Rui Carmo
Marcin Wichary put together this amazing piece that looks at the evolution of Mac settings–from Susan Kare’s nimble 1984 Control Panel to the current iOS-like (and highly debated) System Settings.
It’s hard not to smirk at the many “innovations”, plus the way quirks and influences from other environments crept in along the way. There’s a certain charm in the description of early experiments and the inevitable overloading of options (“a reward for good work is more work”), all while pointing out that even now, some approaches feel like rearranged relics from the past.
This is very much worth a leisurely read over the weekend if you’re curious about how much design, technical limitations, and plain stubbornness have shaped the Mac’s interface over the decades, and being caught up in a little bit of Mac nostalgia and still poking at my little replica Macs, this was a great rabbit hole to dive into as I take it easy for a while.
Plus the way the emulators are embedded is simply a stroke of genius–now there’s a creative use for CSS transforms if I ever saw one…