Susan Kare: Mother of Icons You Love (or Hate)

bughunter writes "One of today's Yahoo Daily Picks is the personal exhibit of Susan Kare: the mimimalist creator of most of the original Macintosh icons then, later, the iconic elements for Windows 3.0, and she didn't stop there. More than just icons, her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious - trashcans, bombs, and Happy Macs are universally recognized by computer literate persons the world over. (I can personally attest that the Mac System 6 beachball is burned into my soul...) She deserves some recognition of her own."

Comments

500 Internal Server Error

[Anonymous Coward]

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@kare.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

"More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Re:500 Internal Server Error

[mattrix2k]

It was working a few minutes ago when it was in The Mysterious Future. Quickist slashdotting I've ever seen for a site with no large downloads.

Re:500 Internal Server Error

[wheany]

Does it return a sad webserver icon?

First post and it's already Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject.

Apperently not mimimalist enough

[ripetersen]

as the image server is already /.'ed

Already?

[BShive]

Zero comments and already /.'d. BTW, many of those icons are recognizeable even by computer-illiterate people too.

Re:Already?

[Lev13than]

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

http://kare.com/images/

Mimimalist

[blackmonday]

I too am a mimimalist and must contact her, I thought I was the only one.

Re:Mimimalist

[nexex]

then why do you have a computer?

Too Late

[Ken@WearableTech]

This was /. before it even went live. Here is the google cache but it won't let you see the pretty icons.

neato

[SweetAndSourJesus]

I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now.

The one with the bomb icon on it.

I don't wear it at airports.

Re:neato

[Ponty]

I have her "Be Good" t-shirt (with the Pope icon on it.) I always get good comments on that one.

If you really want to be impressed, check out her five dots and six dots fonts. They're beautiful. I use them regularly for detail work in my webpages (including my homepage.) Just great. Well worth the money.

Re:neato

[realperseus]

My girlfriend is wearing Susan Kare apparel right now....

Apparel with the bomb icon on it......

And yes, she wears them at airports..... *grin

Re:neato

[Jace of Fuse!]

I have a T-Shirt that says...

"BOMB TECHNICIAN. IF YOU SEE ME RUNNING, TRY AND KEEP UP."

I wore it into an airport without even realizing what I was wearing (I was picking up a friend.)

Nobody ever said anything about the shirt.

Re:neato

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm actually wearing a Susan Kare t-shirt right now. The one with the bomb icon on it. I don't wear it at airports.


That shirt is very popular in Iraq right now for suicide bombers who cannot afford real explosives or are in training

Re:neato

[jetpack]

Heh. I saw that on somebody's .sig a while back and thought it was pretty funny. Where did you get the shirt?

Re:neato

[lessbianinman]

It would seem that you should have started running at the point say when you realized that you were wearing the shirt? Maybe you will try this and report back the results? ;)

Re:neato

[Anonymous Coward]

Where did you get the shirt?

have you heard of google?

Re:neato

[datadictator]

I take it we will not be seeing your GF modeling the apparel in question ?

Forgive the cliche but...
It would be da bomb.

*wink*

Obviously...

[ultramk]

it isn't burned into your soul, because it isn't a beachball, it's a watch. The minute hand turns.

Dork.

m-

Re:Obviously...

[Lynn Benfield]

AFAIK, the beachball first showed up as the wait cursor for MPW (Apple's pre-Mac OS X command line development environment). It started showing up in other software after that.

In terms of the official busy cursor, you're right, it was a wristwatch.

Re:Obviously...

[jaavaaguru]

Yup. I like the beachball more though. At the time I had a Sinclair QL, and did a bit of programming which usually turned out to be text-based software. It was easy to mess with the QL's character set to make an Apple-style beachball and make it spin using multiple slightly different looking characters. If X ever had the need for a busy cursor like that, I'd love it to be the beachball.

Re:Obviously...

[TrackDaddy]

Of course, the old joke in the Win 3.1 days was that while the Mac used a wristwatch for a wait cursor, Windows had an hour glass. Think about it.

Re:Obviously...

[Ponty]

Uh, it does.

Actually, it's a rainbow "beachball." When NEXTSTEP was released in 1988, the only media the NeXT Computer had was a 256 MB optical drive. The wait cursor looked like a spinning optical disc. When the NeXTDimension 32bit color board was released, NeXT users were delighted (or dismayed) to see it spinning in all the colors of the rainbow. The wheel looked like diffracted light off of optical media.

I, for one, was delighted to see that very same wait cursor in Mac OS X 10.0-10.1. Unfortunately, it's now bigger and more cartoony in 10.2 and doesn't look a lot like its fifteen year old predecessor.

Re:Obviously...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't used Macs in ages, but there used to be a beachball icon that you could substitute for the watch.

Dork.

And this is how you repay her?!

[mekkab]

Slashdotted without a comment in sight!

Re:And this is how you repay her?!

[cwmonkey]

Hmm, and this after seeing a comment in a PHP thread about someone not ever seeing a cgi script get slashdotted...

Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[dekraved]

On the part of the site that was working, the pixel fonts reminded me of a time I tried to make Microsoft Word have the look of the old DOS Wordperfect. I managed to make the background blue, though it was really bright, and I managed to make the text gray. But I couldn't find the right monospaced, pixelly font. Has anybody else tried to do this, or am I just psycho? I thought that Wordperfect was much more fun to write in. I always felt like Doogie Howser.

(Also, for a supposed icon expert, how come the portfolio icon doesn't really evoke portfolio so much as "person writing"?)

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[wheany]

Did you try Terminal or Fixedsys?

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[zephc]

best monospaced font i know of is Monaco (at 9 point), still the same great font, from the first Mac to OS X.2

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[John_Booty]

Have you tried Andale Mono? At least for code, I find that to be my favorite monospaced font of all time. It's a very subjective thing of course, but perhaps you'll like it.

It used to be part of Microsoft's free font downloads; they've since pulled it from their website, but it should be easily findable on the web.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[WatertonMan]

I have to disagree. The first thing I did when I got my Mac was copy Lucida Console from my PC. I love that Font. Very readible. Looks great in Terminal.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[cetan]

I'm so glad someone else uses Andale. I love that font.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[Ponty]

It's a reasonable font, but I have nothing but praise for un-antialiased Monaco 9 and 10 for my code. It's amazing.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[shellbeach]

It used to be part of Microsoft's free font downloads; they've since pulled it from their website

You'll find all the Microsoft free web fonts (inc. Andale Mono) at corefonts.sourceforge.net - all perfectly legal, btw, and even with the option of an rpm package.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[zog karndon]

uh, did you try view/full screen and the various WP options under Tools/Options/General? Word 97/98 had a ton of funky options (mostly under tools options) that tried to make it more comfortable for WordPerfect users. Word 2K seems to have removed some of them - I seem to recall a monospace mode in Word 97, but can't find the options flag in Word 2000.

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[Anonymous Coward]

A while back I manually created an 8x16 BIOS font for Windows (I wrote a program that read the font information from the BIOS, then overwrote an existing fixed width font). At the time I really wanted a 9x16 font (the 'X' looks better, as well as a few other letters), but I couldn't find any documentation on the font formats so I had to settle on the 8x16. I've used it for years now, it's especially good for IRC :)

If you want the bios font, here is a link to it:

biosfont.fon

Enjoy,
calamari

Re:Pixel fonts and Microsoft Word?

[dekraved]

This was definitely the sort of font I was aiming for, but AFAIK Word 2K won't let me use non-TrueType fonts. Alas!

What about....

[VistaBoy]

...the icon I'm staring at trying to look at this already-slashdotted page? Did she make this one too?

If you click the Windows 3.0 icons

[rf0]

If you click the Windows 3.0 icons you get an error. Its so cool that she managed to emulate windows on her web page :)

Seriously though when the /.ing has died down I think it will really be worth a look even for a retro kick. She designed the solitare cards for God's sake. How many hours of my life has that accounted for? :)

Rus

Re:If you click the Windows 3.0 icons

[Joe the Lesser]

I could care less about mac icons, but kudos on keeping the US work force entertained! :D

Beach ball?

[Clockwurk]

I'm kind of curious how a beach ball is representative of busyness or waiting. Plz explain.

Re:Beach ball?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't a beachball, it was a clock or watch or something (I don't remember what it looked like exactly).

The submitter is a retard.

Re:Beach ball?

[Anonymous Coward]

the beachball is a separate icon to the clock/watch

retard

Re:Beach ball?

[binaryDigit]

Actually it's not a beach ball. The current OSX "I'm busy at a very low level" thingy is a spinning multicolored disc, which resembles a beachball (sorta) and hence it's name. The old version was a watch with spinning hands.

Re:Beach ball?

[azav]

The terms we have used for that little "ball of death" are much less friendly.

Spinning technicolor pizza of death.
Pinwheel of pain

Oh, the aagony. :]

Re:Beach ball?

[SideshowBob]

The beach ball referred to was the wait cursor for MPW (Macintosh Programmer's Workshop).

It was copied widely in numerous popular 3rd party applications, but you are correct in that the official wait cursor for the OS was the watch cursor.

The spinning disc cursor used in OS X is a descendent of the wait cursor from NeXTStep, which was originally used to indicate that the Magneto-Optical disc was in use.

Re:Beach ball?

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

I thought it was a spinning CD. I guess you learn something mew and useless everyday. :)

Re:Beach ball?

[saddino]

I remember that the Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal (BLIT) bitmapped terminal used a coffee cup (i.e. "go get a cup of coffee while you wait") icon for waiting, which gives you an idea of how long you had to wait sometimes...always got a kick out of that. Bring the coffee cup to the Mac!

Re:Beach ball?

[rworne]

Actually, before the current Jaguar "pinwheel" implementation, it was a spinning rainbow disk platter, a holdover from the magneto-optical disks from the NeXT computer era.

My first dealing with OS X had this spinning icon appear after opening a file, and it brought back memories of the older NeXT operating system I used to use back in the 90's.

I was rather sad to see it go in the current version of OS X, I always considered it a sort of tribute to OS X's beginnings.

Re:Beach ball?

[Ponty]

Optical disc, actually. I wrote a little bit about it up above. Pretty cool stuff.

Re:Beach ball?

[Anonymous Coward]

Filemaker uses a coffee cup icon when waiting for a remote search.

Re:Beach ball?

[darqchild]

it was a circle, divided in quarters. 2 white, and 2 black. and it would spin.

Amiga Icons

[NetNinja]

I remember when I owned my Amiga there was a person who created an application called Magic icons. It changed the way the Amiga's desktop looked and for the most part a large number of Amiga users defaulted to using that application.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a bit miffed that this article doesn't mention the great amiga icon designers. The amiga also used the 'watch' icon, and a pointer, it also used a paper with a folded over top as representing a document, and many of the other icons on the site linked to in the article, and it used them before the macintosh.
I'm not saying there should be a copyright on icons as simple as these, they're too tiny to be quarreled over, but surely the correct recognition is due?

Re:Amiga Icons

[CausticWindow]

Check out Workbench Nostalgia for screenshots of all Workbench/AmigaOS versions.

Jolly memories.

Re:Amiga Icons

[usotsuki]

What about GS/OS icons? Hmm, GS/OS was a MacOS clone in 1987...for a 16-bit machine (and no, the 68000 is not a 16-bit processor, any more than a 386SX is!), 65816/2.8 MHz, less powerful than a Mac but oh, the eye candy! *g*

Re:Amiga Icons

[Ponty]

Yea, but the whole OS looked like warmed over then re-frozen crap. This is flamebait, I know, but I have never seen anything as hideous as the Amiga GUI.

How can you justify making people read this:
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.h tml
or this
http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/images/w b_35_2 .gif

all day long? That and the god-awful flickering interlaced mode that seemed so popular. If it wasn't squished it was vibrating. Ghastly, ghastly OS.

Re:Amiga Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Amiga fanatic as well, but Kare really is the Mother of All Icons, in the sense that anyone can be. The Mac was the first 'consumer' system with a default GUI.

Things to note:
-The Mac did beat Amiga to market by a year.
-The Lisa predated it, anyway.

-I'm not sure exactly which Amiga addon you're thinking of, but the Amiga featured easily-replaced icons and pointers from the start.

