The macOS App Icon Book
Michael Flarup: The macOS App Icon Book is a beautiful artbook dedicated to preserving the craft of app icon design. It’s a vibrant journey through the art of desktop app iconography for macOS. The...
View ArticleForty Years of GNU and the Free Software Movement
Free Software Foundation (via Hacker News): On September 27, 1983, a computer scientist named Richard Stallman announced the plan to develop a free software Unix-like operating system called GNU, for...
View ArticleGoogle at 25
Google (via Hacker News): Twenty-five years ago we launched Google Search to help you find answers to questions big and small. As we celebrate our birthday, here’s a look back at how our products have...
View ArticleThe History of Cover Flow
Andrew Coulter Enright (in 2005): I thought [the iChat AV] implementation would work perfectly if applied to my Visual Browsing problem.Like paper cards flipping within a bar jukebox, I pictured each...
View ArticleMicrosoft Finalizes Activision Blizzard Acquisition
Dan Milmo (Hacker News, MacRumors): Microsoft has completed its $69bn (£57bn) deal to buy Activision Blizzard, the maker of games including Call of Duty and World of Warcraft, after the UK’s...
View ArticleThe Myth and Reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Jeff Johnson (Mastodon): This famous keynote slide was, to put it euphemistically, a bit of product marketing. Non-euphemistically, it was a big lie. Snow Leopard had quite a few new features,...
View ArticleA Short History of Recovery in macOS
Howard Oakley: For the first ten years of Mac OS X, its closest substitute was Single User Mode, or SUM, entered by starting the Mac up with the Command and S keys held down. OS X then booted into the...
View ArticleDave Cutler Interview
Dave Plummer (via Hacker News): Dave Cutler is a seminal figure in computer science, renowned for his contributions to operating systems. Born in 1942, he played pivotal roles in the development of...
View ArticleThe Original iPhone Demo
Fred Vogelstein (2013, via Hacker News): The software in the iPhone’s Wi-Fi radio was so unstable that Grignon and his team had to extend the phones’ antennas by connecting them to wires running...
View ArticleTaligent’s Guide to Designing Programs
David Goldsmith (1994, PDF, via Hacker News): If you browse the computer section of any technical bookstore, you’ll find many good books offering advice on how to do object-oriented design—books...
View ArticleDavid Feldman, RIP
Legacy: He earned a BS in Computer Science from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2023, he served as Distinguished Visiting Technologist at the MIT Center for Art, Science...
View ArticleDoom at 30
Wouter Groeneveld: On 10 December 1993, John Carmack, John Romero, Sandy Petersen, and the rest of the id Software crew completely changed the world by releasing the most violent and satisfying DOS...
View ArticleNiklaus Wirth, RIP
Bertrand Meyer (Hacker News, Slashdot, Reddit): We lost a titan of programming languages, programming methodology, software engineering and hardware design. Niklaus Wirth passed away on the first of...
View ArticleThe Mac at 40
Malcolm Owen (MacRumors): January 24 will be the Macintosh’s 40th birthday, marking four decades since Steve Jobs showed off what he believed to be the future of computing. Dan Moren: In that time,...
View ArticleThe Origin of Comic Sans
Thomas Steeles (via Jason Kottke): [Most] people know of the font. By that notion, Vincent Connare, the creator of Comic Sans, has exclaimed that “I made the best font in the world.” Whether you...
View ArticleTom Dowdy and SimpleText
Mike Piontek: I was looking at this [SimpleText document] icon for inspiration and now I’m wondering what the name of the newspaper is meant to be. pnop? 🤔 I like that the front page photo is a...
View ArticleFlickr and Facebook at 20
Flickr: To celebrate this huge milestone, we’re taking a trip down memory lane to explore all of the technological and structural moments that have shaped Flickr into what it is now. Mark Zuckerberg:...
View ArticleHow AirPort Changed Everything
The Serial Port (via David Kopec): “No wires.” This simple phrase from Steve Jobs during Apple Airport’s debut in 1999 contained more than a decade of history behind it. Follow along as we chart the...
View ArticleFeatures Lost Across Versions of macOS
Michael Schmitt: Article Do You Use It? How TidBITS Readers Install macOS Updates - TidBITS says that “Some people even wait until Apple announces or even releases the next macOS version, under the...
View ArticleSeven Years of APFS
Howard Oakley: Although APFS has certainly had its moments over the last seven years, Apple’s gambles have paid off, and proved key to the success of Apple silicon Macs. Had there been no APFS, many of...
View ArticleDaniel C. Lynch, RIP
Katie Hafner (via Hacker News): In 1986, Mr. Lynch decided to hold a workshop to train vendors and developers to configure equipment for routing traffic through the internet. The point was to make...
View ArticleThe Apple Jonathan
Stephen Hackett (Hacker News): Those four machines are well known, but there was a fifth possibility in the mix, named the Jonathan. In his book Inventing the Future, John Buck writes about the...
View ArticleOnline Messaging Systems of Yesteryear
Jeremy Reimer (via Adam Engst): PLATO was an educational system that began in 1960 and was nearing its fourth iteration. It was responsible for many computer firsts, such as the first flat-screen...
View ArticleDelta’s 10-Year Journey to the Top of the App Store
David Pierce: On this episode of The Vergecast, Testut joins the show to tell us the full Delta story. He describes his early attempts at building emulators, the first time he almost made it onto the...
