Tech Reflect

I worked on the Mail team from just before Public Beta thru Tiger. One of my proudest achievements on the team (and at Apple) was brainstorming with my team members and pushing an idea we internally called Magic Mailboxes and eventually became called Combined Mailboxes.

Some of the ideas came from my unique job which partly consisted of supporting everyone in Software Engineering on using Mail. And not everyone was an uber-geek engineer so I got to see what all sorts of users struggled with.

This feature was being developed in 2002 and shipped with Jaguar. I have to give my colleague Paul Marcos a lot of credit for brainstorming and being a strong supporter of the concept.

If you’ve ever worked on software that must be used by everyone from the most novice user to the most advanced, this may resonate with you. With Mail, it was … READ THE REST

In June 2006, Apple shipped the plastic MacBook, available in both black and white. I received a black model at work sometime that year.

It was plastic, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. Little did I know that, at around the same time, a redesign of the Dock was taking place.

Now, I actually don’t know for sure the Black Dock was inspired by the black MacBook, vice versa, developed in unison, or just a coincidence.

The look

Sadly, I don’t have great images showing the Black Dock, but here’s what I have.

If you ignore the overdone reflections, the look of the Black Dock is actually pretty nice. Sadly, I don’t have a movie, but imagine swiping over the icons and only having the icons moving, just dancing above the Dock.

The behavior

The best part of the Dock redesign was how it felt. The platform … READ THE REST