston 7y ago
  This could get pretty cool with a webcam in there and live remote control of the "reverse claw" to deploy toppings...
y_tho 7y ago
"Hey reporter, check this out. Order pizza online." "Yes, but why isn't it doing what I think it should be doing!?"
wheybags 7y ago
Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really. I think the main draw is you don't to talk to anyone. Not having to have a social interaction with a stranger is a major selling point. Also, doesn't apply to pizza, but for other things the main advantage is you don't need to order during business hours.
- docbrown 7y ago
  >Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really. I may be in the minority but I find this feature quite useful. As someone whose is a more visual learning person, having the ability to virtually see how my product will turn out makes it easier for me to make choices. Instead of thinking about if item X and Y go together, it gives me a better idea of how it may taste when I see them stacked on top of each other. I know X tastes like this, so seeing them next to each other, it may allow me to better think if tastes will work together. We also can’t forget about people who may not be able to read properly. Instead of worrying what they’re ordering, they just make it look like what they want. (somewhat of an extreme case but possible) So while I agree this small design is not a high priority for UX designers, I do think not having it would be somewhat of an accessibility barrier for some users.
  - tedmiston 7y ago
    It also could allow you to do things not normally possibly like 2/3 pepperoni to 1/3 cheese vs halves. Or a design like a flag made out of pepperonis or a heart on Valentine's Day. I would pay more for the ability to make custom designs.
- not_a_cop75 7y ago
  It eliminates having to wait 20 minutes at the pizza place, which I surmount is the one reason people don't order in person. I don't order on the phone because I don't really use phones much anymore - most communication is better handled by texting/email.
- 7y ago
mehrdadn 7y ago
My issue isn't where my topping goes, it's how much of that topping is on the pizza. In my experience, when they get to choose, they can be surprisingly reluctant to literally double the amount of a given topping, no matter how much you push them. They'll put a ton more if it's a different topping, but not if it's the same one.
- berbec 7y ago
  At Domino's, there is a sliding scale of topping amounts. As the total number of toppings go up, the amount per topping goes down. Large 1-topping has 48 pepperoni Large 2-topping has 30 (from memory, many years ago) So a double pepperoni pizza has 60, not 96 slices.
  - hunter2_ 7y ago
    So it costs the same upcharge to go from 0 to 48 and from 48 to 60? That's pretty weird.
    - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
      It's less about food costs and more about the complexity and resultant labor costs, I think.
      - mrob 7y ago
        If that was the case then the first pepperoni slices would cost more, not the last ones. It's obviously market segmentation: somebody who really loves pepperoni will be willing to pay more per slice.
    - nemo44x 7y ago
      The cook time may go up since there is more mass.
      - hunter2_ 7y ago
        Thick/dense components like dough/sauce/cheese I could see how the cook time increases more than linearly as the mass increases linearly. But with other toppings, there's no way the cook time goes up more from 48 to the hypothetical 96 than it does from 0 to 48.
Gigablah 7y ago
It's surreal seeing an article that actually differentiates between the Internet and the World Wide Web.
- qroshan 7y ago
  It was written by an MIT dude
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  At this point, given all the apps, IoT devices, etc. I feel like people know that there is more to the internet than what they can get to in their web browser. Go back 10 years or so and the browser totally dominated (aside from email and gaming perhaps), leading to the lack of differentiation you are referring to. On the other hand, these non-browser communications I'm referring to almost always use HTTP APIs (a.k.a. web services) these days, whereas in the past they would use raw sockets or whatever else, so you could argue that even these comprise the web.
house9-2 7y ago
> Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Isn't this a Seinfeld episode.
- y_tho 7y ago
  Cucumbers on a pizza. What madness.
DonHopkins 7y ago
PizzaTool (which I wrote in 1990 and shipped with Solaris 2.0) not only let you interactively design your own pizza, and create and name your own custom pizza styles, and order them via Sun's Email=>FAX server, but it also drew an image of the pizza (with PostScript), which you could then spin to "cook" it by repeatedly rotating the pixels to make it look like it cooked and melted the cheese. The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... PostScript PizzaTool source code: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt You could also drag and drop images into your pizza! Here's a video and transcript of a demo I gave at the Exploratorium (which explains all the kids screaming in the background). