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That Solitaire is not the Real Thing, which is the old Windows 3 to XP solitaire, the only one worth playing, with the Susan Kare design.

It runs fine under Wine, btw. All you need is sol.exe and cards.dll.

At the top of Slashdot pages is an icon with a TV screen with rounded corners and a "rabbit ears" antenna.

The "floppy disk" icon for "Save" hasn't made sense in 20 years. Even then, it makes little sense; it ought to mean "copy to removable medium", not "save to local file".

The use of binoculars for "search" never made much sense. For some time, I thought that icon meant "zoom". "Movie camera" icons still appear in some programs, with camera outlines not seen since the 1930s. But they sometimes mean "play" rather than "record". Images of cassette tapes still appear in some audio-related programs.

Abstract icons hold up better. The circular arrow for "refresh" is fine. Symbols from international road signs are well recognized.

Facebook seems to avoid this. The most dated icon on Facebook's main page is a tear-off calendar. Photoshop is at the other extreme, with a collection of icons meaningful only to people who did photographic film darkroom work.

Too many people are trying to emulate Susan Kare's work of 30 years ago. Badly. Kare herself has moved on.

The fanboys claimed that they didn't want all of that.

That goes a long way back. For the original Mac, the fanboys were saying "The Mac has resolution; it doesn't need color." (IBM had color. Sun had color. Apple was strictly black and white. Not even greyscale in the early models. Fortunately for Apple, they had Susan Kare, who made the Mac interface look good under those limitations.)

Of course Apple has to lock out the "tinkerers". They'll just screw up the aesthetic.

Look at most open source programs. The icons suck. The fonts suck. The layout sucks. The usability sucks. Few people can get those things right. Open source doesn't have a Susan Kare.

You know what tinkerers will do. "See, if you press here, it pops up a keyboard image and you can use VI commands." Name one open source program that's undergone usability testing.

I'd rather have text menus than vast numbers of tiny obscure icons.

And if we have to have tiny obscure icons, someone as good as Susan Kare is needed to design them.

What a deal they made! You have to wonder what would happen if MS had to play like any other software company had to and not have a tie in to the per machine cost. When the better DRDOS came out and was really eating into Microsofts DOS sales MS dropped a windows beta on the world that when run and found you were running DRDOS told you future windows versions will not work with it, has to be the one of the greatest dirty tricks of all time.

It was also pretty hard to believe MS when they stated that the Mac OS had little to do with the development of Windows when they hired UI Design artists like Susan Kare who worked on the Mac UI. Check out this site: http://www.kare.com/portfolio.html

Strangely I see a lot of parallels between Apple and Microsoft during the Vista development. When Apple was developing Copeland, the next generation Mac OS, release dates kept slipping and grand features would pop up and disappear just as quickly. Apple had lost its way, which was great because Jobs came back and Copeland was dumped and NextOS was made into OS X. Which gives me the power of Mac OS and Unix as well.

I really think Microsoft should have dumped vista and started from scratch on a new Windows OS. I think Longhorn was Microsofts Copeland and they made the wrong decision. I have two XP boxes running XP SP2 and I won't be upgrading those to Vista anytime soon. I am even running XP on my mac laptop with parallels desktop. Time will tell if they can make Vista into something better but every PC I have been around lately is still running XP.

Strange that a lot of the bells and whistles and even some major features look a lot like and even act a lot like features that OS X already had. Apple has borrowed from Microsoft as well. The difference is that when Apple borrows from Microsoft it more often not improves the interface and provides more efficient code.

If we are keeping a score sheet however Microsoft by far has borrowed much more from Apple, right down to hiring ex-apple OS interface designers for Windows 3.x. Susan Kare is a prime example.

http://www.kare.com/design_bio.html
http://www.kare.com/portfolio.html

Strange that a lot of the bells and whistles and even some major features look a lot like and even act a lot like features that OS X already had. Apple has borrowed from Microsoft as well. The difference is that when Apple borrows from Microsoft it more often not improves the interface and provides more efficient code.

If we are keeping a score sheet however Microsoft by far has borrowed much more from Apple, right down to hiring ex-apple OS interface designers for Windows 3.x. Susan Kare is a prime example.

http://www.kare.com/design_bio.html
http://www.kare.com/portfolio.html

The dogcow was designed by Susan Kare, and here's a brief history.

HIgher resolution != Smaller text

Any decent OS or web browser will let you scale up font sizes. The end result is that your text is the same size, but smoother.

I *hate* OSes that do that! If I'm paying top dollar for lots of pixels it's because I want to put lots of text on that screen. If you feel that you need more pixels in each character in order to make them readable then I suggest you're using the wrong fonts.

The *right* fonts, by and large, are the twenty year old ones that came with the original Macintosh, especially Monaco (and Geneva for variable width). Monaco 9 is still today very hard to beat as a font for terminals or programming. And it's not just Mac-heads who think so -- I know lots of Windows and Linux people who swear by it (or close clones) as well.

Just make sure you remember to turn anti-aliasing *off* for those fonts. They're perfect already, and hand-optimized pixel by pixel by the best in the world (Susan Kare) in a way that a smoothing engine can never match.

Only a few people do icon design well. Susan Kare, who did both the original Mac icons and the original Windows icons, is the best known. Take a good look at her work. For some modern icon designs, see Kare's icon family for Autodesk.

Only a few people do icon design well. Susan Kare, who did both the original Mac icons and the original Windows icons, is the best known. Take a good look at her work. For some modern icon designs, see Kare's icon family for Autodesk.

