TMO at SxSW - User Interface Designers Talk OS X, XP/Vista
Today, with Mac OS X gone and Intel chipsets not far behind, I thought it would be fun to look back at OS X and the transition to it compared to the recent switch to macOS 11 Big Sur. I started by watching Steve Jobs' introduction of Mac OS X at Macworld Expo in 2000, which was a perilous time for the Mac.
by Misha Sakellaropoulo, 12:00 PM EST, March 15th, 2006
Mcsm: Behind The Scenes Mac Os Download
Nov 18, 2020 Inside Sketch 18 November 2020 Yes Sur: Behind the scenes of Sketch's macOS makeover 'We always want to put your designs front and center so they can shine — the last thing we want is for the interface to get in the way.'. Once you plug in your Mac disk, behind the scenes MacDrive works to seamlessly enable Windows understand HFS+ disks and allow you to read and write to the disk. There is nothing to launch or learn, MacDrive makes Mac disks look and act just like any other disk on your PC. Feb 29, 2000 Behind the scenes Mac OS X's interface refinements will undoubtedly make the Mac more elegant than ever. But what's going on under the hood in Mac OS X will make this operating system more. Mcsa windows server 2012 complete study guide exams 70-410 70-411 70-412 and 70-417.
This year's South by Southwest (SxSW) Interactive festival, which concluded Tuesday on the eve of the famed music festival, served up a number of interesting panel discussions, but none of greater interest to Mac users than Tuesday's 'Behind the Scenes: Developing OS X and Longhorn,' which saw two former user interface designers at Apple and Microsoft—now co-workers at Frog Design—come together to discuss the design considerations that have gone into Mac OS X and Windows XP/Vista.
Cordell Ratzlaff, a nine-year Apple veteran, was head of Apple's human interface group during the time Apple acquired NeXT and began developing Mac OS X. Mark Ligameri spent six years at Microsoft working as a designer on Windows XP and Vista, as well Office 12 and other Microsoft projects.
Mr. Ratzlaff recalled for the audience the moment he was called into Steve Jobs' office at Apple, following Apple's acquisition of NeXT in 1997 but prior to Mr. Jobs assuming any official role at Apple whatsoever. With a pair of his best designers by his side, Mr. Ratzlaff stood in Mr. Jobs' office as the Apple co-founder called them 'a bunch of amateurs' and launched into a long criticism of the Mac OS 8 interface.
Sensing that his job was in fact not on the line as he had thought—Mr. Jobs would, after all, have cut to the chase and fired him immediately—Mr. Ratzlaff was relieved to learn that what Mr. Jobs wanted from him was a new design for the Mac OS.
As it so happened, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team had already been working on a ground-up redesign of the operating system after they discovered that their original goal of porting the look-and-feel of Mac OS 8 completely to Mac OS X would be impossible. 'We were only going to be able to get about 95% of the way there [putting the Mac OS 8 interface on Mac OS X], which is possibly the worst thing you could do,' Mr. Ratzlaff said. The redesign had been scrubbed by higher-ups at Apple but was put back on track by Mr. Jobs.
With that, Mr. Ratzlaff and his team's list of requirements for the operating system, which had been called overly ambitious and led to laughter from engineers who heard of them only weeks prior, became mandatory. These included 32-bit color with alpha channels and QuickTime integration, all being able to run on a system with just a G3 processor and as a little as 8MB of video memory. Mocking up the operating system's design and functionality with Macromedia's Director, Mr. Ratzlaff frequently would remind Apple engineers that 'Macromedia can do it, so why can't you?'
Mac OS X was first demonstrated to the public at Macworld Expo San Francisco in January 2000 after being shrouded in secrecy for nearly three years. Mr. Ratzlaff would depart from Apple following its completion but prior to its release, interested in pursuing other design goals. '[Mac OS X] 10.1 was not going to be nearly exciting,' Mr. Ratzlaff said, exlaining how Mac OS X was the fourth major user interface design he had worked on at Apple, and by far the most ambitious.
