Category: Apple History

There’s been a lot of news about HEY’s new calendar app being rejected by App Store Review. In a lengthy X thread discussing the issue, David Heinemeier Hansson revealed that HEY has resubmitted the app to Apple, this time with some built-in content that seems awfully familiar:

You’re going to love our “make it do something” implementation (and hopefully @appstore will too!). If you don’t have a HEY account, you can use the calendar to explore Apple’s history. Check this out: pic.twitter.com/j8cXnfOsaf

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Some sad Apple Retail news broke this afternoon. Here’s Joe Rossignol:

“After many years of serving customers at our stores in the Bay Area, we plan to close our store at Infinite Loop,” an Apple spokesperson said, in a statement shared with MacRumors. “All of our valued team members will have the opportunity to continue their roles with Apple. We look forward to welcoming our customers at our nearby Apple Park Visitor Center and other locations, on Apple.com, and the Apple Store app.”

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Michael Steeber:

Today I’m launching a major update to Facades, the field guide to Apple Retail Stores. I’ve added detailed timelines filled with store history, new ways to track and share your store visits, custom lists, and much more. This update is the product of feedback from readers like you, and I hope you’ll enjoy what I’ve made.

I’ve been using the updated version for a while via TestFlight, and it is delightful. The title design touches are fabulous.

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Dan Bashur at LowEndMac has a look at where Mac OS 9 is today.

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Doug Brown:

After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable pin was going into the memory controller chip in several Mac models, so I was pretty confident that in-system programming was possible.

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It’s the stuff of lore now, but Steve Jobs’ “Grid of Four” took a messy Mac lineup and made it simple enough for anyone to understand:

Trying to cram the Apple of today into something like the Grid of Four doesn’t make much sense. In fact, Apple only used it for a handful of years, but even when the Grid of Four was the product strategy at Apple, the iMac began to creep toward the professional column.

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Microsoft:

From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.

Adam Engst:

Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from 1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in Cornell University’s public computer rooms. Two years after we graduated, a college friend of Tonya’s encouraged her to apply for a job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app’s history that Tonya later penned two April Fools’ spoof articles about it: “ Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,” 1 April 2003, and “ Microsoft Word 5.1 Returns… to the iPad,” 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual for Word 6, Microsoft’s first attempt at a cross-platform version. I applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word’s interface.

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Apple PR, 21 years ago today:

Apple today announced its “X for Teachers” program that gives a free copy of Mac OS X version 10.2 “Jaguar” to every K-12 teacher in the U.S. “Jaguar” combines a stable and robust UNIX-based foundation with Macintosh’s legendary ease-of-use to create the world’s most advanced operating system for teaching, learning and administration. The free copy of “Jaguar” is accompanied by free copies of Apple’s Digital Hub applications–iMovie for digital video editing, iPhoto for organizing and sharing digital photos and iTunes for building a digital audio library.

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Cameron Kaiser has written the most in-depth article I’ve ever read about Apple’s long-defunct Cyberdog product. The dive into OpenDoc is just a sweet bonus.

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Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way.

Today, we look at a UI element that started life in iTunes, but spread to the iPod, iPhone and Mac over time: Cover Flow.

Cover Flow’s Early Days

We’ll get to that in a moment, but first we should recognize Andrew Coulter Enright, the inventor of Cover Flow. In December 2004, he published a blog post proposing a new way to skim media in iTunes:

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Michael Steeber, writing something you should take the time to read:

October marks eight years since the death of Gary Allen, a legendary figure in the Apple community. Over the span of 14 years, Gary visited more than 140 Apple Stores and meticulously documented every detail of Apple Retail design and operations on his website, ifoAppleStore.com. I’ve never taken a moment to properly recognize Gary’s contributions to the community and his impact on my life, so today I’m going to fix that.

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I am loving these icons, and look forward to seeing a Flower Power version in a few years.

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