Slashdot Mirror
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."
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"?)
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.
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
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
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!
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.