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcript-17f627eab14a#90b4 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc... So this is PizzaTool and RasterRap, and these are written in The NeWS Toolkit, not HyperLook. But HyperLook is layered on top of The NeWS Toolkit, or sort of on top and in between The NeWS Toolkit. But this is pure TNT. Now these are, umm. PizzaTool: I’ll do PizzaTool first. PizzaTool lets you order pizzas with a GUI. And we can select which pizza parlor. Tony & Alba’s is the nice one in Mountain View. They support ordering pizzas via FAX. Now you can write you name, and your phone, and all this, and you can have a “Take and Bake” or “Please Deliver”. You say Please Deliver: “They probably won’t deliver unless you make it worth their while by ordering lots of pizzas!” It gives you those “affordances”, I mean, ahem, right, I was trying to work that word in. So ok, hit Toppings, you get this lovely topping dialog. And you can pop up a menu of common pizza styles, pinning it in the Open Look tradition. And, you know, it sets up the check boxes for you. And then you can add other toppings. And then see, when you’ve added a bunch of things, it actually changes your category of pizza. I might get, like, it will flip to “Everything” pretty soon or something. Well anyway, yeah, let’s do “Cheese”, and then if I were to add all these crazy things, it will realize that it can actually get a better deal by upgrading me to an “All Meat Combo” with 10 extra toppings. It’s your little “pizza guide”, you know. And once you’ve selected all your toppings, and how big you want your pizza, you hit “Preview”, so that you can make sure that this is the pizza you really want. And then it just does this, makes a little window, see this is a neat window here. It’s cut out, so that your pizza is just floating within the frame. And now, whoop, ok. And then you can add more toppings, and it forks off a lightweight PostScript to sprinkle toppings. And it’s totally object oriented, I swear. Now that you have a preview, and you want to see what it’s like when you cook it, you can just use direct manipulation, and just sort of spin it around with the mouse, and then let it go. That actually has a pretty good effect of cooking the toppings, because you get all this nice noise from the rotation, you know. It’s just… It’s all written in PostScript. “Camera person is now laughing!” (Camera lurches around violently!) You know, and then you got your pizza right the way you want it, and then you can hit “Order”. It goes “Do you really want to order a pizza from Tony & Alba’s? This will cost real money and make you want to drink beer!” Then you say “Yes!” And then, you know, when you’re on the right network and everything, what it does, it faxes the order there, and… Oh! “Yer pizza is being held hostage until ya payz off yer tab, chump! Yer tab’s presently $1212.64.” I guess Sun hasn’t been paying off my account since I left. Oh well… Umm, yes, right. So, now, this has, PizzaTool has some other useful features. You can, go into pizza authoring mode, and edit your pizza toppings. Or, you know, say you have a favorite kind of pizza, you can just make a new style, “Don’s Fave”, and save, and say, “New Style”. It just adds it there, dynamically updates, so — this is basically a test that I made for the — you know, and it copies its state onto — you know, so, this is a test I made for the toolkit that used every bit of the toolkit that’s possible, and is as dynamic as it could be. Anyway, the other thing we had to test was drag and drop. Now there’s this other program here, it’s RasterRap, and it allows you to drag this image and drop it into that, or you can drag it from here and drop it into the other. So these guys will talk to each other through drag and drop, and give you the lovely feedback. And then you can also — PizzaTool also supports drag and drop. So BLOOP! You can put a little Mona Lisa in your pizza, and then spin her, and put some bell peppers down, and maybe some turkey. (Camera person laughs and shakes camera.) This is all in the name of progress! Ha ha ha! (Confused muttering in the background!) Oh, and if you make the pizza small, it goes really fast! So once you’re done doing all this crazy stuff, you can wash it out. By, see, we have this nice beautiful painting of a wave here, put the wave in there, and go whooooosh. What’s really neat is when you make it spin really fast, really really fast — we’ll put the butterfly in for that for that — you go BOOM! Well now, that’s not fast. Boom. Yeah, ok. Ahh, oh yeah, you get these really great —I can’t really explain it very easily, but let’s add some artichoke hearts. (chuckle) Yeah, so, yeah, mathematical imprecision, or something like that. This is just sort of a food processor. I left it spinning over Christmas to see what happens and it was really a mess when I came back. Ok, well any way, that’s just what PizzaTool does.
tyingq 7y ago
Kind of hard to do that well without xmlhttprequest. It would be a slow flow through a maze of possible pages. That time period had a lot less to work with.
- acdha 7y ago
  XHR made more things possible but before that had JavaScript made what was then called DHTML possible. You could do things like swap images and shift positions, etc. to prepare a form to post since that kind of application isn’t dependent on bidirectional communication, latency, or a huge problem space. Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    The article was written in 1994. DHTML didn't exist. I'm pretty familiar with the state of the state in '94. The web was a pretty limited platform. Also, don't forget, still mostly dialup. Additional web requests were expensive, user experience wise. This was the AOL heyday.
    - acdha 7y ago
      I’m aware of that: I was specifically responding to the XHR reference, since the “maze of possible pages” part had been avoidable for years before IE5 introduced XHR. Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
- sangnoir 7y ago
tjoff 7y ago
Really? If I only got the option to "design" the pizza visually you better hope that the pizza is best in class. Because that seriously sounds pretty miserable, even in 2019 and I can't imagine it being done well in the near future either.
rolltiide 7y ago
I write these sort of articles too, they are educational and detail user experiences and how they can be better while having click bait titles to attract people that have already made a negative conclusion of the technology. In the present they also turn off people that are obsessed with the technology. They both read it and as the hype dies down ideally they stand the test of time and are equally as insightful or visionary like. It gets me the support and attention I aim for though. Like being a goto for advisory or an expert in a trial.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sct202 7y ago