-The Amiga team was working within a few Commodore-mandated restraints. The roughly ~640x200 resolution was picked to allow reuse of CRTs CBM had on hand (the team wanted a more standard 'scandoubled' resolution), and the 1000 was to ship with only 256k (given the RAM crisis of the time).

-Further, the 1000 did not have a Kickstart ROM, meaning Kickstart (equivalent to a Mac's ROM) would use precious RAM. As the basic windowdressing was incorporated in the Intuition code (and thus part of Kickstart), keeping the number of bitmaps to a minimum was important. This is also why the original Workbench screen used a 4-color (out of 4096+) palette, when the chipset itself was capable of much more.

As such, the graphic design *was* fairly minimalist, but this left room for applications to shine. Contrast this to the original Mac, which was so useless the 'Fat' model had to be introduced only months later. (Those limitations also meant you were spending much longer staring at the desktop on a Mac, while on an Amiga, your app was launched- probably on its own screen- and you were getting actual work done.)

Another fun note about usability- with the original intention as a games system, and some confusion as to the eventual shape of the computer version (remember, these guys didn't even know if they'd be working for Atari or Commodore), the "hideous" Blue-White-Orange-Black scheme derived from experiments with the worst, most-burned-out TVs they could find. That palette, they determined, had the best contrast on even the worst tubes. (In those days, it was rare for a home's *good* TV to be dedicated to a personal computer.)

Re:Amiga Icons

[baryon351]

How do you figure that the amiga used those icons before the mac, when the first amiga was released in 1985, more than a year after the first mac which used icons from the lisa, which was demonstrated in 1982, the GUI of which had been under development for 18 months already; Before hi-toro existed, even.

Screwy Amiga-user revisionism

Re:Amiga Icons

[Skuld-Chan]

Flickering had nothing to do with the OS - it had everything to do with the chipset and moreso what mode you were in.

For instance DblNTSC looked quite nice on my A1200. As did any mode on my A3000 - with the flicker fixer (basically the opposite of a vga to ntsc convertor).

I wouldn't knock the OS too much - its only recently that we have os's that respond as quickly as AmigaDOS did in the early 90's. I still have a tape full of 3d animations I still can't believe what we could do on an 8 meg machine.

Re:Amiga Icons

[mdwh2]

How can you justify making people read this: http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_30.html or this http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/images/wb_35_2 .gif

The first one is from 1992, and imo a lot better than other systems of the time. The second one has a crappy font in the Shell window, but that can be changed. I'm not sure what's so wrong with it - can you be more specific with its faults?

And the flicker was when you viewed certain resolutions through a TV - certainly nothing to do with the OS. With a Mac or PC, you got nothing on a TV.

Evidently...

[Hanji]

Her server resources were even more minimalist than her icons...

Re:Evidently...

[eodmightier]

Thats too bad. Maybe I'm out of the slashdot loop but is there any solution in the works on mirroring sites before unleashing holy slashdotting upon them?

Re:Evidently...

[bughunter]

Well, I figured if her server could handle being a "Yahoo Pick of the Day" it could handle a slashdotting.

Eh... wrong again!

Re:Evidently...

[MavEtJu]

If I put a perl virus here, I wonder how many people would run it, just to see what it did...

More than you think... check my signature :-)

Re:Evidently...

[lithron]

Your answer lies in the faq.

Re:Evidently...

[Malcolm Scott]

D'oh! I ran it. What did it just do? ;-)

(I'm too gullible.)

Re:Evidently...

[p3d0]

To the curious: to interpret parent's signature, imagine replacing the colon with the word "foo". It's much more legible that way.

Re:Evidently...

[mlk]

Nope, tis in the FAQ, http://slashdot.org/faq/suggestions.shtml#su900.
Use Google Cashe or The Web Archive.

Re:Evidently...

[Hanji]

I think that it just spawns a process that will, VERY rapidly, spawn a copy of itself and then die. So it shouldn't actually hurt much, just create a hard-to-kill process flitting around in memory.
My knowledge with bash is somewhat weak, and it MAY be spawning TWO processes each time, in which case your memory is quickly filling up with little bash functions each spawning more bash functions.
However, I'm nearly certain that it's the first option, so don't really worry about it too much unless your computer starts getting really slow, in which case reboot.

Re:Evidently...

[haggar]

except that "foo" would return an error message ("foo: command not found"), while the colon wouldn't. Well, it's more like a noop in assembler, but it's still a valid shell command. If you relly want a shell synonim to ":", then use "true". "true" does nothing more but return a zero as exit value, which is the same as what ":" does.

Re:Evidently...

[Anonymous Coward]

No-one has come up with any objections to my previous idea... but then, no-one is paying attention to it either.

Throttle stories. After 1000 views of a story, it gets 'hidden' from the main page for a few minutes (depending on the type of data most desired - movie trailers should have a larger break than a single static HTML page, for example).

It's not perfect, but it's better than what we have now, and it would likely help those little sites stand up to the weight of slashdot.

Re:Evidently...

[Anonymous Coward]

'foo' works fine in a cygwin bash prompt, although it doesn't do what the OP thought it would - it crashes Windows XP quite succinctly (well, not exactly crash, but destroys response while popping up 'no more vm' messages, and the only realistic way out of it is to power off).

Re:Evidently...

[shellbeach]

While I understand that there are reasons for not caching pages (as given in the FAQ), would it be too hard for story submitters and/or slashdot editors to check if there's a google cache for pages hosted on non-commercial sites?

By all means give the original link, but if there's a google cache entry then why not give that link first? (of course, stating that it's a cache of the page, may not reflect recent updates, etc).

This way slashdot would not be to blame if the cache was out-of-date (which seems to be a big issue in the FAQ) and wouldn't have to ask permission to cache the page either.

And for those who doubt the power of the google cache - here's the links from the story in cache form:

1. Susan Kare's homepage,

   The original mac icons ... and ...

   The windows 3.0 icons

There - was that so hard, now?

Re:Evidently...

[datadictator]

Well your litle bash script don't run.

First it told me that the : is an unknown identifier, then after removing first one, then both colons, it died even more beautifully.

Sorry pal :-)

grep -i $BLONDE;date;
cd ~;touch;finger;mount;uptime;umount;sleep

It's fun and it can run :-)

Re:Evidently...

[p3d0]

I think you're wrong. Did you try it? The line starts with "foo(){" which defines a new function called "foo".

Re:Evidently...

[haggar]

You might be right, actually. But yes, I know a function is defined, I took that into consideration, and I just didn't like what that little piece of code could do.

unhappy mac and bomb, huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, scratch a few thousand more people who aren't going to recognize her legacy because her website can't handle the traffic.

Seems kind of appropriate considering.

Re:Soulless Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I love America. The world should too.

minimal

[SHEENmaster]

bandwidth, and a misconfigured apache install.

Re:minimal

[smasherbob]

I know this is offtopic, but isn't it about time slashdot editors ASK the owners of smaller sites if they can link to them? I really feel for the people that get blindsided like this. At least warn them so they could cap their bandwidth or change their server config or something.

Re:minimal

[borwells]

If you don't want people visiting your site why would you create it in the first place?

Re:minimal

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference here you're failing to grasp. A person creates a site, of course he wants "people" to visit. Now, does he want "Slashdot people" to visit? Possibly not. "people" and "Slashdot people" are two entirely different animals.

Re:minimal

[smasherbob]

Of course - but it's courtesy to warn someone that they're going to have nearly a million people one link away from their site. Not many of these small sites are able to handle that much traffic, this much is blatently obvious.

Re:minimal

[CommieBozo]

What is misconfigured about her Apache install and how can you tell? Just curious.

Re:minimal

[Forkenhoppen]

Its a matter of liability. If they start warning people, then they have the right to refuse. If the person doesn't get back to them in time, and they get slashdotted, then they could sue 'cause they didn't give them approval, and they knowingly assisted in the slashdotting.

My guess is that they feel they're in a better legal position by pretending they don't know any better.

Personally, I think it'd be kinda useful if there was a little icon next to each link in an article; either a checkmark or an X or a bomb maybe, telling whether or not the site was available. Stem the tide once they actually take down a site.

But yeah, the proper way to do it would be to either mirror it, or redirect to the google cache. (Assuming the google dudes don't immediately cut them off. ;)

Realistically, nothing's gonna happen, tho. Even if it isn't a matter of reduced liability, they've introduced that new membership thing where people find out about articles a half hour before they go "live." If stuff gets slashdotted, it's only more incentive to pay, right?

(Don't mind me.. just a little cynical. :)

Yay for Graphic Designers

[ArcSecond]

I gotta say that cute icons make a difference. I hate the crappy ones that most software use. Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20 * 20 pixels (or whatever) takes a certain kind of talent.

I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.

Re:Yay for Graphic Designers

[Anonymous Coward]

...Designing an icon that is distinctive and has an obvious functional message at 20*20 pixels (or whatever)... Kids today. 20*20 pixels - In my day we had a 1*1 pixel, and it was black all the time. And we loved it.

Re:Yay for Graphic Designers

[MattCohn.com]

Really? Man were you lucky, I had to design a series of 1*0 pixel icons, all of which represented a diffrent machine status. Not only that, but it was on a monochrome monitor, and couldn't be on OR off. I needed to make up my own color when I didn't have anything to work with. You kids have it far too easy.

Re:Yay for Graphic Designers

[rockola]

> When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.

And when the Mac had a twisted mouth, it played a C MAJOR chord! What's with that? The first four notes of Beethoven's Fifth would have been much more appropriate - even if you don't know the piece you'll get the idea when you hear it.

Collective subconscious

[Gorilla_Man]

...her GUI elements have become part of the modern collective subconscious

...So much so that we do not even need to see the article.

Re:Collective subconscious

[ArcSecond]

I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.

Re:Collective subconscious

[Planesdragon]

I believe the term is "collective UNconscious", a reference to the common dream-space of human minds that includes such things as archetypes. I doubt it can be applied to something that is merely cultural.

Actually, you just answered yourself as to why the article was right.

"Collective Unconciousness" is human instict.

"Collective subconciousnes" is human culture.

"Collective Conciousness" is, apparantly, /. and the herd mentality.

Talk about an audience

[sssmashy]

I'd never really thought of icon creators as artists before, but I suppose they deserve recognition with the more familiar artists.

Just think: together with the "NBC Peacock" guy and a handful of other logo creators, Susan Kare's "art" has probably been viewed and used my more people, for more hours, than any conventional artistic works in human history... and all in the space of two short decades.

Re:Talk about an audience

[Anonymous Coward]

two short decades

How would that compare to, say, about 240 long months?

Re:Talk about an audience

[Anonymous Coward]

With exception for the person who designed the Male & Female Bathroom signs.

Re:Talk about an audience

[cybermace5]

I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples:

The cross.

National flags.

The gold-star sticker.

Re:Talk about an audience

[binaryDigit]

Actually I've always been very impressed by icon artists. The skill required to represent something in a 16x16 or 32x32 pixel box and make it recognizable (at least the good ones) was like magic. If you look at many icons up close, they quickly start looking like a random pattern of pixels, how one visualizes how that random pattern should be arranged to look like a hand holding a pen writing on a piece of paper is very cool.

Re:Talk about an audience

[mekkab]

ohhhh! and emoticons have taken the 1970's smiley face to new hights of ubiquity! :)

Re:Talk about an audience

[RevAaron]

Ok, so who was the artist behind Jesus's logo?

Re:Talk about an audience

[kawika]

Yep, if you ignore the people who do engraving for the world's coins and paper money, I'd have to agree. Although I would have to say that money art is highly politicized compared to computer OS icons...

Re:Talk about an audience

[PuckRembrant]

Ok, so who was the artist behind Jesus's logo?

The Romans.

Re:Talk about an audience

[Galvatron]

He said "who," not "which national group." The point is, there was no identifiable artist who made the cross in its current form. It started as a tool (a tool for execution), and then more stylized deptictions of it became the religious icons we know today.

Re:Talk about an audience

[slittle]

I'd rank icon artists up with font artists. Neither are something that you'd typically think about, but holy shit, when you use a system with crappy fonts/icons (ie. go from your usual Mac/Win system to a crusty old Unix X terminal) it makes a hell of a difference.

