512 Pixels

>Yeah, because it doesn’t exist.

I probably remembered it wrong and conflated the Rosenbaum with being about Woz and Jobs.

>That was not why Woz (and Jobs) were interested in them, which is my point.

Woz and Jobs decided to learn about blue boxes because they read "Secrets of the Little Blue Box" [0], an article which covers people selling blue boxes to mafia bookies [1]. My understanding is that Woz thought that Blue Boxes were neat and that Jobs wanted to turn it into a business so they began mass producing them. They were looking for a market, they knew based on the article that got them excited about Blue Boxes in the first that Blue Boxes can be used to evade wiretaps and that also based on that article they knew organized crime was willing to pay for them. At the very least they must have talked about it as some point, perhaps just to say we are never selling these to the mob".

If you ever get a chance to ask Woz about this, I'd love to hear his answer, who did they try to sell blue boxes to and if they didn't try to sell blue boxes to bookies what was their thinking at the time about why not?

"And with Wozniak, of course, the story goes that he discovered the blue box via reading Ron Rosenbaum’s article, Secrets of the Little Blue Box" [0]

"We [not Woz or Jobs] had this order for a thousand beeper boxes from a syndicate front man in Las Vegas. They use them to place bets coast to coast, keep lines open for hours, all of which can get expensive if you have to…

> this particular thing is not new.

Article author here. I think the quoted claim is somewhat misleading. There are at least two different ways to interpret a UI feature as "not new":

1) The feature has been in the operating system all along.

2) Something analogous existed 40 years ago and then disappeared long ago.

You're referring to 2, not 1.

The only reason I chose Calculator app for my screenshot is that its window is very small, which allowed me to make a small screenshot, because people may be reading the blog post on small phone screens. In other ways, admittedly, Calculator is not a great example, because its window is not actually resizable, and thus it's not the type of window that you would normally place in the corners of your screen, like a resizable document window.

Rounded corners on a "widget" type of app are not as objectionable. As other commenters have noted, the calculator in "classic" Mac was a special Desk Accessory. In contrast, on Tahoe, the varying corner radii affect ordinary document-based apps.

Consider Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah. The top of the windows had rounded corners, but the bottom did not! https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-0-Cheetah-Applications.png

TextEdit, for example, did not start to have rounded bottom corners until Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, which was itself much maligned for bringing the iPhone UI to Mac.

Don't forget the OS 9 wallpapers:

https://512pixels.net/projects/mac-os-9-5k-wallpapers

My favorites among these are the gradient-rich desktops that dropped in Mac OS 8.5 back in '98, like those UFO ones.

That's when the OS gained support for icons with 24-bit color and 8-bit masks, which are the direct ancestors to today's 1024x1024 32-bit app icons. Perhaps to commemorate this full leveling up of the classic Mac desktop to millions of colors, Apple hired a small team of designers to custom make the UFO, Capsule and Tub desktop pictures.

Screen sized gradients between two relatively close colors almost always land in the sandbar of banding or dithering in order to quantize all those subtle variations to the limited color depth. But these desktops do a beautiful job at avoiding that. I'm not sure, but I think they achieved it by color grading a zero-to-255 3D render with a high bits/channel ratio in Photoshop, tuning the grade and quantizing to 8 bits per pixel from time to time as a sort of gamut warning. Any problematic areas could then be "buffed out" with careful blend mode shenanigans on the boundaries.

8 months (though I imagine sales may have tanked in June when they announced the transition to Apple Silicon, so Apple probably only got 3 months of sales.)

But it was in fact the fastest intel MacBook Air - and it still is.

What few people outside Apple (or even inside given Apple's notorious secrecy) probably realized in early to mid 2020, even after the WWDC announcement, was how great the Apple Silicon/M1 MacBook Air was actually going to be, and how it would transform expectations for performance and battery life in a fanless laptop.

Perhaps Apple should have offered a trade-in scheme like they did for the Lisa/Macintosh XL. I wonder if they offered upgrades to the buyers of the October 1999 Power Mac G4 (PCI Graphics) which was replaced by a better model only two months later.

https://512pixels.net/2020/01/some-short-lived-macs/

KDE in 1999:

https://czechia.kde.org/screenshots/images/medium/matthiase1.jpg

GNOME in 1999:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/GNOME_1.0_%281999%2C_03%29_with_GNOME_Panel_1_and_File_Manager.png

Of course, it's a matter of taste, but GNOME and KDE looked pretty bad back then. If I had the money, I'd definitely preferred NeXTSTEP. It's just so much cleaner and better thought-out. This is what it looked like in the early 90ies:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png

BTW, this is what NeXTSTEP looked like in 2000 (Mac OS X public beta):

https://512pixels.net/projects/aqua-screenshot-library/mac-os-x-public-beta-kodiak/#jp-carousel-15269

I love NeXTSTEP, because it was awesome for its time, but I greatly prefer the latest macOS :).

One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors.

If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement.

[0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-os-x/mac-os-x%5E2009%5E10.6-snow-leopard-finder.png
[1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mountain-Lion-Finder-Home-2000x1384.png