71–80 of 295 posts
In an alternate timeline, HyperCard was not allowed to wither and die, but instead continued to mature, embraced the web, and inspired an entire genre of software-creating software. In this timeline, people shape their computing experiences as easily as one might sculpt a piece of clay, creating personal apps that make perfect sense to them and fit like a glove; computing devices actually become (for everyone, not ju…
For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.
For anyone (like me) wondering who this guy was, he was a prominent UI guy at Apple back in the day. According to Wikipedia he created the menu bar, QuickDraw, and HyperCard. For whomever submits stories like this, please say who the person was. Very few people are so famous that everyone in tech knows who they were, and Mr. Atkinson was not one of them. I've heard of his accomplishments, but never the man himself.
Wow. Rest in peace Bill. I think he is deserving of a black stripe up top.
From Walter Isaacson's _Steve Jobs_: > One of Bill Atkinson’s amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on a screen to overlap so that the “top” one clipped into the ones “below” it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of cou…
Windows partly obscured would have rows that may not begin at 0, may not continue to width-of-window. Window regions could even have holes if a skinnier window was on top and within the width of the larger background window.
The cleverness, I think, was then to write fast routines to add, subtract, intersect, and union regions, and rectangles of this structure. Never mind quickly traversing them, clipping to them, etc.
It's really sad to see desktop apps adopt hamburger menus and things that make sense on mobile but make life harder on a desktop built for WIMP.
Thank you, Bill! Some days I'd rather be using your interface.
Some notable stories from Folklore.org: https://www.folklore.org/Joining_Apple_Computer.html https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html --- something to bring up whenever lines of code as a metric is put forward https://www.folklore.org/Rosings_Rascals.html --- story of how the Macintosh Finder came to be https://www.folklore.org/I_Still_Remember_Regions.html --- surviving a car accident
When I was on the ColorSync team at Apple we, the engineers, got an invite to his place-in-the-woods one day. I knew who he was at the time, but for some reason I felt I was more or less beholden to conversing only about color-related issues and how they applied to a computer workflow. Having retired, I have been kicking myself for some time not just chatting with him about ... whatever. He was at the time I met him…
I think this says more about you than it does about him
RIP. It still suprises me that people with resources die so early (he died at 74).
Life is not guaranteed. Once you've seen it happen a few times, you realize how stochastic death really is (or really, how stochastic living is). 74 is at least not the territory where people generally gasp at how young he was.