Re:Talk about an audience

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but apart from the roads, the aquaduct, education, medicine, wines, and Jesus's logo, what have the Romans ever done for us?

Re:Talk about an audience

[kgarcia]

the NBC Peackock, Rockefeller center, Mobil Gasoline among others were done by Chermayeff Y Geismar Associates between 1960 and 1970. Paul Rand was another designer that did a lot of the iconography we recognize today, like the IBM logo, NEXT, & Westinghouse... sorry about the history lesson... had just finished reading about it for a class...

frowny mac

[Drunken Coward]

I'll never forget the first time I saw the "sad Mac" icon during bootup. It made me chuckle and would have been even more amusing had it not been for the fact that my system would no longer boot.

I stopped using macs soon after that.

Re:frowny mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped using macs soon after that.

I prefer the BSOD shade of blue to the frowny mac :)

Re:frowny mac

[TrackDaddy]

So, how long after you recieved the "sad Mac" screen was it that you realized you needed to "stop using" your Mac? I know you said "soon", but did that mean you sat there fruitlessly trying to move them mouse and ckick on the keyboard for a half an hour before you gave up?

Sorry, I just couldn't resist...

elsewhere too

[Yakk]

She also worked on some of the icons at Eazel (she did the first Nautilus vector theme) and some of the fonts for Danger (who make the hiptop/sidekick).

slashdotted already...

[morcheeba]

I was expecting to at least see some sort of sad/broken/dead/flaming server icon, but the message was just plain text.

Oh well, I'll just have to make my own :(

Solitare icons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, she isn't famous for the mac icon, but for the thousands and thousands of solitare gamers world wide.

Seems like the server is a bit slower now and the portfolio cgi is broken.

I wonder... how many slashdot.org dupes and bad Jokes ... we will see tomorrow ;-)

I wonder

[segfault7375]

I wonder what an icon would look like if you wanted it to say "Oh shit, I've been /.'d!" :)

Re:I wonder

[ThePlague]

Cowboy Neal, of course.

Re:I wonder

[pyros]

my money's on a Visual C++ .Net banner ad.

Re:I wonder

[Kourino]

Well, now you can ask her :3

Re:I wonder

[ncc74656]

I wonder what an icon would look like if you wanted it to say "Oh shit, I've been /.'d!" :)

Burning Mac, perhaps?

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

My guess is it would look like the Ghostbusters symbol. But instead of a ghost it would have a /. in it.

More Icons

[T-Kir]

I remember in the days of Windows 3, there was a dll icon file that was about 300KB ... and scrolling through it on a 386 SX took about 10 minutes! Can't remember it's name though.

Re:More Icons

[leviramsey]

Ah, the wonderful moricons.dll... makes me a little teary eyed...

Re:More Icons

[Wraithlyn]

It's still there! It is called moricons.dll

On my WinME box here, it's 82 KB, XP's is 206 KB for some reason.

It's funny to look at the ancient icons still in there.. Paradox, Borland Turbo Pascal, Lotus 123, etc :)

Re:More Icons

[samrolken]

I think you're talking about moricons.dll.

Re:More Icons

[CommieBozo]

Maybe you're thinking of moricons.dll? It's still included with modern versions of Windows. Check out C:\windows\system32\moricons.dll under XP.

Re:More Icons

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, stupid question.

How do you view a dll file?

Re:More Icons

[Nick of NSTime]

Create a shortcut on your Windows desktop. Right click it, then pick properties. You should see a button toward the bottom labeled "Change Icon." Click that, and put the path to moricons.dll in the text box. Voila, you can see the icons.

Some of her icons at images.google.com

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

If you just search for Susan Kare using Google Images, you'll find quite a few examples.

Re:Some of her icons at images.google.com

[galaxy300]

Oh rats! She invented the paper clip too? I was just about to use that in a project of mine...

Re:Some of her icons at images.google.com

[puto]

I hate to sound sexist but she is a very attractive women. There is so much character and life in her face.

As a geek who admires good work and good looking women, I gotta say WOW.

My girlfriend is an AIX genius who is also a head turner.

Puto

Re:Some of her icons at images.google.com

[Haeleth]

Mind you, the typical geek definition of "attractive woman" is any vaguely female entity who fails to run away screaming at the first encounter...

Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't reply to specific comments. I can only start new threads. Is it just me or is this a new policy on this site? Free speech my ass. Taco, just get rid of ac's completely and stop adding (undocumented) anti-ac functions to your craptastic website.

Re:Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't reply to specific comments. I can only start new threads. Is it just me or is this a new policy on this site? Free speech my ass. Taco, just get rid of ac's completely and stop adding (undocumented) anti-ac functions to your craptastic website

Yea, I can't believe that I can't reply to your comment as AC. oh...

fucking dumbass

Re:Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

just to add another note: maybe its your fucked up karma. or the fact that you are a clueless idiot that doesnt understand how to post or reply.

Or maybe its a plot: we are all out to get you. Quick! Lock your doors!

Stupid people shouldn't breed

Re:Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the help asshole. fuck off.

i'm telling you that there's something wrong with /. i browse at -1, view newest posts (threading off). i had to click at least dozen times on the "change" button before the "reply" button (and the "reply" links on individual comments)appeared. otherwise, there's no "reply" button, and no way to reply to comments. obviously it's not affecting you (or you got lucky).

anyone else having this problem or am i the only one.

Re:Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

read my reply to your other post asshole. slashdot it fucked up somehow.

fucked up karma? hey idiot, i'm posting as ac. i don't have karma.

don't know how to post? i've been posting on slashdot for the past three years.

plot? suck my dick. i'm not a conspiracy-theorist slashbot. i'm a troll and this weird slashdot behaviour is preventing me from trolling and crapflooding.

-ac

Re:Why can't ac's post normally anymore?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the fuck does free speach have to do with ASCII pics of some guys arse?

Google Cache

[Torqued]

Karma whoring mode ON:

Google Cache Links:

iconic elements for Windows 3.0 [Google Cache Link]

original Macintosh icons [Google Cache Link]

Re:Google Cache

[Pharmboy]

Karma whoring mode ON:

Hell, I wish I had a mod point to give you, purely for truth in advertsing!

Re:Google Cache

[GraZZ]

Normally the Google cache isn't too much help when you're trying to view images on a slashdotted site ;)

However, it's working in this case, leading me to surmise that kare.com is dying simply because of CGI usage. Yet more proof that CGI should be taken out into the street and shot.

Re:Google Cache

[Torqued]

True on the cache comment.. but I did check to see if they worked before I posted them. :)

Re:Google Cache

[haggar]

Thank you, regardless of the motivation (karmawhore).

Now, I see that among those original Mac icons there's this four-leaf thingy. What was that symbolizing, anyone?

Re:Google Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

The four-leaf thingy is the Apple key. Which is like a Control key that lets you do keyboard shortcuts for common actions, e.g, Apple-Q quits a program.

Re:Google Cache

[iocat]

It's hard for me to believe the same person did both sets of icons. The Mac icons look so elegant and timeless, and the Windows icons just look cheap and lame. I guess it's tough to follow yourself...

Re:Google Cache

[usotsuki]

The Apple/Kyrka key.

-uso.

Re:Google Cache

[Patrick13]

I used this link and clicked through all the cached versions:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe =UTF-8&q=site%3Akare.com+Susan+Kare+User+Interface +Graphics+Portfolio+Page

The images still work for whatever reason.

Re:Google Cache

[haggar]

Does it mean that clicking on this icon did the same as pressing the Apple key? Or was this purely a keyboard icon, never to appear on the GUI?

Re:Google Cache

[Suppafly]

It's hard for me to believe the same person did both sets of icons. The Mac icons look so elegant and timeless, and the Windows icons just look cheap and lame. I guess it's tough to follow yourself...

Spoken like a true mac fanatic and not someone that has actually used both systems.

Re:Google Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

the icon appeared in keyboard shortcut indicators in the right-hand side of the menu

Re:Google Cache

[iocat]

Actually I am using a PC as I write this. I'm no glassy eyed fanatic, and I may not know icons, but I know what I like!

her work & legacy

[nsda's_deviant]

kare's portoflio shows to her credit:
mac paint,
macintosh icons
macintosh fonts (like classic chicago!)
windows 3.0 icons
windows solitare
os/2 warp icons
7 pixel fonts

her site is getting hammered already. the coolest part of susan kare is she had no template for the creation of her art. she gave form to predesigned functions. she's sorta like a Jonathan Ive way back when.

Yahoo + /. Great.

[Daniel_Staal]

Good. So instead of just /.ing her, we do it on a day when the site's address has just been emailed out to thousands of link-starved people too.

Script Kiddies wish they had that much power.

Re:Yahoo + /. Great.

[lesv]

Some of them do -- Unfortunatly.

Re:Mac elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

The happy mac icon is shown during boot as long as things still are going OK. When it changes into a sad mac, it has apparently encountered some problem.

Icons are Evil.

[pongo000]

All of them. Here's why:

Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection. Even the lowly trashcan: Its appearance varies widely from desktop to desktop. The word "trashcan" is widely recognized in the language of your choice, regardless of the font used (well, let's stick to readable fonts, not Wingdings). Different trashcan icons take precious brain cycles away from important stuff in order to determine that said icon is, in fact, the trashcan on the MacOS 9.x desktop (or whatever your poison might be).

It's my desire to see all icons with a simple one-word description in place of the pictures. The extra level of indirection (recognize icon using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) is really unnecessary.

Desktops may not look very pretty, but they'll sure as hell be more functional with icons replaced with "wordcons."

Re:Icons are Evil.

[juuri]

This would make sense if people pattern matched to words but they don't. Take a group of people and allow them to press a button corresponding to a meaning and then show them pictures. Then do the same with words, the picture responses will be *much* faster. We are visual creatures.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Dr.Zap]

Used to make "wordcon" menus with MSDOS batch files. I suppose you could make great ones with current tools, or you could butcher your GUI and remove all graphcs.

BTW, ever wonder how much brain power does it take to convert all those words back into the images your brain processes?

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Pirogoeth]

Icons are nice to learn where things are. Eventually the muscle memory takes over and they become unnecessary. You could change my trashcan icon to a picture of anything and I would still drag files to it because I know that that's where the trash is.

I modified the icon bar in Mail.app the way I liked it and have been using it that way for about a year now. I recently mucked it up and had to reinstall it. I modifed the icon bar again, but didn't put the "delete" button back in the same spot. Good thing the icon is there, because my mouse still automagically moves to where it is 'supposed' to be, but isn't anymore.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[WatertonMan]

More than just visual recognition occurs though (although that is significant). With the visual recognition comes a recognition of using the object for something.

Thus not only is it easier to recognize a trashcan over the word trashcan, but you immadiately intuit that you can put things into a trash can, move a trashcan and so forth.

Some people confused this aspect of UI to mere metaphor. This led to all sorts of horrible interfaces - many that pushed metaphor. The problem was that the power of icons and mice wasn't metaphoric but a kind of embodied action. You can have embodied actions with CLIs as well. Indeed many aspects of CLI do this - although they tend to be more complex than icons.

It is unfortunate that these aspects of UI design are so often neglected.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[tc]

Sorry, but you're wrong. And you've failed to grasp the point of icons.

The point of icons is not so much that you can instantly know the function of an unfamiliar icon by looking at the picture. It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does. I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons. You also need much less screen real estate in a small icon (such as a toolbar button) than an equivalent text button.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Complete and utter bullshit. Research shows that good icons are remembered and that they are more distingashable than a word and of course, take up less space. This is the whole point of icons.

Even though you are trying to look as if you know something about UI and usablility, you obviously don't know anything.

Score -1, misleading.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Anonymous Coward]

I 'grasp' the point of icons, but they've been overused, especially in the windows world.

Fire up Visual Studio 6 (I haven't upgraded to .NET despite the great things all the ads on slashdot have to say about it), and open up a visual basic product (or C++ too).

I still don't know what half of the icons up at the top do, 90% of them look pretty much the same. And trying to find that activex control to plunk onto the form? Good freaking luck. I have 4 rows wide of 'em and you have to hover over each and every one to find that vsAwk control.

Icons are good at what they're for, but this is at least one case where I'd prefer a text based list thats alphabetically sorted.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[error0x100]

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Here's a revelation for you: people are different.

