Another fun old Apple video to kick off the week:
Category: Apple History
LisaGUI⇢
Andrew Yaros has rebuilt the Lisa’s user interface on the web, and it is glorious:
LisaGUI is a web OS inspired by the Lisa Office System, Apple’s first graphical user interface (GUI). It aims to perfectly recreate the Lisa’s iconic 1-bit UI directly in your browser.
The State of Mac Hardware in 1999⇢
I had only seen parts of this old WWDC session before this week, but it’s a fascinating one. The iMac segment in particular is fun, and the Macintosh Portable’s appearance caught me by surprise:
A History of the Mac’s Settings⇢
Marcin Wichary had put together something insanely great:
As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.
FireWire’s Introduction and Importance
If you’ve been wondering why so many of us are sad about the end of FireWire — despite it being well past its prime — you have to go back to its start.
FireWire was first introduced with the “Blue and White” Power Mac G3 back in 1999. This is mine, a machine I used way back at my high school job. It now lives in my studio:
In macOS Tahoe, Things Are Indeed Dire for FireWire
It has been reported that macOS Tahoe doesn’t include support for FireWire devices. To see for myself, I dug out an old FireWire 800 drive I used to use in my Apple service tech days. This baby has a lot of volumes on it, all of which appeared when plugged into my MacBook Pro running macOS Sequoia:
Getting this old drive plugged into a modern Mac requires a trip to Dongletown:
Pushing Tahoe’s Finder Icon Even Further
John Gruber, responding to my article celebrating Tahoe Beta 2’s new Finder icon:
I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.
Revisiting the Aqua Introduction
In the wake of Apple’s Liquid Glass announcements at WWDC, I took some time and rewatched the Macworld San Francisco Keynote from 2000, when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the Aqua user interface:
Here’s how Apple PR wrote about it at the time:
“Mac OS X will delight consumers with its simplicity and amaze professionals with its power,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO. “Apple’s innovation is leading the way in personal computer operating systems once again.”
Doug Brown Found a Power Mac G3 Rom Easter Egg Nearly 30 Years After Launch⇢
This is really, really cool:
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
This story starts with me on a lazy Sunday using Hex Fiend in conjunction with Eric Harmon’s Mac ROM template (ROM Fiend) to look through the resources stored in the Power Mac G3’s ROM. This ROM was used in the beige desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999.
macOS Tahoe Beta 2 Fixes the Finder Icon
If you missed my previous post on the topic, the first version of Tahoe had the dark blue on the right side of the Finder icon, which was criminal.
Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:
Now, the background material is blue, with the face on the right side of the icon using a white glassy material. I think this looks pretty good:
Tahoe Seems to Drop FireWire Support⇢
The first macOS Tahoe developer beta does not support the legacy FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 data-transfer standards, according to @NekoMichi on X, and a Reddit post. As a result, the first few iPod models and old external storage drives that rely on FireWire cannot be synced with or mounted on a Mac running the macOS Tahoe beta.
Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app.
Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish⇢
To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Steve’s commencement address at Stanford, we are sharing a newly enhanced version of the video below and on YouTube. It is one of the most influential commencement addresses in history, watched over 120 million times, and reproduced in media and school curricula around the world. The talk even helped inspire an unlikely NBA title comeback for the Cleveland Cavaliers when LeBron James played a clip from it in the locker room before a critical game three against the Golden State Warriors in 2016.