It's funny they mentioned flowers, when today most online flower delivery services deliver bouquets that are often don't even look inspired by or related to the picture they put online.

GrumpyNl 7y ago
You mean like the hamburger shown at the menu and the hamburger you get for real.
reaperducer 7y ago
This is true. It's gotten so bad that I don't order flowers online anymore. I can't count the number of times I've ordered flowers online and the bouquet showed up frozen, freezer burned, or dead in a FedEx tube mailed from the other side of the country. Now I phone (yes, phone) the local hospital near the recipient and ask them what florist they use (often it's contracted to a mom-and-pop store down the street). Then I call (yes, call) that place on the phone and order. I've never been disappointed this way.
- notzuck 7y ago
  I've never been disappointed with flower delivery! Keeping my fingers crossed after reading your experiences.

sli 7y ago

That first paragraph you quoted is certainly prophetic but it also feels like it's dripping in bemused sarcasm at the novelty of the internet.

codingdave 7y ago

If that was written in 1994, it was 8 more years (2002) before Domino's had a visualization of your pizza online. I don't know when other chains did it. If you really want to get a sense of how long ago that was, we coded the Dominos Pizza builder in both Flash and Javascript... because not all browsers had great Flash support.

badrequest 7y ago
Wait, are you saying you were on the team that built this? Any good blog posts on the subject?
- codingdave 7y ago
  I worked for the consulting company that partnered with them to re-brand and re-code their web site in 2002, yes. It was long ago and while it was cool to have done a site that gets that much traffic, it was a run-of-the-mill consulting project, so no, there isn't anything written up about it.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    That's one small step for a consultant, one giant leap for pizza eaters. While maybe not interesting from a technical standpoint it might still find a big audience among non-programmers.
adrianmonk 7y ago
Sun Microsystems had pizzatool in 1990: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems...
- wil421 7y ago
  Wow looks like a sys admin made that UI. I knew a brilliant sys admin who loved Solaris and still had it running under his desk. All the forms he designed were way too busy and all over the place. More options than anyone could possibly use.