I can more quickly find an icon I know in a sea of other icons, than I can find a text button in a sea of other text buttons.

Well, I can much more quickly find a text label in a sea of other text labels, than an icon I know in a sea of other icons. Does that make you "wrong"? No. People are different. This isn't "right" or "wrong". Deal with it.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Kourino]

Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection.

You've never played DDR, or maybe even video games, have you? When you're familiar with it, processing an image is pretty much instantaneous, not that it's terribly slow in the first place for simple stuff like this.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[xombo]

A good example of this was when I was at a friends house on his linux box, and I asked him what his browser was, I immediatly searched for anything that had a world in it, since that is most commonly for web browsers. I had to point over all of them because in Gnome they were all just weird blobs, when I'm at home, I have to point out Mozilla to people because they don't know what the little dragon thing is.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[metamanda]

I used to design icons (still do sometimes) so feel free to regard my reply as a little bit biased.

A poorly made set of icons can indeed be worse than text. I think the really crucial element is whether different icons or wordcons are easily distinguishable. Your brain can easily pick out unique features. for example:

OOOOOOOOOOOOOQOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOTOOOOOOO

notice how that T is much easier to spot that that Q? Icons that all look similar will be more difficult to pick out than words. However, to some extent, text looks like text looks like text, and a set of icons that have been designed to be easily distinguishable from each other will be easier for most people to pick out than a bunch of wordcons. Yes, there is a learning curve where you have to figure out what the icons mean, but I typically learn that pretty fast, and then I process icons faster than text. I would say that once they are learned, you're stripping away a "level of indirection". After all, kids who haven't learned to read yet can process pictures... you learn how to do that very early.

As an aside, people read lowercase, serifed fonts faster than uppercase sans-serif fonts because uppercase sans-serif fonts have fewer distinguishing features for each letter. Your speed of reading, or your speed of picking out icons, doesn't happen on a conscious level. Even if you're annoyed by icons, they might be helping you anyway.

Your point about the trashcan icon is kind of interesting, and true. The point of an icon is that it evokes a general concept. A trashcan icon that is too detailed can make you think of a particular trash can, or a particular type of trashcan -- a simple one should just make you think of the platonic form of trashcan. It should work sort of like the word "trashcan", except that you can read it faster, and tell it apart from other icons more easily. (That's why the simplicity of Kare's icons is so awesome.) So yes, it would work much better if it's appearance were consistent across OS's.

The idea of trying to pick a tool in photoshop using printed names -- "paintbrush, history brush, pencil" -- instead of icons makes me shudder.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Anonymous Coward]

Trouble is, about 4% of icons (yes, I pulled that number out of my butt) are good icons. Much of the time, the icons are poorly drawn and it's impossible to figure out what they are or tell them apart from other icons. Sometimes, you use a system for years before you ever figure out what the drawing is supposed to be.

For example, consider bookmarks in Netscape Navigator 4.x (well, and Mozilla too). I used that program for at least a year before I figured out what that icon was supposed to be a drawing of. I already knew that it stood for bookmarks, but for the life of me, I could've sworn it was a forked snake's tongue. That's what it looks like. I can now see that it looks sort of like a bookmark, but honestly, it still looks much more like a snake's tongue. For a very long time, I didn't care what it looked like or stood for. My goal in using the program was to get something done, not invest time in learning about someone's bad art. All the places where the bookmark icon occurs are places where only bookmarks can occur anyway, so it doesn't help anything be visually distinctive. So, I regarded it as part of the huge, expansive mass of visual clutter that serves no purpose but is unfortunately a part of using most software these days. (Same goes for web sites, CNN, etc.)

And then there is the problem that some icons just don't stick in my mind. I'm using OS X for development work these days, and at the end of the dock is an icon that takes me to the finder. I've used Macs off and on since 1989, sometimes on a daily basis, so I've had a chance to become familiar with the little blue face icon. You know, the finder icon. Or wait, is it the Mac system icon? Or is it the MacOS logo? The fact is, there's probably some kind of meaning it's supposed to have, but it's really never been clear to me. Or maybe it doesn't have just one meaning. Maybe it means whatever the developers want it to for that particular release.

So my point is, since I can't figure out based on cumulative experience with the Mac what that icon is supposed to be, and since I don't care either (recall that I just want to be able to open the finder), I just remember that when I click on the thingy at the end, it takes me to the finder. But I only remember that after looking at all the icons in the dock and wondering, "How do I get to the finder again?" Then I think for a second and say to myself, "Oh yeah, there's an icon on the dock that does that for me. Which one is it... Oh yeah, for some reason it's the face that takes me to the finder."

So I guess my point is that icons aren't necessarily bad in the abstract, but in the real world, even Apple -- the people who (in theory) do it best -- have produced a system where the icons are used in a way that's confusing. In the real world, icons are almost universally badly drawn and badly applied. It really would be clearer if there were just a word there that said "Finder". And if that word needs to be drawn in an artful way in order to make it visually distinctive, that's fine. It can be in red, with a swoosh and a curlycue, as long as the word "Finder" is present and easy to read. And "easy to read" does not mean that it takes up 1/10th of the space like in some icons I've seen.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[tc]

Those would be examples of poor icon designs then. That doesn't invalidate icons as a concept.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[tc]

Here's a revelation for you: people are different.

And here's a revelation for you: if you read the post to which I was replying (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it seems likely that you would agree with me that (s)he was wrong, since the original poster was flat out saying that icons were evil and should be replaced by text in all situations. I stand by my statement that the original poster is simply wrong - because all the evidence indicates that a great many people find icons useful, even if there may be a few outliers who do not. Regardless of your personal preference, it seems clear that it would be a UI design blunder to globally replace all icons with text buttons, which it seemed the original poster was implying.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Commutative Monoid]

Agreed. I generally detest icons. I only find them useful for inherently visual-spatial tasks, like modeling or image editing. Toolbars of ugly, low-resolution, non-informative icons that require me to read a tooltip to even get the foggiest idea of what it's meant to do, really irk me. I always turn them off for any program I can. I can scan text labels much more fluidly.
Whether or not this will always be the case (in the future software vendors may actually determine more effective visual cues) I don't know, but certainly presently is for me.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[error0x100]

Well, I think the original poster was just exaggerating his/her point a bit. Regardless: you still posted your point as being an "absolute fact" that icons are better, which is no better than the original poster.

I don't think the original poster's post was "flamebait", just his/her opinion (also incorrectly stated as fact, but anyone with half a brain cell could deduce that that was the only problem with it - apart from that, he/she has a point).

Personally I like (well-designed, attractive) icons in certain situations, and I know that many other people actually prefer them - probably the majority of people. I'm simply in favour of choice. Today's computers are powerful enough to offer a choice to users in this matter. Heck, the computers of the 1980's were powerful enough to offer a choice in this matter. So I don't see what the point of bickering about it is.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Commutative Monoid]

It really astounds me that this was modded up.

1. There's no citation for this research. What's Insightful here?
2. It contains ad hominem implying ignorance, when it has nothing to support its position. Are we to take this person's word for it?
3. It presumes that the findings of such (unnamed) research shows some sort of uniform value for icons across all parties. Something isn't "complete and utter bullshit" when the finding's of someone's study does not coincide the reality of what an observers knows to be true for themself. 4. It presumes that the result of such research is applicable to the reality of deployed software icons. Since the poster didn't see fit to provide us with any proof as to this "research," one cannot know if it is even meant to apply to actual software. If the premise that given a certain condition X an icon Y is more easily determined within a set of icons Z, doesn't mean, for instance, that Microsoft Office's toolbar (just for example) is at all more efficient than text.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[mvdw]

If you're in linux, you only need one icon: the one that opens a terminal.

In the new terminal, simply typing 'mozilla &' will open a new browser (assuming mozilla is in the $PATH). But you already knew that, right?

Re:Icons are Evil.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Sorry for not going any referances. But I though that this would be common knowledge as well as common sence. Probably a bit naive on my part. But I'm sure Google can help you find your answers.

BTW. I do think that icons have been abused. But the origonal poster was giving the impression that all icons are would be better off as text. And that icons have no use. Not that they were being abused.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Commutative Monoid]

I was criticizing the moderation of the post, because it was unwarranted. Your comment wasn't insightful, and it had no facts to be checked. There is no such thing as "common sense" when making blanket statements about the value of certain aspects of visual cognition. You can't simply apply what you recall, remember, believe, think, or assume to have learned from a source you cannot provide to another discussion.

I agree that the original poster was being fairly general in his criticism of icons, but it doesn't mean the moderators should empower your equally generalized, and if I might add, flamebait of a post with its 5, Insightful status.

Perhaps he believes all icons would be better off as text. If they're consistently and constantly abused in his experience, then studies you vaguely recall about visual recognition that were not done on software icons are pretty irrelevant. If on the other hand you actually have sources of research on the effectiveness of the actual usage of icons in real software, then you should, by all means, enlighten us. That would be insightful.

If I have to use Google to verify the content of your post, then a post claiming authority over someone else's witless banter doesn't even deserve your kharma bonus, least of all mod points.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[easyfrag]

For example, consider bookmarks in Netscape Navigator 4.x (well, and Mozilla too). I used that program for at least a year before I figured out what that icon was supposed to be a drawing of.

Oh, so thats what that icon is supposed to be

Re:Icons are Evil.

[neurojab]

people are different.

Individualism is really just part of the collective dogma of western culture. It's not a solid fact. The fact is that there are 4 billion so-called "individuals" on this planet. How different are these "individuals"? A very small part of our genetic makeup varies among each individual. I'd wager that if there were a way to compare thought patterns and beliefs, we'd find even less differences. It's too bad that because of this individualist indoctrinitation, people can't acknowledge that we're really the same. Instead, we try hard to find "differences" to distinguish ourselves and find reasons to fight about them.

If proper studies have been done that show that icons are more user friendly, then I'm afraid it's quite likely your preference for text is just part of your indoctrinated desire to be an individual.

People aren't different. Drugs do not support terrorism. Santa Claus isn't real.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[Haeleth]

Er, do you really believe that our genetic makeup defines everything about us? That's rather like saying that your average Linux box is no different from a Windows system because the hardware is the same. Software is key, and we're only the same until the brain has been programmed.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[rpg25]

Actually, that's not true. Readers do perform pattern recognition. When a fluent reader reads a written page, a lot of what's going on is pattern recognition. There isn't actually that much reading words out letter-by-letter.

For many things, words provide a much better discriminator, because you can more precisely capture meaning, and because there may be no good image for the process in question.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[neurojab]

You're right that the software is the key. My point was that there's even less variation in our "software" than in our genome. We're programmed to want to be individuals. Go up to Berkeley and watch all the kids with painful-looking piercings and you'll see what I mean. Do the piercings make them different? Or are they just sadly following their "be an individual" programming by mutilating themselves? You be the judge.

Re:Icons are Evil.

[kris_lang]

Your example gave the opposite result for me. The 'Q' actually has a descender on it and "pops out" visually from the line with Os on it, whereas the 'T' is confined to the same vertical limits as the Os and does not visually "pop out." This is obviously also a function of the font being used and not a disagreement with your premise. I'm trying to think of the link on visual crowding and visual psychophysics for this.

The other thing that is important in symbology (which is important in designing air traffic controller displays, or military displays with icons or symbols or letters representing individual troops or armaments or hardware) along with recognizability is differentiability. If you've got multiple symbols on a crowded display, how do you make particular features stand out and how do you make multidimensional representations in symbols and icons?

One way is to have the symbol represent one thing (type of object) and its color represent another thing (category of object, e.g. increasing altitude, decreasing altitude, steady altitude, or red and green for the opposing positions in a football team instead of Xs and Os).

And small symbols subtend less than half-a-degree of visual arc, they are extremely tiny. Most of the color matching and color discrimination work has been done using 10 degree and 2 degree spots. The CIE XYZ and CIELAB color spaces (from the 1930s and the 1970s) all used relatively large targets compared to the size of icons on the original Mac or text on current screens.

Re:Mac elitism

[binaryDigit]

Oh well, I guess owning a Mac makes you some sort of IT hero around slashdot. You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about.

Well around here I don't know of ANY IT guys that know any of that. Here IT guys usually refers to the systems support guys (you know, the ones that maintain the network, sets up computers, gives you flack for installing non standard software, etc). The stuff you mention usually is the domain of the developers (or engineers if you prefer).

