3 ms·

> guys from the Apple booth thought that NeWS was pretty neat grin depends on who you ask

DonHopkins 4y ago
True that. I gave a demo of NeWS pie menus, emacs, and the HyperTIES browser and authoring tool to Steve Jobs once, and he jumped up and down and shouted "That sucks!" Overall I got about a 3:1 sucks to neat ratio. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098824 Steve Jobs had poor enough taste to say that pie menus suck! ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179 It's the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15–19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus! So I've written up a 30 year retrospective: This article will discuss the history of what’s happened with pie menus over the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption. Here is the main article, and some other related articles: Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018. Take a Look and Feel Free! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!

True that. I gave a demo of NeWS pie menus, emacs, and the HyperTIES browser and authoring tool to Steve Jobs once, and he jumped up and down and shouted "That sucks!" Overall I got about a 3:1 sucks to neat ratio. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098824 Steve Jobs had poor enough taste to say that pie menus suck! ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17098179 It's the 30 year anniversary of CHI’88 (May 15–19, 1988), where Jack Callahan, Ben Shneiderman, Mark Weiser and I (Don Hopkins) presented our paper “An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus”. We found pie menus to be about 15% faster and with a significantly lower error rate than linear menus! So I've written up a 30 year retrospective: This article will discuss the history of what’s happened with pie menus over the last 30 years (and more), present both good and bad examples, including ideas half baked, experiments performed, problems discovered, solutions attempted, alternatives explored, progress made, software freed, products shipped, as well as setbacks and impediments to their widespread adoption. Here is the main article, and some other related articles: Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software, May 15, 2018. Take a Look and Feel Free! https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 Steve Jobs Thought Pie Menus Sucked “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” On October 25, 1988, I gave Steve Jobs a demo of pie menus, NeWS, UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES at the Educom conference in Washington DC. His reaction was to jump up and down, point at the screen, and yell “That sucks! That sucks! Wow, that’s neat! That sucks!” I tried explaining how we’d performed an experiment proving pie menus were faster than linear menus, but he insisted the liner menus in NeXT Step were the best possible menus ever. But who was I to rain on his parade, two weeks after the first release of NeXT Step 0.8? (Up to that time, it was the most hyped piece of vaporware ever, and doubters were wearing t-shirts saying “NeVR Step”!) Even after he went back to Apple, Steve Jobs never took a bite of Apple Pie Menus, the forbidden fruit. There’s no accounting for taste!