MauranKilom 7y ago

This gets awkward when you would have to distribute unequal pieces of e.g. chicken. Although I guess you could make a live "reverse claw machine" for added entertainment...

klyrs 7y ago
Ye gods this is a horrible concept, so let's develop it further. After you've assembled your pizza with the reverse claw machine, you need to direct a spatula under the pizza, and into an oven. When your pizza is done enough, you use the spatula again to drop it into a box. Then you get a box-claw machine which you use to place your fresh pizza-in-box onto a delivery drone. Make sure it's balanced! Finally, you're granted control of the delivery drone, which you can fly to your house. What could possibly go wrong?
- Igelau 7y ago
  Pizza is being forged. 12 hrs remaining. Get it right now! Cost: 400 Gems
tedmiston 7y ago
This could get pretty cool with a webcam in there and live remote control of the "reverse claw" to deploy toppings...

y_tho 7y ago

"Hey reporter, check this out. Order pizza online." "Yes, but why isn't it doing what I think it should be doing!?"

wheybags 7y ago

Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really. I think the main draw is you don't to talk to anyone. Not having to have a social interaction with a stranger is a major selling point. Also, doesn't apply to pizza, but for other things the main advantage is you don't need to order during business hours.

docbrown 7y ago
>Honestly, I don't think they did nail it, specifically regarding customising the pizza visually. Sure, some sites let you do this but noone cares really. I may be in the minority but I find this feature quite useful. As someone whose is a more visual learning person, having the ability to virtually see how my product will turn out makes it easier for me to make choices. Instead of thinking about if item X and Y go together, it gives me a better idea of how it may taste when I see them stacked on top of each other. I know X tastes like this, so seeing them next to each other, it may allow me to better think if tastes will work together. We also can’t forget about people who may not be able to read properly. Instead of worrying what they’re ordering, they just make it look like what they want. (somewhat of an extreme case but possible) So while I agree this small design is not a high priority for UX designers, I do think not having it would be somewhat of an accessibility barrier for some users.
- tedmiston 7y ago
  It also could allow you to do things not normally possibly like 2/3 pepperoni to 1/3 cheese vs halves. Or a design like a flag made out of pepperonis or a heart on Valentine's Day. I would pay more for the ability to make custom designs.
not_a_cop75 7y ago
It eliminates having to wait 20 minutes at the pizza place, which I surmount is the one reason people don't order in person. I don't order on the phone because I don't really use phones much anymore - most communication is better handled by texting/email.
7y ago

mehrdadn 7y ago

My issue isn't where my topping goes, it's how much of that topping is on the pizza. In my experience, when they get to choose, they can be surprisingly reluctant to literally double the amount of a given topping, no matter how much you push them. They'll put a ton more if it's a different topping, but not if it's the same one.

berbec 7y ago
At Domino's, there is a sliding scale of topping amounts. As the total number of toppings go up, the amount per topping goes down. Large 1-topping has 48 pepperoni Large 2-topping has 30 (from memory, many years ago) So a double pepperoni pizza has 60, not 96 slices.
- hunter2_ 7y ago
  So it costs the same upcharge to go from 0 to 48 and from 48 to 60? That's pretty weird.
  - ThrustVectoring 7y ago
    It's less about food costs and more about the complexity and resultant labor costs, I think.
    - mrob 7y ago
      If that was the case then the first pepperoni slices would cost more, not the last ones. It's obviously market segmentation: somebody who really loves pepperoni will be willing to pay more per slice.
  - nemo44x 7y ago
    The cook time may go up since there is more mass.
    - hunter2_ 7y ago
      Thick/dense components like dough/sauce/cheese I could see how the cook time increases more than linearly as the mass increases linearly. But with other toppings, there's no way the cook time goes up more from 48 to the hypothetical 96 than it does from 0 to 48.