BTW, the Happy Mac was the icon you saw when your Mac passed all it's boot checks and was booting "normally" (vs the Sad Mac which you saw if your machine was hosed).

The Happy Mac icon

[leerpm]

is an icon of an old single unit Macintosh computer with a smiley face showing on the screen. But why take my word for it when a picture is worth a thousand words

Re:Mac elitism

[stratjakt]

Well that is indeed hardware troubleshooting of the highest order! See a frowny face, pay tech support.

Computer literate indeed!

Bomb icon for web site

[mikosullivan]

They should put a bomb icon on their web site to reflect their /.ing.

What has she done for me lately?

[Acidic_Diarrhea]

Well that's quite a portfolio but what has she done lately? Obviously I can't get at her site because it's a smoldering heap BUT I am curious why you don't mention any more recent additions to that portfolio.

So is she retired or in a different field or just not getting called on by the companies anymore?

Greybeard elitism?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about. Do not tremble, Old One. Your many years of diligent study and hard work have been noted, and we promise that the Slashdot young will be brought to you after lunch for a nice, soothing na^H^Hstory.

Re:Mac elitism

[forkboy]

And you bitch about Mac elitism? Listen to yourself dude.

"I've never used a mac except for a few times in passing, blah blah, it's only for the computer illiterate, blah blah, I obviously know everything about computers because I know a couple coding techniques so I'm right and you're wrong, blah blah blah"

I'm sorry that you didn't feel included when the editor said that computer literate people know the Happy Mac icon, but damn, lay off the hostility...there's no need to call for jihad. If you don't like macs and never have, good for you, that's your choice. If you can reminesce about your Commodore PET, then let the other 95% of the people on /. think back to the old macs they owned or used in school.

As far as arrogance derived from coding or system administration skill goes, it is unfounded. You're not cool and you're not making a difference. Any reasonably intelligent person can perform these tasks given the time and desire. You are not a unique and beautiful snowflake.

Now hopefully we'll both be modded down as trolls and we can go on with our lives.

a 16x16 canvas

[rtphokie]

Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[WatertonMan]

Because when I applied 1000 monkeys designing icons on 16x16 I found that she'd already come up with all the good ones.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[geekbox5]

With that 16x16 canvas, this woman managed to make images that have become part of everyday household life for many people. Her work has been seen by hundreds of thousands of people at least, and I believe some of her work is still showcased in the moricons.dll file. Just because a canvas is small, doesn't mean it's unimportant.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Exactly. Why don't you try to come up with something good on only a 16x16 pixel canvas.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Concerned Onlooker]

I don't think you're supposed to care about it, it's just that you just might find it interesting. The whole point might be just what you said, that there is only so much one can put on a 16x16 canvas, and the skill and artistry comes in seeing how much information can be conveyed in such a restricted area.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[unitron]

"There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas."

I think that's kinda the point, doing so much with so little, especially considering that she was making squares look like curves. If you can create better looking icons than hers while subject to the same conditions and limitations I'm sure we'd all enjoy seeing them (ascii goatse.cx does NOT count)

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Cuthalion]

Given that you can only realistically expect about twenty unique designs per monkey, you really need 200,000,000 monkeys (for a 16x16 black and white canvas). Given that there are only a 12 monkeys to the barrel, that's a quite a lot of fun!

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Dominic_Mazzoni]

Tell me again why we are supposed to care about this? There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.

True. Good thing Susan Kare had a 32x32 canvas to work with (the size of all Mac icons from the original 128K Mac through OS 9.1).

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[rtphokie]

If you can create better looking icons than hers while subject to the same conditions and limitations
I contend that she did nothing special because if she didn't do it, someone else would have and the results would have been identical because of those limitations.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[teamhasnoi]

Tell me again why Haiku is such a popular form of poetry? Three lines? Whatever. And why can't basketball players just grab the ball and run without all that dribbling? And who the hell decided that the 'blues' should have only 3 chords?

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[trb]

There is only so much you can put on a 16x16 canvas.

With a single bit deep, you have 2^256 (10^80) images to choose from. (With 8-bit color, it's 256^256 (10^600+).) I have to agree, with 16x16, the possibilities are limited. I'm guessing that Susan Kare just printed them all on her ImageWriter and used the best ones.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Anonymous Coward]

What a small imagination you have.

I contend your mind is but a 16x16 canvas. And blank, at that.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Have Blue]

That's the point exactly. How do you cram a complex concept like "use this to change the window size" or "the system is busy, wait a bit" into a 16x16 B&W image in such a way that one can easily deduce what that function is? It's hard enough already to decide to use a trash can for computer files or a wristwatch to indicate activity (remember that no one had ever designed icons before), and much harder to draw an instantly recognizable trash can with those constraints.

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[WatertonMan]

Yeah - but I only had a 1000. Do you think I'd get better icons that she hadn't made already if I'd brought more monkies?

Re:a 16x16 canvas

[Cuthalion]

Have you considered renting or leasing your monkeys? That can be very economincal.

You gotta love Steve Jobs' overkill.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hire a doctor of fine arts to make graph paper doodles.

Re:You gotta love Steve Jobs' overkill.

[unitron]

Since those "graph paper doodles" need to look like something else when you shrink them down I'd say that hiring a doctor of fine arts to perform fooling of the eye was the best way to get a quality product quickly.

Re:Mac elitism

[binaryDigit]

It also gave a diagnostic code. How is this any different than some cryptic bios failure code from days gone by in the pc world (or count the led flashes on many unix boxen, or lookup the error code on the led on IBM boxen)? Maybe not as cutsey, but hey, Macs are in graphics mode ALL the time so you could do "fancy" stuff like that even way back then. Seems to me you're the only "elitest" around here.

Re:Mac elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming from someone decrying elitism, that is about the most elitist post I could think of.

Icons? Can't really say I kare.

[Anonymous Coward]

Free the troll twosday april one

The best icons

[Rob Parkhill]

Some of the best icons ever created were by Keith Ohlfs for NeXTstep. Amazing what he could pack into 64x64 2-bit greyscale pixels.

Check out his latest work at Pixelsight

Re:Mac elitism

[Yokaze]

Hashing a with buckets makes out of a Happy Mac a collection of groups of Not So Happy Mac parts of similar size, but of unrelated use.

A B-Tree is stuffing a lot of Happy Macs to a lot of 'X's, so you can smash them faster because of their physical nearness. But keep them in countable pile, so you don't lost track of them.

A two-handed clock algorithm is a attempt at stopping a clock with both hands, which bears the problem that one hand is catching the other.

And Google is the answer to all questions

Where is my banana?

(I admit, that I was not aware that Happy Mac stood for "that icon", too.)

Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[MacFury]

Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for? The benefit of the visual icon and a label for further clarification? Also. How does one write. "copy current selection to the clipboard then erase it from the screen" in 20x20 pixels? I'm sure others could think of longer winded phrases that have common corresponding icons.

Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[swisener]

"Cut"

Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[error0x100]

Simple: "cut". You could fit that into 11x5 pixels and it would still be clearly readable.

Tooltips are not that useful because you can only see one at a time, and first have to float the mouse over a button. This is very different to seeing all available options spelt out on the screen at once.

Labels AND icons just take up lots of screenspace. This is fine for desktop icons, but not for toolbars. I agree with parent poster, but mostly about toolbars, and not icons in general. Toolbar icons are mostly meaningless; give me text anyway. The brain can process a written word MUCH faster than pretty much any 16x16 image, regardless of how well the image corresponds with the functionality. On toolbars, though, text would take up too much space horizontally.

Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[usotsuki]

Pair of scissors.

-uso.

Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[Forkenhoppen]

Now do the same to explain the X style of cut and paste.

Re:Isn't that what titles/labels/tooltips are for?

[usotsuki]

X is pathological *g*. From what I heard, it's good at what it does, but it wasn't meant to be a GUI for lusers, and as a result, it's not really user-friendly. Now die-hard techies should have no problem with it, but they're the type who'd have maximized bash windows or emacs up full-screen all the time. *g*

-uso.

[-] MS-DOS Prompt [_][*][X]
bash-2.04$ _

mother of solitare!

[Enrico Pulatzo]

you're the cause of so much wasted time (outside of /. ;)

Re:mother of solitare!

[frozenray]

She just designed the cards AFAIK. Solitaire was written by Wes Cherry, who was probably hired by some evil superpower in an ingenious attempt to sabotage the Western economies. A quite successful attempt, I might add, looking at the state of those economies right now.

Compressible art

[sssmashy]

I can store the collective works of Shakespeare in a 10 Mb zip file. The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.

And yet, the collective works of Susan Kare could probably be compressed down to 1 or 2 kilobytes. Talk about minimalism!

Re:Compressible art

[Anonymous Coward]

The collective paintings of Michelangelo, scanned and compressed with zero data loss, would probably be 100 Gb at least.

Depends on the scanner of course, but I can easily believe that it would take 100 GB or more. If you just consider the portions of the Sistine chapel he painted, you get roughly 1000 m^2.

I can just imagine some guy lying on his back atop a scaffold, laboriously using a flatbed scanner to scan the entire ceiling... :-)

Re:Compressible art

[tryfan]

And yet, she's every bit as interesting as Michelangelo or Shakespeare!

Poor woman!

[obotics]

She deserves some recognition of her own.

So instead of buying her flowers and sending her chocolates, you slashdot her server. What kind of thanks is this!?!

The new math?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is about the 10th time I've seen this in the last few days.

Slashdot requires you to wait 2 minutes between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been -239 seconds since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

WTF is up with this? Can you not test your code in a sandbox? How long has slashcode been alpha? You'd think your uber-effective counter trolling code straight by now.

An icon for slashdot effect?

[l0ungeb0y]

Maybe now that her site is feeling the power of the geek, she'll feel inspired to make an icon for the fabled slashdot effect to commemorate the tormenting of her poor webserver.

Re:An icon for slashdot effect?

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

Shhhhhh... You arn't suposed to know about their evil plan.

Atari 512ST

[Anonymous Coward]

Did she do the mushroom too?

Re:Atari 512ST

[usotsuki]

I don't know, but the PC version of GEM (Atari licensed GEM from DRI) had a trashcan and that got Digital Research sued...

-uso.

Mac viral icons

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember making Mac icons myself. One of the most interesting/exploitable things about early Mac icons was that they were somewhat viral. If you instered a disk with an icon that the system didn't have, it would add it to the systems set of icons. Sometimes it would even replace an 'official' icon with the hacked one, but I never quite figured out when it would vs. wouldn't do this.

As an example, I was bored waiting for someone I carpooled with in college, so I started diddling around on one of the campus library computing lab's macs. Using resedit I changed the MacPaint icon to a rather x-rated female figure. (rather difficult to do well in 16x16 pixels, or whatever it was). About 6 months later one of my frat brother's younger sibling showed me "this neat icon that replaced the MacPaint icons at high school"... It was my icon!

When I had made it originaly I didn't know it would spread (bad pun), I expected it to just mess with the one library machine. Experimenting some more I discovered the icon capturing effect, but as I said I never figured out the complete set of rules.

Re:Mac viral icons

[One Louder]

There was an interesting computer virus vulnerability that (I believe) was never exploited related to this behavior of Macs. At one time, one could "compress" resources, including icons, with a custom codec. That codec, of course, could be a virus - such that the very act of inserting a disk would cause the virus to be executed as a side-effect of the system attempting to automatically add new icons to its database.

Umm.... so what?

[jemenake]

Next week, I guess we'll be treated to an expose' on the dude who wrote Windows' auto-insert notification code?

I mean... we had to use some icons, and those icons had to be made by somebody, and it happened to be her. My guess is that it is most likely one of those "right place, right time" kind of things. I figure she was just the most adept (of the Mac developer team) at making icons moreso than it was a case of Steve Jobs ordaining "Find me the best iconographer on the planet!".

This is much like how people get famous in the music industry. Why did Britney Spears get famous while the thousands of similarly mediocre talent did not? Because, contrary to what Einstein asserted, God does play with dice, and some stuff is due to pure happenstance.

So, now she's parlayed that initial luck into a cult of personality. Good for her.

