For me, the pinnacle of Windows UI design has always been Windows 95.
The best windows UI imho was Win2000. Best UI overall would still be OSX, also imho.
X to close
191–200 of 204 posts
Re: X to close
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never used Acorn Arthur but I did use RiscOS 3 whilst at primary school circa '91, and this had an X in the corner: http://www.mjpye.org.uk/images/screens/riscos-02.gif I'm sure the GUI design of RiscOS 3 helped to inspire Windows 95.
I don't remember where the [X] came from specifically but there were a bunch of Brits on the Windows team at the time (myself included) and we had a number of Archimedes machines around. A lot of Lemmings was played. I remember there was nearly endless debate about where the [X] should go so people wouldn't accidentally. I think the desire to make it visually distinct was a big factor.
*so people wouldn't accidentally click it
Re: X to close
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't remember where the [X] came from specifically but there were a bunch of Brits on the Windows team at the time (myself included) and we had a number of Archimedes machines around. A lot of Lemmings was played. I remember there was nearly endless debate about where the [X] should go so people wouldn't accidentally. I think the desire to make it visually distinct was a big factor.
Interesting. That surprises me - I'd always assumed that the UK scene didn't have much influence on the US technology world.
At the time Microsoft's Languages Division was run by a Welsh guy (David Jones) and he liked to hire fellow Brits.
Re: X to close
#194"Vi, vim, emacs or edlin? No [x] to close these 1980's text editors either. X was commonly used to delete characters in-line, but not to close the program." Hmm... I've used :x to write+quit in Vim for years. And, :X is to encrypt+quit. Don't have a year when that was added though. Could be fun to try and dig that up.
>Hmm... I've used :x to write+quit in Vim for years. And, :X is to encrypt+quit. Don't have a year when that was added though. Could be fun to try and dig that up.
:x (short for :xit) was in the original ex written by Bill Joy in 1976. According to Joy[1], ex pulled together ideas from a few different places:
1. em from QMC, written by George Coulouris[2]
2. a modified version of ed from UCLA
3. An early version of ex written by Charles Haley based on the em source in 1976
4. Bill Joy himself
em uses 'x' for its interactive find-and-replace mode ("exchange"), so it didn't originate there. That leaves 2, 3, and 4 as possible origins. I can't find anything on the UCLA ed. If the origins are in 3 or 4, :x is from 1976.
[1] http://roguelife.org/~fujita/COOKIES/HISTORY/1BSD/exrefm.pdf
Re: X to close
#195I worked at Atari, on the Atari ST (writing a bunch of systems-level code). My cow-orkers were working closely with DRI to port GEM to the ST hardware. GEM wasn't done yet, and much of the engineering effort there was helping DRI finish it up. A lot of stuff was done on the Atari side of the fence that never made it back to the DRI sources.
I can categorically state that there wasn't any Japanese influence on that "X".
If anything, it was programmer art. We Atari folks were mostly video-game programmers, with some sense of design, and a lot of the stuff that was coming out of DRI was pretty ugly. So it probably got tweaked late a night until it "looked pretty" and wasn't revisited (the ST was started and shipped in about 10 months, so we were in kind of a hurry).
Re: X to close
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those screenshots are strikingly modern compared to the windows screenshots of the era: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2.1x#mediaviewer/File:W...
The NextStep was way ahead on the curve for it's time (which is one of the reasons it failed). I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers. In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where desi…
I don't think it worked out for them? The systems were way to expensive for most users.
Re: X to close
#197Another old example. WordStar: Used "X" to Exit to system in its main menu ( https://www.flickr.com/photos/markgregory/6946218793/?rb=1 ) - I do not know the revision shown in the screen shot. According to Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar ) WordStar was released in 1978. Which moves the date back to at least 1978 to use X for exit. However, there is possibly a very simple explanation that the blog po…
Not to mention the letter X sounds like the word "exit," or "ex it." In this way using X as a keyboard command to represent exit might be distinct from the way OP posits X to represent batsu (false, bad, wrong or attack).
In Ultima IV (1985) the spell for exiting a dungeon was the X-it spell (activated with the letter X).
Re: X to close
#198UPDATED:
So this little article has travelled pretty far! There were a lot of good tips, comments and insights into the origin of [x] but none as good as this email that I received from Windows 95 team member Daniel Oran.
“Hi Lauren,
A friend forwarded me your Medium piece, “X to Close.” He remembered that I had worked on Windows 95 at Microsoft — I created the Start Button and Taskbar — and thought I’d be amused. I was! :-)
It’s fun to see how history gets written when you actually lived those long-ago events. I joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager for the user interface of “Chicago,” which was the code name for what eventually became Windows 95.
So, who was responsible for this last minute change? As far as I can tell, this person is responsible for the proliferation and widespread use of [x] in UI design today.
It wasn’t a last-minute change. During 1993, we considered many variations of the close-button design. And the source wasn’t Atari. It was NeXT, which had an X close button in the upper right, along with the grayscale faux-3D look that we borrowed for Windows 95.
I wanted to put the Windows X close button in the upper left, but that conflicted with the existing Windows Alt-spacebar menu and also a new program icon, which we borrowed fromOS/2, on which Microsoft had originally partnered with IBM.
Attached is the earliest Chicago bitmap I could find that includes an X close button. It’s dated 9/22/1993. (In attaching the file to this email, I just realized that it’s so old that it has only an eight-character name. Before Windows 95, that was the limit.)
Thanks for your very entertaining essay!
Best,
Danny”
I guess you could say case [x]ed.
Thanks again to everyone who helped track down earlier examples of GUIs and early text editors that used [x] to close as well. Fascinating!
Re: X to close
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, I remember thinking that Windows95 was 'inspired' by NeXTStep when it was new. The NeXTStep machines themselves were pretty amazing for their late-80's origin. They had (and effectively used) 4-level 1-megapixel displays at a time when PC's were largely stuck at 640x480 or worse.
High screen resolutions were certainly possible on DOS PCs of the era, but since PCs were an open platform, developers would often target their software at the lowest common denominator of hardware, so outside of specific niche markets, they didn't typically produce DOS applications intended for high-resolution displays. On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of high…
> On top of that, the DOS market in that era always preferred to make the tradeoff in favor of higher color depths rather than higher resolutions.
I think I'd characterize it a little differently: I remember games favoring 256-color modes (320x200, ModeX, etc.) and productivity applications favoring higher resolution. At the time, having both high bit depths and high resolution at the same time was asking too much of the hardware.
To put it in perspective, for a while, my desktop PC was an older generation 486/33. When I say 'older generation', what I mainly mean is that it was one of the last machines that lacked a local bus of any kind. This put the video board behind an ISA-bus, which was lucky to sustain 8MB/sec shared across all peripherals. Just looking at the bus, it couldn't update a full 1024x768 desktop at more than 10Hz. (320x200 was well over 100Hz).
Re: X to close
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NextStep was way ahead on the curve for it's time (which is one of the reasons it failed). I read an awesome piece a while back (and for the life of me I can't remember where) that said if you want to design for the future, estimate what computing power will be available in 10-15 years then buy that for your developers. In that project I think they spent 186,000 per machine per user on average but they where desi…
I don't think it worked out for them? The systems were way to expensive for most users.
The NextStep didn't work out for a bunch of reasons cost been one of the major ones.
The other project wasn't trying to create a product they where trying to capture a sense of what hardware would be on every desk in 10 years and design for that, in effect skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is.
I wish I could remember where I read it :|.