Mr. Ligameri's experience at Microsoft was decidedly different, beginning with the contrasting management styles of the two companies. No Microsoft executive plays such an active role in the development of design like Mr. Jobs does at Apple; executives prefer to delegate design to the experts and stay out of it. Whereas Apple developed Mac OS X in complete secrecy and released it without any user testing whatsoever (a point Mr. Ratzlaff acknowledged surely led to some of the more glaring shortcomings that were corrected with Mac OS X 10.1), Microsoft has a penchant for demonstrating software long before its release, a poor and often frustrating decision in Mr. Ligameri's opinion.
Such a policy leads to ideas that and concepts that customers see and except soon afterwards but don't actually get to experience in a finished product sometimes for a number of years. Case in point: many of the design improvements Microsoft is delivering in Windows Vista this year were originally slated to be wrapped into a Windows upgrade set for release just 12-18 months following Windows XP. A number of security issues related to Windows XP that Microsoft had to focus engineering efforts on patching led to more than a two-year delay for that upgrade, however. The end result: what customers saw in 2003 and were told was going to be ready soon has yet to ship.
For a panel discussion on interface design development concerning Mac OS X and Windows the conversation was surprisingly civil and tame when it came to the subject of one company lifting ideas from the other. Mr. Ligameri explained that contrary to what many people believe, the Windows design team doesn't copy many Apple ideas. Most of those ideas are simply good ideas, and designers often conceive of goods ideas at similar times (a point Mr. Ratzlaff acknowledged).
'How much is just industry momentum moving in a certain direction versus how much is pixel for pixel reproduction?' Mr. Ligameri asked. Perhaps the most telling design element of Mac OS X, in his opinion, is simple attention to detail, so is Microsoft copying Apple when it decides to pay more attention to detail?
Mr. Ligameri also related the frustration that competing design teams experience all the time. For example, Microsoft had been developing a windows management system that was extremely similar to Apple's Expose when Apple first demonstrated the feature in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther to the public. Coupled with the fact that Apple was going to be shipping Mac OS X 10.3 Panther first, Microsoft designers were once again caught in the difficult position of having had pursued what was a wholly in-house development idea at the time but what the public will surely correlate with copying Apple's design.
Looking to the future, both Mr. Ratzlaff and Mr. Ligameri agree that operating system user interface design is moving away from a windowing system as content consumption replaces content creation as the primary use for a computer. Witness, for example, Windows Media Center Edition or Apple's Front Row software, which do away with dialog boxes, menus, and buttons. Your cell phone's interface, or even any of Apple's iLife applications, are similar examples.
Today, we're excited to share some details of our Big Sur update. Refreshing our UI for Apple's latest OS has taken countless hours of hard work, tough decisions and careful revisions from dozens of people across the Sketch team. We want to say a big thank you to them all — we're incredibly proud of the work they've done.
To get the lowdown on how the team created Sketch's beautiful new interface — and to show off some of our favorite details — we sat down to chat with our Design Director Marcelo Marfil.
So what's new?
'Early on, we had a single goal in mind. We wanted to make sure Sketch on Big Sur still put your designs front and center so they could shine,' Marcelo explains. 'The last thing we wanted was for the interface to get in the way.' With that in mind, the team focused on tweaking and refining the existing interface rather than a complete overhaul. They wanted the app to feel familiar after your Big Sur upgrade, so you could instantly get back into your designs. 'In essence, it continues to be the same Sketch people know and love,' he says. This is an evolution, not a revolution.
That said, the team did take the opportunity to push things a little further in a few key areas. 'Adopting new OS standards like a full-height sidebar and toolbar already make a huge difference, but we couldn't stop there,' says Marcelo.
Yes Sur
'As with anything new, there's an inevitable learning curve you have to work through,' he continues. After taking some time to use the betas and understand the new paradigms, the team started exploring how they could make sure our native app still felt ‘at home' on Mac — while continuing to support people that want to stick with macOS Catalina (or even earlier OSs).