Now, for something truly interesting to do while we're at the site... how many people think that there was deliberate thought given to which icons you can get on the various bits of clothing that she sells on her site. Specifically, note the women's thong. Among other limitations, you cannot get a thong with:
- The dead fish
- The sushi roll
- The rolling dice (think STD's)
- The cherries

So... you gotta ask yourself, did the various icon/clothing combinations go through some deliberate "hidden meaning" censorship?

Re:Umm.... so what?

[TiMike]

Wish I had my random 5 Mod Points. This is well said.

Re:Mac elitism

[robbo]

Dude, you haven't lived until you've dropped Happy Mac. What a TRIP!!

Cultural problems

[SuperBanana]

I remember the happy mac startup icon from 1984... when the Mac was happy, *I* was happy. When the Mac had a twisted mouth and Xs for eyes, I wasn't.

Some folks may remember the happy mac actually winked at you during startup in one of the OS 8 versions. It was quickly yanked- Apple supposedly got a backlash(or feared one) from cultures/countries where winking is offensive; search on google and you'll find a ton of links about it.

Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)

Random trivia- most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team. My 660AV's ROM contained an image of the team(much larger) at a beachparty. It is so sad to see that easter eggs have pretty much been killed off for years now in apple hardware/software.

Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?

Obligitory slashdotting joke: Her site could use the SPOD right about now :-)

Re:Cultural problems

[RevAaron]

Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?

I don't believe she did- the Spinner in OS X is a cleaned up version of the Spinning Winchester/CD of Death in NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and older version of OS X.

Re:Cultural problems

[Zeal17]

Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)

Heh, I remember my science teacher in high school getting those when he accidently plugged his keyboard into a s-video port (or something of the like) They were pretty cool. I do remember it took some real problems to get the sad mac.

-Zeal17

Re:Cultural problems

[eodmightier]

I remember being a young kid, sitting in my bedroom working on my computer and after a reboot hearing those Chimes of Death. Scared the poo out of me. Probably one of my first SUCCESSFUL major troubleshooting situations.

Re:Cultural problems

[SuperBanana]

most of the original Macintosh's ROM was taken up by a COLOR image of the Macintosh development team.

Technical correction on this one- I can't find any 'google evidence' to collaborate the above, so I might be wrong, it might have been black and white, and I've probably got the wrong Original Mac model(there were a number of them- the Plus, the 128k, 512k, 1MB...then there's the SE, SE/30...yadda yadda.) Oh well. Sorry folks.

I am positive about the 660AV having the beach party picture- there was a program you could download that would extract it from the ROM, and I gave it a try- amused me greatly :-)

Re:Cultural problems

[flagstone]

I interned for a summer at an Apple site in Campbell CA doing some graphic design, MM Director presentations, that kind of thing. We burned some out to CDs, back when that meant writing the data out to a Bernoulli disk or somesuch, then heading over to the washing-maching sized unit to try to create a test disk, then back to correct the formatting, etc, etc.

At any rate I remember trying out a test disk on one of the Macs at the end of the day, only the formatting was of course incorrect and the machine froze up. Upon rebooting, it tried to read the hosed CD, failed miserably and to my horror blasted out the Chimes of Death for all to hear.

The only thing worse than hearing the Chimes of Death is seeing a bunch of heads peering in over the cubicle walls to see which miserable intern had just caused the Chimes to sound....

Re:Cultural problems

[mlk]

> Curious- Did she design the Spinning Pizza of Death, in OS x?

Spinning Pizza Of Death? WTF is that? (guess the none-mac-user)

Re:Cultural problems

[mrseigen]

The chimes of death give me this weird feeling in the pit of my stomach, it scares the shit out of me too. Strange how that one sound has the power to nearly kill me.

Re:Cultural problems

[extrarice]

[quote]
Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)
[/quote]

Didn't Apple replace the chimes of death with the sound of a car crash? Or was that a different kid of error?

Re:Cultural problems

[Dylan Zimmerman]

They do that to _everybody_. That's what they were designed to do. If anyone hears those tones, they immediately know that it is a Bad Thing (tm).

I almost had a heart attack the first time I heard them. My PowerBook 5300c had just come back from Apple Service (with System 8.6, no less) and I was attempting to get my ethernet card to work. I put the drivers where they went in System 8 and re-booted. For some reason, when it boots into System 8.6 now, it garbagizes the System file.

Anyway, it said that it couldn't find an operating system (disk with the flashing '?'). When I tried to do a soft reboot from the keyboard, it did the Chimes Of Death. I tried to look up the hex codes on the Dead Mac screen, but I couldn't find them anywhere.

I still don't know what was going on, but I had System 8.1 in a folder on the HD. I got Disk Tools PPC and set it to boot from the 8.1 folder. It works now, but I really want System 8.6 again.

Re:Cultural problems

[Phroggy]

Spinning Pizza Of Death? WTF is that? (guess the none-mac-user)

It's just the "busy" cursor, left over from NeXTStep but redrawn in rainbow colors. Equivalent to the hourglass cursor in Windows.

Re:Cultural problems

[Phroggy]

Similarly, they yanked at one point the Chimes Of Death(doo wee do doooooo) that accompanied the dead-mac(and error code dump), usually caused by severe hardware or software problems during booting in older macs. It genuinely freaked people out(I know it scared the shit out of me the first time i heard it.)

The replacement sound is screeching brakes and a big explosion played at full volume. I don't think they changed it because the old sound was too scary.

Re:Cultural problems

[xombo]

I remember my friend had an old powerbook with a battery near death, and he booted it up, saw the sad mac, and just said, "What the fuck!" it was hillarious, his dad was like, "aww, it's the sad mac!"

Re:Cultural problems

[mlk]

Thank you.

Re:Cultural problems

[SuperBanana]

Spinning Pizza Of Death? WTF is that?

Whoops, sorry- it's a technicolor spinning disk cursor that served as MacOS X's "I'm busy" indicator. It got its nickname because in early versions of OS X(ie, 10.0), it would appear ALL the time; subsequent versions improved matters dramatically.

Sometimes it was only one application that would show it(ie, you could switch to another app and keep using the other app), other times you'd get it in all applications.

A friend, who did a lot of OS X development and attended WWDC and such, said that the cursor indicates when the application has stopped responding to events.

Re:Cultural problems

[mlk]

Ta.

Re:Cultural problems

[usotsuki]

IIRC, ClarisWorks 4 supported some form of the Spinning Pizza too, didn't it? :\

-uso.

Re:Cultural problems

[Ponty]

Poorly seated ram was a way to get it.

The chimes of death scared the hell out of me the first time I heard them. When they replaced it with the car crash in the Power Macs (I think that's when it was,) that scared the hell out of me, too. In fact, hearing anything but the comforting Mac "bong" would scare the hell out of me.

Re:Cultural problems

[Ponty]

One of the mid-90s Macs (for some reason I think Classic or Classic II) had a copy of System 5 in ROM for last-resort troubleshooting. I think that was a great idea -- a bare bones version of the OS that's guaranteed to be good. Ah, Apple.

Re:Cultural problems

[Raskolnk]

anything but the comforting Mac "bong" would scare the hell out of me

Wow, that's a good use for one of the old one piece Macs. I imagine it's much more stylish than an IBM compatible bong.

Re:Cultural problems

[Ponty]

I knew someone would point that out. Well done. I tried to think of another sound, but a "bong" really is the closest onamonapeia I could figure.

Re:Cultural problems

[WillAdams]

Correct.

Susan Kare left NeXT before doing much at all w/ the interface.

The initial version of Workspace.app was coded up by Chris Franklin, and of course, Keith Ohlfs did the icons (and a spiffy bitmap terminal font), as well as a (buggy) program of that name.

William

Re:Cultural problems

[Moofie]

First time I heard that car crash, I totally freaked out. Then started laughing. God, that was LOUD.

Re:Cultural problems

[Phroggy]

Yes, the "beach ball" cursor has also existed in classic Mac OS since nearly the beginning. The watch cursor usually indicates a brief delay while waiting for the application to complete a minor task and become responsive again, while the spinning beach ball is usually for larger tasks which are expected to take longer.

In Mac OS X, the "spinning pizza" cursor (I don't know if that's the most commonly accepted name for it or not) is triggered by the operating system when it senses that an application is not responsive for any reason. I think applications that want to indicate a busy status will generally use the old watch cursor - or maybe that's just Carbon apps. At a quick glance I can't see any mention of this in the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines.

Re:Cultural problems

[ckd]

One of the mid-90s Macs (for some reason I think Classic or Classic II) had a copy of System 5 in ROM for last-resort troubleshooting.

Classic. System 6.0.8 IIRC (6.something in any case). Hold Cmd-Opt-X-O to boot from it. It even had the Chooser and an AppleShare file, so you could boot from it and run software off a server--totally diskless....

Re:Cultural problems

[Tokerat]

Chimes of death as well as Mac startup noises can be found here. Note that you can make most ADB-based Macs (pre-USB) "crash test" on startup by pressing Apple-Keyboard Power Button just as the startup chime is playing. This will, however, hang the Mac at the sad mac screen and you will need to reboot it with the Apple-Control-Power Key combo.

Apple-Power Key is the keyboard shortcut for the Programming Interupt Switch, just like Apple-Control-Power Key is the shortcut for the Reset Swtich. The Power Key is the button on the keyboard with the small leftward-pointing triangle.

Re:Cultural problems

[usotsuki]

New Hacker's Dictionary link

Spinning Pizza of Death

[OS X; common] The quartered-circle busy indicator on Mac OS X. It is analogous to the Microsoft Windows hourglass, but OS X 10.0's legendary slowness under the Aqua toolkit makes it rather more evocative. See Death X of.

-uso.

So skip it

[Anonymous Coward]

Christ, what's with people who think every article on slashdot has to be something they're interested in? In the future, skip to the next article, don't whine about it. If everybody whined about articles they don't care about every story would have 100000 comments like this. No thanks.

moricons.dll

[Anonymous Coward]

moricons.dll

Re:Mac elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG UR COMPUTER LITRATE!!@@!!!! &runs!*

seriously, you come off as awfully pretentious. just so you know.

-chris

MOOF!

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Moof! Says the dogcow.

Forget Icons, she designed Control Panel

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Forget Icons, she designed Control Panel

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's one of the examples of the least costomizable operating system in history. If I want Job's preferences, I'll get a mac. While I want to choose how my computer runs, I don't think I will.

Re:Forget Icons, she designed Control Panel

[Saturn49]

And somewhere else, around the same time, someone was "designing" the sendmail configuration file.

Re:Mac elitism

[lewp]

Silly, it's not elitism when you're doing it to someone else!

Oh, wait...

Yeah, and I'd hit it!

[Anonymous Coward]

This Susan Kare chick is a MILF!

Results for GIS of "Susan Kare"

Netscape

[Anonymous Coward]

I notice she has designed icons for Netscape also.

Maybe /. can have her do a Flag Icon!

[teamhasnoi]

since that's been incorrect for years. Of course, it will probably be replaced with a pyramid with a eye on top of it soon.

so close

[poot_rootbeer]

You mean moricons.dll?

I was disappointed that despite the file name, none of the icons depicted composer Ennio Morricons...

Re:Soulless Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

I love america

Look like someone already has... In the Face!

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't get out enough.

just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

You shouldn't reply to trolls. Usually they want to catch you in a not-really-thinking mood, and obviously they did for you. None of the things he mentioned are coding techniques; B-trees and hash buckets are data structures, and the two-handed clock he mentions is an algorithm. Thus his rather funny anti-Macintosh rant gets a reply from you that makes you look ignorant. That's irony.

Re:just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that Slashdot needs a "-1 doesn't understand shit" moderation.

A pity that mod would be applied to YOU, not the parent.

Algorithms and data structures are not coding techniques? Damn dude, you're really stupid. I mean 'pushing the envelope' stupid.

Re:just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you want to call thousands of years of mathematicians programmers. In which case you're probably on the bottom of the barrel.

Re:just so you know

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that a technique is used by mathematicians doesn't mean it's NOT a coding technique.

That would be like saying that punching is not a karate technique because kung fu students use it.

Maybe we can ask her...

[japhar81]

to create a slashdotted icon?