Gigablah 7y ago

It's surreal seeing an article that actually differentiates between the Internet and the World Wide Web.

qroshan 7y ago
It was written by an MIT dude
hunter2_ 7y ago
At this point, given all the apps, IoT devices, etc. I feel like people know that there is more to the internet than what they can get to in their web browser. Go back 10 years or so and the browser totally dominated (aside from email and gaming perhaps), leading to the lack of differentiation you are referring to. On the other hand, these non-browser communications I'm referring to almost always use HTTP APIs (a.k.a. web services) these days, whereas in the past they would use raw sockets or whatever else, so you could argue that even these comprise the web.

house9-2 7y ago

> Instead of simply letting people order a pizza, why not let them design it as well? Isn't this a Seinfeld episode.

y_tho 7y ago
Cucumbers on a pizza. What madness.

DonHopkins 7y ago

PizzaTool (which I wrote in 1990 and shipped with Solaris 2.0) not only let you interactively design your own pizza, and create and name your own custom pizza styles, and order them via Sun's Email=>FAX server, but it also drew an image of the pizza (with PostScript), which you could then spin to "cook" it by repeatedly rotating the pixels to make it look like it cooked and melted the cheese. The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool: How I accidentally ordered my first pizza over the internet. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-pizzatool-2a7992b4c797 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-story-of-sun-microsystems... PostScript PizzaTool source code: https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt You could also drag and drop images into your pizza! Here's a video and transcript of a demo I gave at the Exploratorium (which explains all the kids screaming in the background). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avJnpDKHxPY&t=21m43s https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcript-17f627eab14a#90b4 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transc... So this is PizzaTool and RasterRap, and these are written in The NeWS Toolkit, not HyperLook. But HyperLook is layered on top of The NeWS Toolkit, or sort of on top and in between The NeWS Toolkit. But this is pure TNT. Now these are, umm. PizzaTool: I’ll do PizzaTool first. PizzaTool lets you order pizzas with a GUI. And we can select which pizza parlor. Tony & Alba’s is the nice one in Mountain View. They support ordering pizzas via FAX. Now you can write you name, and your phone, and all this, and you can have a “Take and Bake” or “Please Deliver”. You say Please Deliver: “They probably won’t deliver unless you make it worth their while by ordering lots of pizzas!” It gives you those “affordances”, I mean, ahem, right, I was trying to work that word in. So ok, hit Toppings, you get this lovely topping dialog. And you can pop up a menu of common pizza styles, pinning it in the Open Look tradition. And, you know, it sets up the check boxes for you. And then you can add other toppings. And then see, when you’ve added a bunch of things, it actually changes your category of pizza. I might get, like, it will flip to “Everything” pretty soon or something. Well anyway, yeah, let’s do “Cheese”, and then if I were to add all these crazy things, it will realize that it can actually get a better deal by upgrading me to an “All Meat Combo” with 10 extra toppings. It’s your little “pizza guide”, you know. And once you’ve selected all your toppings, and how big you want your pizza, you hit “Preview”, so that you can make sure that this is the pizza you really want. And then it just does this, makes a little window, see this is a neat window here. It’s cut out, so that your pizza is just floating within the frame. And now, whoop, ok. And then you can add more toppings, and it forks off a lightweight PostScript to sprinkle toppings. And it’s totally object oriented, I swear. Now that you have a preview, and you want to see what it’s like when you cook it, you can just use direct manipulation, and just sort of spin it around with the mouse, and then let it go. That actually has a pretty good effect of cooking the toppings, because you get all this nice noise from the rotation, you know. It’s just… It’s all written in PostScript. “Camera person is now laughing!” (Camera lurches around violently!) You know, and then you got your pizza right the way you want it, and then you can hit “Order”. It goes “Do you really want to order a pizza from Tony & Alba’s? This will cost real money and make you want to drink beer!” Then you say “Yes!” And then, you know, when you’re on the right network and everything, what it does, it faxes the order there, and… Oh! “Yer pizza is being held hostage until ya payz off yer tab, chump! Yer tab’s presently $1212.64.” I guess Sun hasn’t been paying off my account since I left. Oh well… Umm, yes, right. So, now, this has, PizzaTool has some other useful features. You can, go into pizza authoring mode, and edit your pizza toppings. Or, you know, say you have a favorite kind of pizza, you can just make a new style, “Don’s Fave”, and save, and say, “New Style”. It just adds it there, dynamically updates, so — this is basically a test that I made for the — you know, and it copies its state onto — you know, so, this is a test I made for the toolkit that used every bit of the toolkit that’s possible, and is as dynamic as it could be. Anyway, the other thing we had to test was drag and drop. Now there’s this other program here, it’s RasterRap, and it allows you to drag this image and drop it into that, or you can drag it from here and drop it into the other. So these guys will talk to each other through drag and drop, and give you the lovely feedback. And then you can also — PizzaTool also supports drag and drop. So BLOOP! You can put a little Mona Lisa in your pizza, and then spin her, and put some bell peppers down, and maybe some turkey. (Camera person laughs and shakes camera.) This is all in the name of progress! Ha ha ha! (Confused muttering in the background!) Oh, and if you make the pizza small, it goes really fast! So once you’re done doing all this crazy stuff, you can wash it out. By, see, we have this nice beautiful painting of a wave here, put the wave in there, and go whooooosh. What’s really neat is when you make it spin really fast, really really fast — we’ll put the butterfly in for that for that — you go BOOM! Well now, that’s not fast. Boom. Yeah, ok. Ahh, oh yeah, you get these really great —I can’t really explain it very easily, but let’s add some artichoke hearts. (chuckle) Yeah, so, yeah, mathematical imprecision, or something like that. This is just sort of a food processor. I left it spinning over Christmas to see what happens and it was really a mess when I came back. Ok, well any way, that’s just what PizzaTool does.

