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This reminds me of an old story about the original development of OS X Aqua in the 90s. At the time they were doing functioning mockups for the Aqua design in
by lower 5y ago
This reminds me of an old story about the original development of OS X Aqua in the 90s.
At the time they were doing functioning mockups for the Aqua design in Macromedia Director. It was not easy to actually implement the UI with the available hardware, but the mockups showed that it was possible. "Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that 'Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?'"
Only source I can find is: https://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/03/15.9.shtml https://www.macobserver.com/article/2006/03/15.9.shtml
> As it so happened, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team had already been working on a ground-up redesign of the operating system after they discovered that their original goal of porting the look-and-feel of Mac OS 8 completely to Mac OS X would be impossible. "We were only going to be able to get about 95% of the way there [putting the Mac OS 8 interface on Mac OS X], which is possibly the worst thing you could do," Mr. Ratzlaff said. The redesign had been scrubbed by higher-ups at Apple but was put back on track by Mr. Jobs.
> With that, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team's list of requirements for the operating system, which had been called overly ambitious and led to laughter from engineers who heard of them only weeks prior, became mandatory. These included 32-bit color with alpha channels and QuickTime integration, all being able to run on a system with just a G3 processor and as a little as 8MB of video memory. Mocking up the operating system's design and functionality with Macromedia's Director, Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that "Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?"
- PostThisTooFast 5y agoIt's sad that they even wanted to do an exact port. Also sad that some fundamental design errors were repeated in OS X, with the worst being the single menu bar that's glued to the top of the screen and has to be shared by all applications. That's understandable in GUI 1.0; but after every other GUI went with menus on applications' main frames, it became clear that their design was superior. Another ridiculous Mac UI problem was not being able to resize windows from their edges (or even 3/4 of their corners). WTF? At least Apple FINALLY fixed that, albeit grudgingly and 30 years later.