Wrong Link

[Rellik66]

Here's the right Google cache link

Re:Mac elitism

[binaryDigit]

Maybe you should get some better-educated IT guys. Knowledge of the way computers and software work can help one make intelligent decisions about how to set them up, help one diagnose problems, and help one write custom software to get a job done.

How does knowledge of how a btree works help someone figure out a driver issue? There is a huge difference in having a basic understanding of how software environments work vs specific algorithms (which is the the OP referred to). What would an IT person be coding to require them to know about the complexities of freeing/allocating memory. Hell, the current thinking is that we don't want PROGRAMMERS (Java, C#, HLL, scripting, etc) to have to deal with such issues, let alone the guy who unpacks the Dell and installs Office a dozen times a day.

Good admins are programmers/engineers, too. That makes them more expensive, but they can be much more efficient and flexible that way.

I disagree. Anyone who knows any more than very basic programming will probably be a programmer. You get paid more and you put up with a lot less sh*t, assuming of course you can find a job right now, in which case they would settle for an IT job to pay the bills. The only time I see programmers act as IT guys is in small shops that can't afford full time IT folk (or if their IT folk are like many of the IT folk I've met and sometimes take, umm, a while shall we say to get what seems like the most basic things done, like add more ram to your system). And I would never let an IT guy near any code (other than os scripting).

-1 offtopic

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus of Nazareth did not die so we could enjoy eggs and chocolate bunnies!

Yeah, but it was a spiffy side-effect.

Icons!

[Pilferer]

This is what Linux needs (i.e., gnome/kde) - some GOOD icons. I'm sorry, but the stuff that's being used now is crap. A mix of artsy, well drawn crap with crapy crap. This woman's icons both a) LOOK GOOD, and b) convey MEANING...

Let's politely (after the nasty slashdoting) ask her to whip some up for us. I'd paypal a few $'s for some nice, professional KDE icons, wouldn't you?

Re:Icons!

[terrabit]

http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_14.gif

In the bottom right left hand corner:
"Client: Eazel, Inc., 1999-2000"

Eazel used to be in the linux desktop market, right?

Depends how you define "art"

[sssmashy]

I'd have to disagree with you violently there. I can think of several examples: The cross. National flags. The gold-star sticker.

I'm not sure you can define the cross, or national flags, or other extremely common symbols as "art", unless you want to stretch stretching the definition to the point of absurdity... i.e. saying that "art" includes all human symbols and structures that can be represented visually. Is the symbol of a circle "art"? How about a white flag, or a crescent moon?

What distinguishes art from mere symbols? "Art" has to be copied faithfully to the original form. Susan Kane's icons appear, pixel for pixel, exactly as she created them. Their origin can be traced to a single, original source (the artist).

Symbols like the cross have been visually represented in millions of different forms by millions of people. The symbolic origin is obvious (crucifixion of Christ), but there is no such "artistic" origin. The cross is a symbol not because one brilliant artist invented it, but because it was a simple and obvious way to represent an event that was passed along through oral and written tradition.

Re:Depends how you define "art"

[jedidiah]

Art doesn't have to be pretensious or overly complex.

Re:Depends how you define "art"

[Ricky M. Waite]

The cross did not originate with Christ. It was around for thousands of years previous - the cross has been a consistently spiritual symbol in all of human history, with variations and origins such as the Egyption Ankh.

Re:Depends how you define "art"

[The Zody]

Yes, Kenny G, The Backstreet Boy's, and kid rock's work are considered "art."

Re:Depends how you define "art"

[jedidiah]

If you want to be really pedantic, yes.

Art doesn't need to be tasteful or relevant either.

Thus, Art encompasses all of what has already been discussed plus the paintings of chimps and elephants and a 100K doodles and carvings created by primitive proto-humans.

Re:Mac elitism

[brucehoult]

I'm computer literate. I've worked on dozens of systems from the commodore PET to the IBM Sys/36 and AS400 to HP 3000 and lately some of the Stratus boxes that started rolling through our companies 'bullpen'.

I've never used a mac except a few times in passing.

I use MS Windows and Linux and HPUX and Solaris and even ftx (a Stratus OS) on a daily basis. I've also been using and programming the Mac since a few weeks after it came out.

If you're not familiar with the Mac after nearly two decades then I'm sorry but you are *NOT* computer literate.

It was designed explicitly for the non-computer literate.

It was designed to be accessable to the computer illiterate. But that's an inclusive thing, not exclusive. It is (and always has been) a superb machine for software hackers because it has a much more open and customizable operating system than MSDOS or Windows have ever had. YOu can replace or enhance *anything*.

You know what a Happy Mac is but don't know what 'hashing with buckets' means or what a b-tree does or what a two handed clock algorithm for freeing memory is all about

What a strange thing to say when the Mac "HFS" file system is nearly unique in being based totally around b-trees for the directory and file extents structures! There isn't a flat array or linked list in sight.

Archive.org link

[Anonymous Coward]

Archive.org link

To see the icons

[bayerwerke]

http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_2.gif

http://www.kare.com/images/portfolio_6.gif

etc...

Re:Mac elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

cat http://www.happyfunball.com/hfb.html | sed -e s/mac/ball/g

Happy FUN MAC!

-only $14.95-

* Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged
exposure to Happy Fun Mac.
* Caution: Happy Fun Mac may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
* Happy Fun Mac Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not
be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
* Do not use Happy Fun Mac on concrete.

Discontinue use of Happy Fun Mac if any of the following occurs:

* Itching
* Vertigo
* Dizziness
* Tingling in extremities
* Loss of balance or coordination
* Slurred speech
* Temporary blindness
* Profuse sweating
* Heart palpitations

If Happy Fun Mac begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.

Happy Fun Mac may stick to certain types of skin.

When not in use, Happy Fun Mac should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...

Failure to do so relieves the makers of Happy Fun Mac, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.

Ingredients of Happy Fun Mac include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.

Happy Fun Mac has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.

Do not taunt Happy Fun Mac.

Happy Fun Mac comes with a lifetime guarantee.

Happy Fun Mac

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!

Re:US Marines are ASSASSINS!!

[CharlieG]

Front page on MSNBC

Guess what, don't stop at a military checkpoint, you deserve to get your ass waxed.

Dad (WWII) vet and I were laughing about this on Saturday - I asked him if he was ever told that he had to fire a warning shot is someone didn't follow instructions at a checkpoint. He said "No, you just shot them" After a couple of weeks folks learn not to disobay at checkpoints

I hate WinXP icons!

[kenjay]

Somewhat offtopic, and definitely the wrong site, but... I like the clean look of Win2k, with Appearance set to "Windows Classic". I'm running XP Pro now, and I despise the soft, blurry, fuzzy, pastel icons. I've done the easy adjustments MS allows, and found a package of ME icons that I use with Microangelo. Any links out there for going the rest of the way? In particular, the loudspeaker icon on the taskbar and the Control Panel icons are bugging me.

Control panel icon

[thogard]

Why did the control panel icon from Win 3.0 look likes something ripped from from an Amiga? It had the Amiga's (original) logo colors, a large "A" and small computer with a built in keyboard.

Here's a picture

Re:US Marines are ASSASSINS!!

[Dylan Zimmerman]

Assassin: One who murders by surprise attack, especially one who carries out a plot to kill a prominent person.

These people were hardly assassinated. If you don't stop at military checkpoints, they WILL shoot you. It's that simple. In fact, if you pose a potential threat and don't follow orders that you are given, then you get shot.

Similar things happened when we were fighting in Vietnam. Children would run out to hug the soldiers. Unfortunately, some of the children had live grenades that they would use to kill them. Our troops started gunning down anyone running towards them in self-defense.

ObSlashdotting

[Spunk]

Her icon for "500 Internal Server Error" leaves much to be desired.

guys

[six11]

who says slashdot will not help you get laid?

I wish UI designers could figure that out too...

[Kjella]

It's more that you can recognise that icon again easily once you know what it does.

So, if I start a new program, should I then see:
a) Ten kazillion icons with no explaination ('cept MouseOver)
b) A minimalist program that'll use descriptive text names with icons, putting icons on a quickbar as they come under heavy use (with the optional drag&drop if I want it there myself)

Personally, I think icons are overrated compared to an alphabetically sorted lists and well thought out menus, even though I want a *few* icons. But heh, people are different.

Kjella

Your brain is tricking you.

[thatguywhoiam]

Or, at least, it might be.

When you say,
Processing an icon takes another level of brain processing, another level of indirection

... I'm assuming you experience this yourself.

In heavily left-brained individuals, the icons can actually begin to lose their meaning due to reliance on the converse side of the brain. It works both ways, too; a heavily right-brained person will have much more trouble manipulating something like a pull-down menu than, say, the OS X Dock.

It's actually not very common either, to have a prevalence of one-sidedness (literal) to your brain that would work to impede the ability to derive meaning from both glyphs and word-shapes.

Having said that, icons are a well-proven visual tool that work extremely well most of the time, given proper usage, and there's bucketloads of information backing this up right through pre-history to your first carbon cave-scratchings.

It is possible that you don't see them this way. And, on another note, did you really think that all those little pictures in every single end-user operating system were just spurious fluff?

How did she design them?

[Chordonblue]

Wouldn't it be interesting to learn that she designed the Windows 3.1 icons on Mac Paint? :)

Re:How did she design them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe she designed the original Mac artwork on an SGI... :-)

OTOH, they're small enough she could easily have designed them on graph paper with a pencil, then converted them to hexadecimal and keyed them into the computer. (I designed a font for the TI99-4/A that way, then wrote a BASIC program to load it!)

Re:How did she design them?

[Saturn49]

*Sigh*. You've obviously never used Mac Paint. The mac paint format (and program) only allows for 2 bit color (black and white). Kind've hard to design the *color* Windows 3.1 icons on it.

Not to mention the potential difficulty in transferring the file from a mac to a PC. Macs didn't natively support DOS formatted disks back then, and only a few obscure apps that allowed DOS to read Mac formatted disks. I suppose you could resort to a serial connection or modem and a file transfer protocol. Even then you'd have to convert .mac to .bmp. I think MS probably just gave her PC to use...

Re:How did she design them?

[bjb]

If she didn't do them on a Lisa, I'd bet she did them on an Apple II. Hey, it's black and white, right? The Apple II at least had those two colors ;-)

Re:How did she design them?

[Chordonblue]

Actually, now that her site is working again, it says that she indeed used 'Paint'. She even designed the Solitare cards in Paint. Unreal.

online store

[iosmart]

wow, can you imagine just how much money she is probably going to make off of her online store today? that part of the site is fully operational, lol. cgi scripts that display her portfolio (icons she created) are dead through...

Baloney. Few people can do what Kare does

[Animats]

Very, very few people are as good at minimalist design as Kare. Most people who try to design icons create a cluttered mess. Self-explanatory small icons are very rare. She's responsible for most of the good ones.

And no, implementing "skins" does not fix the problem.

I dunno ...

[BillsPetMonkey]

Her icons are certainly ... er ... iconic but how many ways are there of rendering an 's' in 5x5 pixels? For that matter, same with a cursor or an arrow.

And now we're on this topic, I remember the Mac icons she made. Wasn't one of them the trashcan which deleted everything you dragged into it. Apart from the floppy disk.

* A million user thought bubbles all saying the same thing: Won't that delete my floppy disk? *

Re:More Icons (which ones I like)

[macshune]

I always liked the big MSDOS moricon icon. It's the one where the "MS" part of the icon looks like it's burned (ash-white) and the whole thing is listing to the left.

I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?

offtopic but interesting...

[meowsqueak]

ok, this is offtopic and I'm probably going to get flamed, but I really wanted to post something interesting here - my original submission to Slashdot got rejected (how this minimalist icon piece of rubbish got accepted instead I do not know...).

Today, Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame - the slashdot editors don't seem to have heard of him) announced that he *will* be filming a remake of KING KONG, in New Zealand. Details are at
http://stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,2371077a10,00. html

The coolest thing is the intention to build a replica of early 1900's New York in a farm paddock!

No it's not an April 1st Joke.

it gave me a 500 error

[SHEENmaster]

and said there was a misconfiguration. I wouldn't root her box to discover what was specifically wrong.

Re:it gave me a 500 error

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I'm not sure what she looks like; but if she's reasonably attractive, I would root her box.

COD sample?