It started with the toolbar. While aligning with Apple's new design, which adds the document title inline with other toolbar items, they reorganized the default toolbar with the tools they think you'll use the most. There's even a new Notifications icon in the top-right corner of the window which gathers your notifications together, making them easy to manage. Don't worry — you can still customize it with your own favorite tools with a Ctrl-click. You'll also notice the toolbar (and the rest of the app) features some gorgeous new icons. More on them later.
Sleep tight (itch) mac os. Next, the team turned their attention to the Inspector. 'Even though our app's user interface feels at home on macOS, we rely a lot on custom controls and materials,' Marcelo explains. 'It always comes down to whether we think we can give our customers a better experience.' Like the rest of the Mac app, the new Inspector will feel familiar, but every element has been painstakingly reworked to be as beautiful as it is functional.
You'll also notice that the accent color across the app has changed — it's now orange, to match our brand colors across the Sketch platform. Of course, if orange isn't your thing, you can choose a color you like in System Preferences. 'And we modernized our Documents Window,' Marcelo points out. 'It now has a much more familiar look.'
Mcsm: Behind The Scenes Mac Os 7
Evolution, not revolution
'When Apple rolled out the first few betas, we took our time and went deep into OS changes and paradigms.' he explains. 'We wanted to better understand what would work for us, and where we could do better.'
As a result of that thinking, you‘ll find that some tools, such as Scale, have changed from Sheets to become modes in the Inspector. Big Sur's new, larger design for Sheets would have covered the Canvas while you made adjustments. By shifting them to the Inspector, you can carry on working uninterrupted.
'As we always try to do at Sketch, I believe we found a good balance between what the system has to offer and where we want to take it to going forward,' says Marcelo. And never was this balance more apparent than in the team's approach to new icons.
Iconic design
The introduction of SF Symbols in Big Sur brings together iOS and Mac iconography to make it consistent for the first time. Unfortunately, Apple Symbols simply didn't offer the design team enough control when it came to implementing icons across the interface.
'At Sketch we care deeply about our iconography and pixel precision,' says Marcelo. 'Even though Apple Symbols is a great concept, sadly it didn't quite live up to our standards.' Because Apple designed SF Symbols to support multiple weights and sizes, their edges can sometimes appear slightly blurred. After a lot of discussion, the team decided that Apple's Symbols weren't right for the first Sketch release on Big Sur. Instead, they reworked every icon as a vector.
'We wanted to make sure our new icons had a good balance of crispness and smoothness, but still fit nicely within the Big Sur theme and our brand,' he explains. 'After all, we make a design app for designers.' We know we're biased, but we hope you'll agree that the results are quite beautiful.
This isn't the end for icon design in our Mac app, though. As with all aspects of our Big Sur design, the team are keeping an eye on developments for future releases. 'I honestly hope we can eventually convert our own icons to Apple's Symbols too, with all their sizes and suitable weight variants.'
This is just the start
This might be a new design for Sketch, but as Marcelo explains, our philosophy remains the same. 'Even with a fresh new look, this update is a continuation of everything we learned over the last decade,' he says. 'Our focus has always been on giving you the tools you need to create amazing designs in a native Mac application. We couldn't be more excited to be part of this important milestone for the Mac ecosystem.' And as Marcelo is keen to stress, this is just the start. Sketch will continue to evolve, just like Apple's new design language.
'I'd like to take this moment to thank everyone involved internally in this redesign,' he concludes, reflecting on the process. 'It was quite a challenge but I couldn't be more proud of what our team achieved in such a short time.'
Sketch 70 is available now. You can get the update, read our release notes, check out our documentation, or just spend the next few hours gazing lovingly at those icons, which is what we've been doing for the last month or so. Let us know what you think of our redesign on social — we'd love to hear your thoughts.
