Mac Puzzles Old and New
Two things that caught everyone’s eyes when the Mac debuted were its screen—full of pictures instead of undecipherable lines of text—and its mouse. With the latter, an unfamiliar device one pushed around on the desk in order to move a pointer arrow on the screen, a Mac user could manipulate those pictures on the screen. It was a “graphical user interface” and it was all about visual affordances: windows you could drag, buttons you could press, sliders you could slide.
Of course, the Mac that came out of a bag in January 1984 looked a lot different from any of today’s Macs…but not everything about it was completely different. Look at what was on its screen (Figure 1) and then look at what’s on yours today. The windows don’t look that much different, there’s still an in the screen’s upper-left corner, the Finder still has a menu bar with File and Edit menus across the top, and (if you have your Dock visible at the bottom of your screen) there’s still a trashcan icon in the lower-right corner. As much as the Mac interface of bygone days, it’s chock-full of affordances.
In fact, today’s Mac interface has become a rococo reflection of the old 1984 Mac interface. Those complications and coruscations didn’t appear by whim, although certainly some marketing whimsy was involved—I certainly haven’t forgotten the “lickable” buttons of Mac OS X 10.0 that Steve Jobs famously touted.
It’s simply that, over time, as the Mac became capable of doing more and more, the simple graphical interface of 1984 became as much an obstacle as an advantage. Driven by a combination of customer requests, developer ingenuity, and the work (sometimes inspired, sometimes not) of its own usability team, Apple continually added new interface techniques to help people do more things more efficiently—and more pleasantly—on their Macs.
What’s more, as Apple created new devices, it created new ways of doing things on those devices.
In turn, these popular new devices and their new ways of doing things have led Apple to bring some of those new ways back to the Mac from those devices. These days, after all, many new Mac users come to buy a Mac after having owned and used another Apple device first, and it makes both good marketing and good usability sense to give these new Mac users some familiar ways to get things done.
Three and half decades on, doing things on the Mac has become more complicated.
This next few chapters tour some of the more puzzling places of interest in the complicated landscape that is the modern Mac interface. In them we’ll look at How Mac Menus Got Complicated, How Mac Keyboards Got Complicated, How the Mac Mouse Got Complicated, and, finally, How the Mac Desktop Got Complicated.