[lommer]

Does anyone know where I can find a downloadable sound sample of the "Chimes of Death"? I'm not a mac user and I'm interested in hearing them...

Re:COD sample?

[MoThugz]

I imagine it'd be like the default XP shutdown sound... *doo wee do doooo!*

Re:COD sample?

[esk]

try here.

Re:COD sample?

[Captain Nitpick]

Does anyone know where I can find a downloadable sound sample of the "Chimes of Death"? I'm not a mac user and I'm interested in hearing them...

I found copies of both the crash sounds, and the startup sounds here. I recommend the 'Crash Mac Quadra' file.

Re:COD sample?

[Forkenhoppen]

Damn.. those sound personal and professional, and seem to really fit the mac. Nothing like the overproduced or sound-clipish Windows sounds.. or the relative silence of Gnome..

Personally, my faves are the Quadra AV's. Thanks for the link! :)

Re:COD sample?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that the COD and the Startup Sound were VERY loud so be sure to turn up that volume!

Re:Apperently not mimimalist enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Moof!!!

Those in the know are aware of her best creation, Clarus the Dogcow!

Re:Soulless Hack

[usotsuki]

fsck america.

-uso.
Not proud to be an American, because I know I am not free.

Re:Mac elitism

[usotsuki]

BTW, GS/OS 6 is able to access HFS partitions on a IIgs hard disk, and HFS-formatted floppies.

Yeah. GS/OS r0x0r ;) It was the first GUI I ever used.

-uso.

Icons take up MORE space

[Anonymous Coward]

I am skeptical. Consider Japanese ideographs, which are essentially icons. I've seen the same book written in english, and written in Japanese ideographs. The english text version is smaller and uses less paper. Plus, there's no way to look up an icon in a dictionary, there's no way to sort by icon, etc.

Re:Icons take up MORE space

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I'm not sure you understand the context I'm talking in. I'm not suggesting replacing our language with icons or anything.

Icons should be used in addition with text to aid recognition (list of files with different file types, toolbars), and occasionly used by themselves when space is important (photoshop tool pallete, system tray), or even when language may be a barrier (road signs are a good example, sometimes only becasue people recognize it (stop signs), other times because it's describing something (people crossing a road)).

The reason why icons can oftern be better than words in terms of fast regongition is because icons can be made more unique than a word. A word can only be made up from a combination of set, common letters in which you can't choose the combination of.

the bar is too goddamn low..

[slittle]

How does knowledge of how a btree works help someone figure out a driver issue?

Anyone who claims to be a geek should know at least vaguely what a btree is.. they teach that stuff at highschool along with network topologies, databases and spreadsheets. It's basic knowledge.

This is how MCSEs and suchlike happen - people who aren't real geeks and have no idea what's really going on, are taught to "click here, then here, then there" so when the icon moves, they're lost. Knowing what a btree is is just a part of "getting it" that anyone should have if they are let loose with powerful tools.

I wouldn't hire someone like Taco for anything either. Not knowing the difference between "their" and "they're" is just unacceptable, even if he didn't NEED to know and/or had spell checkers at his disposal. It'd be like showing up to the interview in board shorts, sandals, and a loud shirt... it may not affect one's actual job performance, but if the candidate can't even put in minimal effort, what am I expected to think?

For the LAST time

[Anonymous Coward]

The spinning pizza/beachball/whatever, is NOT that.

It's a spinning NeXT optical disc drive disc!!!!

Really, get with it.

Re:Mac elitism

[Yottabyte84]

curl -s http://www.happyfunball.com/hfb.html | sed s/[Bb]all/Mac/g

Will work much better....

He's got sed replacing mac with ball

`mimimalist' - no such word

[voya]

miNimalist ( P ) (mn-m-lst)
n.

1. One who advocates a moderate or conservative approach, action, or policy, as in a political or governmental organization.

2. A practitioner of minimalism.

adj.

1. Of, relating to, characteristic of, or in the style of minimalism.

2. Being or providing a bare minimum of what is necessary.

Makes Great Windows Wallpaper

[billstewart]

There was a while that my work PC had this as its Windows Wallpaper icon - "Hey, what am I doing on this piece of Intel hardware? :-(".

Evildoer!

[JKConsult]

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

Please report yourself to the Justice Department immediately.

-John Ashcroft

Kill their sorry ass

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, but it needs to be done.

Saddam's the disease, we're the cure.

NeXTStep origins

[psleonar]

The "spinning pizza of death" actually originated as a graphical representation of the original NeXT hardware's only winchester-esque drive: the magnet-optical. The alternating black and white slices of the disc were meant to represent reflections on the mirror surface of the disc. (These drives were rather slow, particularly so when writing, due to the two-stage Curie Point process. If the NeXT was waiting for something, it was probably a write to finish, thus the cursor.)

Upon the release of color NeXT hardware, NeXTStep 2.x 'colorized' the disc cursor. This had the side-effect of removing it by a degree from the original visual metaphor.

OS X 1.1 and below had the same, colorized cursor, often referred to as the "spinning beach ball" due to the coloration. 10.2 Aqua-fied the icon, so it now looks... sort of like a gummi something.

(Mac OS 8 and above had their own version of the "spinning beach ball", but that originiated IIRC in HyperCard as a cursor for when the program was busy. I don't believe it was ever colorized - and it was black and white quarters of a circle, unlike the 2-bit (4 grey) NeXTStep optical disc cursor. This cursor is superficially similar to, but as the above narrative describes, historically separate from, the NeXT-derived OS X cursor.)

my yet another airport story

[Tablizer]

The one with the bomb icon on it. I don't wear it at airports.

My brother once over-packed a suitcase. He had to sit on it to get it to close. At the airport a guard asked, "Is it okay if I open it up?". My brother quickly said, "No, it will explode!", meaning that it was overpacked and had to be opened with great care.

However, that is not how the guard interpreted it, and got all panicky and called in reinforcements. Gotta be careful with your slang around there.

But words ARE icons. Just very abstract ones.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but how do you read? Most people read, after a point, mostly by the shape of the word first, not the actual letters. That is, look at the shape of the word letter. It's mostly rectangular, with a small ascender at the front, and a pair of ascenders in the middle. The ascenders (ltf, etc) and descenders (ygpq, etc.) serve as a first line of reading, to narrow down the possible words before you even recognize the letters involved.

This is why ALL CAPS is annoying to read. Since all the words are all ascenders, no descenders. You have to slowly read the entire word.

As for levels of indirection, one could just as easily have (recognize letters/shape using pattern recognition->translate to appropriate schemata->trigger appropriate motor response) or worse.

Mac OS X.2

[STREMF]

When I upgraded Mac OS X, to version 10.2, I was deeply saddened to find that it no longer displays the "happy mac" when booting, but rather that it was replaced by a more "elegant" apple silhouette and a radial throbber.

Do you think the apple hipsters thought the "happy mac" was a little tacky, or just "dated"? Granted, the icon is of a happy mac classic, but I could easily see it replaced by a "happy flat-panel iMac" or even better, a "happy G3 powerbook" (like mine is).

Not in the 64K ROM's

[Anonymous Coward]

There were no images of the dev team in the original 64K ROM's. Just the boot code and all the Manager, minus the Packages and SANE, which were in the System File.

You are thinking of the 128K ROMS.

Totally Pointless Trivia Point #1265

Re:More Icons (which ones I like)

[Nick of NSTime]

I like the Klingon-esque red triangle. I actually released a shareware application with that icon in my VB 3.0 days. :)

Re:More Icons (which ones I like)

[CommieBozo]

It's not supposed to look like it's burned. If you have your MS-DOS 6 box handy, the logo is the same as the box front.

It's the MS-DOS logo being "drawn." The "burned" part is sketched lines.

This is important stuff to know!

Chimes of Doom

[sbwoodside]

... usually caused by SCSI chain problems (lets be more precise ...) ... who can forget the sheer dread of a SCSI chain failure. which device isn't working? those connectors were physically painful to mess with after a while... the cables sometimes didn't work, gotta keep swapping cables and restarting to see what happens ... people put bad cables back on the rack ...

yup, those were the bad old days

bondi blue forever!

simon

symbolic origin of the cross not only Christian?

[fantomas]

The symbolic origin of the cross is surely not only Christian, unless sssmashy means "*The* Cross" with capitals and all that ... is this what you mean sssmashy? - as adopted by Christian countries for their flags? otherwise I'd say crosses probably belong to universal vocabulary of basic symbols like circles, dots, zig zags... I remember how blown away I was when I found a design I'd always thought of as very celtic (Scots /Irish) cropping up in some African designs. My little theory (and I'd love it if more enlightened people could suggest further readings) is that there are a basic number of ways the human hand moves and strong images to copy, so the same shapes and symbols are going to be pretty universal.

Re:Mac elitism

[pyrrho]

>or what a b-tree does

hey! that's a trick question... a b-tree doesn't do anything... it's a data structure!

Tons of Mac Easter Eggs and ALL the Startup sounds

[mstrjon32]

http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/ This has more than you'd ever want to know about the Mac easter eggs and sounds... Scroll down to "computer hardware eggs" to hear the system sounds.

Hidden Mac ROM images

[front]

This page:

http://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/HW-840AV.html

has the images of the beach party and boat.

cheers

front

Re:Mac elitism

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, Fuck you asshole!

GNOME Nautilus

[Sam the Nemesis]

Seems that she designed the icons for Nautilus too.

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

If you are interested in this...

[j0hnfr0g]

I highly recommend the book "Understanding Comics" by Scott McCloud. Actually it is not a book but a graphic novel, except it is not a novel since it is non-fiction.

It is very well written and is one of the few books that I think EVERYBODY should read (even if you aren't into graphic novels/comics).

John

it was 1984

[bill_mcgonigle]

damn, I'm feeding a troll, aren't I?

Re:More Icons (which ones I like)

[Suppafly]

I also like the sunglasses-road-trip icon too. Ahh, memories. Anyone else have favorite icons from that dll?


I was always fond of the macguyver style swiss army knife icon. The foxpro fox icon worked well for games too assuming you weren't using fox pro on the system.

Crash Noises

[kris_lang]

I've got a PowerMac 8100 that occupies a position of power in the garage with its 21 inch Apple monitor on a heavy duty shelf. I tend to start it and walk back into the kitchen during its approximately 2 minute long bootup sequence.

The 8100 bootup crash sound is a sound sample of brakes screeching followed by a loud crash of vehicle into something immobile. I ran into the garage when I heard that sound a year ago thinking that a car had crashed through my garage door. Yikes! It was just the CMOS battery that had run low which triggered it, and I rebooted it and figured out that it was the Mac that crashed, replaced the battery a week later and I haven't heard that sound since.

Now that's an easter egg. BTW, if you have an old Mac 512k, take it apart and look on the inside of the shell casing: you'll find the signatures of the Mac development team in it.

perhaps color is evil.

[metamanda]

If you've got multiple symbols on a crowded display, how do you make particular features stand out

Aye, there's the rub. Making small symbols distinguishable is important, but I don't know any easy-to-follow rules on how to do it. I haven't heard about the effect of amount of visual arc before, but I am still wary of using color (without redundant indicators), because you can very easily make things confusing for people who are colorblind. I've read some of Tufte's stuff on color, and I'm starting to think it's often used inappropriately: for example to indicate ordering by hue, when there's really no natural ordering to it. (ROYGBIV, of course, but that is not an internalized, intuitive ordering for most people. using brightness/darkness might work ok.) I've seen people use color to indicate magnitude, and that's not the greatest idea because a linear increase in, say, the amount of green or saturation or brightness, isn't going to be perceived linearly. You'd have to use a perceptual color space like CIELAB of CIECAM... and most designers and engineers aren't color vision nerds enough to do it. I'm not saying you can't do very good things with color -- you certainly can. But it's hard, while it's very easy to do bad things with color.

There's a lot of sciency cognitive psych knowledge required to do truly good User Interface design (of which icon design is a subset, I suppose). Unfortunately, there is no unified science of UI design, and most of us are stumbling around half-blind and just doing the best we can.

Sorry this is a bit off-topic. But, kris lang, i'd love to know a bit more about CIELAB and stuff, because I've forgotten most of what I learned about it. If you get a chance, can you send some references my way? (my yahoo messaging id is available in my user info i think.)