View ArticleEmoji History: The Missing Years
Matt Sephton (tweet): During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a couple of them to see if...
View ArticleThe Man Who Killed Google Search
Edward Zitron (Hacker News): In emails released as part of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Google, Dischler laid out several contributing factors — search query growth was...
View ArticleThe End of ICQ
ICQ (via Hacker News): ICQ will stop working from June 26 You can chat with friends in VK Messenger, and with colleagues in VK WorkSpace Wes Davis: ICQ was started in 1996 by Israeli company Mirabilis,...
View ArticleHalf-Life’s Canceled Mac Port
Greg Gant: It was natural for the game to be ported to Mac OS and OS X, as other high-profile first-person shooters from the era, like the Doom series, Hexen series, Quake series, Dark Forces, Deus Ex,...
View ArticleOn the Origins of .DS_Store
Arno Gourdol (2006, via Lobsters): However, we soon started realizing that the Finder backend would be useful outside of the Finder. Therefore, a plan was hatched to someday make it available as a...
View ArticleThe Unofficial Apple AI Weblog
TUAW: The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) has been a cornerstone of Apple-related journalism since its establishment on December 5, 2004. Acquired by Web Orange Limited from Yahoo IP Holdings LLC in...
View ArticleAn Ode to the Volume Swipe
M.G. Siegler: I found myself thinking about the AirPods… Specifically, how truly great the volume swiping mechanism is on the AirPods Pro. This must be my most-used gesture in life beyond perhaps...
View ArticleSteve Jobs: Objects of Our Life
Jony Ive (Hacker News): Steve rarely attended design conferences. This was 1983, before the launch of the Mac, and still relatively early days of Apple. I find it breathtaking how profound his...
View ArticleThe Switch From File Paths to URLs
Quinn: I don’t think we ever documented this officially, but to understand this choice you have to look at the history of macOS. Traditional Mac OS did not use paths a lot. Rather, files were...
View ArticleSusan Wojcicki, RIP
Juliana Kim: Susan Wojcicki, a Silicon Valley visionary who helped shape Google and YouTube, died Friday after a two-year battle with non-small cell lung cancer, according to her husband. She was...
View ArticleThe Insane Engineering of the Game Boy
Real Engineering (via John Gruber): The original Gameboy was launched in 1989 and was received with mixed reviews. While its success is ingrained in our cultural memory now, when it was launched it was...
View ArticleThe NeXT IPO That Never Happened
Hansen Hsu (2017, via David Kopec): Had Steve Jobs’ first company not bought his second, history likely would have been very different. Apple might not exist today. No iPhone. But what could have...
View ArticleMarathon Games on Steam
Malcolm Owen: Bungie has finally brought all of the “Marathon” trilogy of games to Steam, with “Marathon Infinity” now playable for free on modern Macs.[…]Classic Marathon Infinity is a free game on...
View ArticleThe Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
Dan Vincent (via Hacker News): The Apple II and Commodore 64 with their 6502 and 6510 CPUs clocked at 1 MHz could trade blows with Z80 powered computers running at three times the clock speed. And the...
View ArticleThe End of Finale
Greg Dell’Era (via Ric Ford): 35 years ago, Coda Music Technologies, now MakeMusic, released the first version of Finale, a groundbreaking and user-centered approach to notation software. For over four...
View ArticleSnow Leopard at 15
Joe Rossignol: Today marks the 15th anniversary of Apple releasing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which became available to purchase for $29 on August 28, 2009.After advertising Mac OS X Leopard as having...
View ArticleAn Abridged History of Safari Showstoppers
Roderick E.J.H. Gadellaa (Hacker News): As noted elsewhere, a developer-lamented but regulator-overlooked aspect of Apple’s monopoly on iOS browser engines has been the prevalence of show-stopping...
View ArticleScripting News at 30
Dave Winer: Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog.I did a roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I’d add this. My blog started because I needed content to...
View ArticleA Brief History of Defragging
Howard Oakley: All storage media, including memory, SSDs and rotating hard disks, can develop fragmentation, but most serious attention has been paid to the problem on hard disks. This is because of...
View ArticleNetscape at 30
Jamie Zawinski: According to my notes, it went live shortly after midnight on Oct 13, 1994. We sat in the conference room in the dark and listened to different sound effects fired for each different...
View ArticleJohn Geleynse Retires From Apple
John Geleynse: Being a part of Apple for 25 years has been the privilege and experience of a lifetime. […] We released the platforms and tools that helped bring incredible products to life. We inspired...
View ArticleThomas Kurtz, RIP
Valley News (Hacker News): Tom is well known as the co-inventor, with John Kemeny, of the BASIC programming language in 1964. A version of BASIC still exists today. John Kemeny and Tom had already...
View ArticleUnreal on Internet Archive
Timothy Geigner: But it just doesn’t have to be like this. Companies could be willing to give up their iron-fisted control over their IP for these older games they aren’t willing to support or preserve...
View ArticleApple Tends to Do Right by Apps It Acquires
John Gruber (Mastodon) has gone through the list of Apple acquisitions: The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users...
View ArticleMicrosoft at 50
Steven Levy: [Nadella] tells a story from a few years ago, when a group of tech analysts came from China to take the measure of Silicon Valley. They attended all the key developer’s conferences:...
View ArticleDonald Bitzer, RIP
Dag Spicer (via Hacker News): Bitzer studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), obtaining a PhD in 1960. Following graduation, he joined the UIUC faculty,...
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