Category: apple inside

Prototypes: Viewing minimized/recent documents

Prototypes: Viewing minimized/recent documents

This was a feature Apple prototyped but never shipped that was near and dear to my heart. The feature addressed two things.

First, people often remember the app they used to create a document or when they worked on it last. It’s harder to remember the name of the document or where they put it. I see people freeze up when the OS asks them where to file something and what to name it. I think this is still a great shortcoming in macOS.

In addition, there’s the question of why does it matter what the name or location of a file is? Why waste time naming and filing things away if you can find it because you remember you created it in MS Word yesterday?

Secondly, when it came to minimized windows, especially those minimized into the application icon—a feature that still exists today—I saw that people would perceive …

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Becoming disabled while working a tech job

Becoming disabled while working a tech job

Tech workers believe that they have the best health insurance and all other types of insurance offered by their company. And they are probably right. I don’t have any data to prove otherwise.

What I do know from my own research and experience is that the disability insurance offered by Apple and other tech companies could leave you in dire straights much more easily than you know.

There are two types of disability: short-term (12 weeks), and long-term (indefinite with a big asterisk). A disability is something that partially or completely prevents you from doing your job. It could be anything from a serious physical injury to a debilitating mental illness.

Remember, this could be some terrible infection you get and end up in the hospital for months. Medical insurance covers the bills but your employer will only pay you via disability insurance. Same goes for an inherited mental condition …

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Manifestos

Manifestos

In 20 years at Apple, I obviously saw a lot and was sometimes motivated to write long, laborious manifestos about things. Usually they were practices and processes I felt needed to change.

These were initially published on my internal blog at Apple. So if you love manifestos and have a lot of time on your hands, here they are.

Enjoy.

…

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Magic Mailboxes

Magic Mailboxes

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 …

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The Black Dock

The Black Dock

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 …

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