tyingq 7y ago

Kind of hard to do that well without xmlhttprequest. It would be a slow flow through a maze of possible pages. That time period had a lot less to work with.

acdha 7y ago
XHR made more things possible but before that had JavaScript made what was then called DHTML possible. You could do things like swap images and shift positions, etc. to prepare a form to post since that kind of application isn’t dependent on bidirectional communication, latency, or a huge problem space. Back around 1998 we built a custom product selector for a popular knife manufacturer which basically did that: you had choices for three components – base, blade, and handle — and a couple other options, but unlike something like Google Maps the list of possible images to load and all of their metadata easily fit in memory and they didn’t take terribly long to download so you could have a nice interactive visual display which was basically a form with a few selects and checkboxes.
- tyingq 7y ago
  The article was written in 1994. DHTML didn't exist. I'm pretty familiar with the state of the state in '94. The web was a pretty limited platform. Also, don't forget, still mostly dialup. Additional web requests were expensive, user experience wise. This was the AOL heyday.
  - acdha 7y ago
    I’m aware of that: I was specifically responding to the XHR reference, since the “maze of possible pages” part had been avoidable for years before IE5 introduced XHR. Similarly, yes, we used dialup back then but we also were using small images with much less color depth and people were more accustomed to pages taking longer to load. Some optimized images could easily have made a basic pizza designer possible in that era - probably with cartoonish 16-color GIF graphics but a good designer could do a surprising amount with a little creativity.
sangnoir 7y ago

tjoff 7y ago

Really? If I only got the option to "design" the pizza visually you better hope that the pizza is best in class. Because that seriously sounds pretty miserable, even in 2019 and I can't imagine it being done well in the near future either.

rolltiide 7y ago

I write these sort of articles too, they are educational and detail user experiences and how they can be better while having click bait titles to attract people that have already made a negative conclusion of the technology. In the present they also turn off people that are obsessed with the technology. They both read it and as the hype dies down ideally they stand the test of time and are equally as insightful or visionary like. It gets me the support and attention I aim for though. Like being a goto for advisory or an expert in a trial.