25 Years of the Dock and Aqua
On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.
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The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it.
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I didn’t design the dock – that was Bas Ording, a talented young UI designer that Steve had personally recruited. But it was my job to take his prototypes built in Macromind Director and turn them into working code, as part of the Finder team.
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I figured if anybody was finally going to kill off DragThing, it might as well be me.
After DP3, he resigned because Apple wanted him to move to Cupertino. Apple fired all the software engineers in Cork, and then they rewrote all his code before shipping Mac OS X 10.0. It’s remarkable how little the Dock has outwardly changed in the years since.
The timeline is interesting. James wrote his classic Mac utility DragThing before working at Apple, then was hired by Apple, then ended up working on the Dock, and then left Apple… to resume working on DragThing.
Also: James’s story about Apple trying to hide James’s location from Steve Jobs is an all-time classic.
When I watch the video back, it’s almost surreal how Steve Jobs keeps doing utterly normal, boring things in Mac OS X while the crowd completely loses its collective mind. Viewed by someone without any historical context, it would seem like a cult being whipped into a frenzy by its leader.
But I was there, and I can tell you that it wasn’t that. This was the moment, after 16 years of classic Mac OS–and let’s face it, the last five of those were pretty rough–when all the failings of the Mac were swept away and replaced with something modern, ready for the challenge of the 21st century.
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It’s a bit of a head trip to watch Jobs explain how windows now have three buttons in the top left corner, colored “like a stoplight,” with symbols that appear when you roll the mouse pointer over them. Those buttons have become as much symbols of the Mac as the menu bar itself, but this was the first time anyone saw them.
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Mac OS X DP3 and the first public reveal of Aqua, this year’s MacBooks will feature an Apple-logo-shaped notch in the center of the menu bar.
Full height sidebars and inspectors also contribute to unnecessary waste of space in the toolbar. Also dividing toolbars to match column widths (like Mail and Notes) further makes unnecessary waste of toolbar space.
I’m ready for a Mac OS UI redesign that raises the bar for Desktop OS design. The way Aqua did.
Even going back to the old Aqua toolbar design would be fine. The new Big Sur way—where there’s lots of empty space, yet the window title gets truncated and important buttons, and sometimes even the search field, get stuffed into the overflow menu—is a regression.
See also: John Siracusa (in 2000), Stephen Hackett, Nick Heer.
Previously:
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Guzmán's observation about wasted space is something that kills me about the macOS redesign. And that's not the only regression -- practically everything they've changed since macOS 10.14 is a regression.
Can anyone think of a UI change made in the last five major versions of macOS that was actually an improvement? I'll add the caveat that a potentially better bit of UI design that is hampered by onerous bugs still counts as a regression for the purposes of my question.
I wish Thomson would resurrect DragThing once again. There is nothing like it anymore (that I can find, and that is equally well designed), and it is sorely needed.
Only auality of life "features" and improvements:
- When you drag a file to a folder in the sidebar in the Finder, it pops a little bit to show you it was successful and where it went
- In Monterey you could hold down shift to make the whole name a draggable proxy icon, but in Ventura+ they took it away and you have to click a spot so small and hard to hit -- above and below the title by like a pixel, and it's not worth it. But it was awesome.
- Pathbar folders became single click.
- Debatably good, the Finder now copies a quoted path.
- Accessibility features like Hover Text/Typing
- Temporary screen zoom while holding down two keys, but the UI doesn't show the Fn symbol. I don't know whether that qualifies, it's not a buggy feature, its a buggy Settings app.
- Control-return context menu
All that said, I can't even tell which window is active and it's difficult to see anything, really. Have you ever tried cropping a white photo in QuickLook? The edges aren't visible at all, you have to know they're there. Like scroll bars and every version of iCal's sidebar since that redesign in… like 2004 or something.
I'm in the hate-it camp.