I agree a new icon theme is needed. The icons don't need to be made more interesting though. They need to be duller.

Originally, Nautilus had actual, genuine Susan Kare stuff. Not just style imitation - real stuff. I thought it was spartan, but it worked, unlike most of the modern icon stuff. I liked Mac and Win3.0 UI designs a lot. I liked Nautilus a lot.

Nowadays, it seems icons have to be fluffy, ephemeral, and cute. I can live with cute, but the fluffiness and complicated looks of the icons have to go. We need simpler icons. We need icons that indicate what they represent and not a damn thing more.

Plus, simpler icons are faster to make so the icon sets can be made really comprehensive, too. It's frustrating to have an icon theme you like and it lacks icons for majority of cool filetypes...

If you like icons, you should check out Susan Kare's page She made most of the original MacOS icons, as well as most of the original Windows icons. Lots of great pixel art.

>>> Now if only IBM would open source the fabulous Workplace Shell [wikipedia.org]!

YES, YES, YES.

IBM shall GPL'ing the Workplace Shell. May they should pay there developers and designers to work with the GNOME team. As the Eazel did with Susan Kare

Many of the icons for OS/2 Warp were designed by Susan Kare, who also designed many of the icons for the original MacOS and for Windows 3.x...

Here are some of the Warp icons she created for IBM.

The main functions of an app should be right in front of the user, expressed as simply as possible. The rest of the functionality should be further in, in menus and dialogues.
Keep the barrier to entry as low as possible to make the app's *main* functionality immediately usable to as many as possible.

Having siad that, I don't actually think the current crop of OSS apps is all that bad. I'm sure there are some turkeys out there, but the latest Fedora and Mandrake distros (as an example) are pretty easy to use out the box. MPlayer (once installed) is as good as anything on Windows (XINE could probably do with some work, though). Firefox is outstanding in this respect. Evolution does fine too (for obvious reasons).

Hav a look at this. I don't know if she's involved in any OSS projects, but it would be fantastic if she was.

If you're involved in configuration, go take a look at Susan Kare's original Macintosh control panel. Now think really, really hard about how to get to something that intutive.

However, the Lisa and Macintosh keyboards both had closed apple symbols.

The Macintosh keyboard had NO Apple symbol at all.

Susan Kare was asked to pick an abstract symbol. She found a sweedish campground map symbol that's been in use ever since.

I'm actually puzzled why Apple put the "Apple" on the later command keys, since the symbol is not used in any of their software to denote keyboard shortcuts. The purists among us bristle at references to "apple-q to quit". Bah! It's "command-q". :)

(The IIgs keyboard was never actually sold with Macs, was it? I remember it having a fairly unique design that matched the styling of the GS)

- Peter

Long ago, I went to a talk by the author of MacWrite. He mentioned that at one point, text deletion was done by selecting the text and dragging it to the trash can. That was quickly rejected by test users.

No designer can make drawings as n00b-friendly as Susan Kare. I don't give a rat, I still think that MacOS before 8 was teh best for the n00bs. Me, I liked GS/OS because you could exit to a command line, but it was the same basic OS underneath as the Mac. (Except programmed for a 16-bit 65816, not a 32-bit 68000)

-uso.

Check this out: http://kare.com/images/portfolio_14.gif.

If you don't care about piddly little things like context, you can go straight to her images folder here:

http://kare.com/images/

That's right, everything you needed to customize your computer's behavior, condensed into a single window 312x155 (roughly) pixels in size. What's more, all the functions are discoverable, neither instruction nor a help file is necessary to use it. It's perhaps one of the most brilliant examples of efficient information display ever realized on a personal computer, plus interactivity thrown in for good measure.

The web page shown is "apple.com", which has a tab bar as its highest level. Below the tab bar is what looks like a menu bar, with no boundaries between the text items. But it doesn't actually have drop-down menus or rollovers; it's just a button bar. Tacky.

Apple also seems to have crudded up the IE window with yet another built-in button bar, with buttons labelled "Apple", "Apple Support", "Apple Store", etc. Again, tacky.

Down at the bottom of the screen, we have icons for applications: the Funny Blue Thing, the Funny Green Thing, and the Funny Orange Thing.

Apple needs Susan Kare, and her minimalism, back.

Actually, there were other fonts designed specifically for the screen long before Verdana. Susan Kare did the fonts Chicago, Monaco, Geneva, New York and so on for the original Macintosh in 1984 -- I believe long before Verdana and the others in Microsoft's library came out.

Verdana was one of the first scalable fonts specifically designed for the screen, that is true.

Also, as others have pointed out, Verdana, Tahoma and so on are not "lost" per se. Microsoft's own license on those fonts allows for free unlimited distribution (so long as the distributor does not derive profit from their distribution), and they also come pre-installed on Windows and Mac systems; anyone that installs Internet Explorer also gets them free.

Cheers,

Ethelred

BillG already knows of Apple's contributions, because he bought the people from there that gave the Mac its coolness factor and used them for Windows 3.0

Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.

It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too. :-)

Glen Raphael
(who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)

BillG already knows of Apple's contributions, because he bought the people from there that gave the Mac its coolness factor and used them for Windows 3.0

Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.

It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too. :-)

Glen Raphael
(who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)

BillG already knows of Apple's contributions, because he bought the people from there that gave the Mac its coolness factor and used them for Windows 3.0

Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.

It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too. :-)

Glen Raphael
(who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)