
Calculator Construction Set (1982) - danso
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt&sortOrder=Sort+by+Date
======
normloman
Some of you will present this tale as proof of Job's restless devotion to
perfecting the Macintosh down to the last detail. I see it as an anal
retentive bully having his way. For all we know, the original calculator app
might have looked great. It just wasn't how Steve would have done it. So
instead he wastes his programmer's time with tedious changes. (The fact that
he wasn't finished with just one round of revisions tells me either Steve
couldn't communicate what he wanted, or wasn't sure what he wanted.) Was the
calculator app really that much better in the end? And were the improvements
worth all that effort? Only the original mac team would know. Who knows--The
original calculator could have looked better.

~~~
danso
I, too, am skeptical of the Jobs design hagiographies...but this was one of
the more palatable examples. In a bigger company, this should've gone to a
design team...did Apple pre-Macintosh have a design chief? If not, then the
calculator UI is one of those things that could've easily slipped into the
low-priority queue, and there's only a limited amount of "oh-fuck-it-
it's-good-enough-for-me,-the-developer" features that a consumer-facing
operating system can tolerate before it begins to looks like amateur hour.

To be fair to Jobs, it can be profoundly difficult to communicate visual
design principles. At least when given the opportunity, Jobs sat down and
actually put his hand to the design work. It's debatable whether Espinosa
spending his time building a parameterized-calculator-constructor was worth
the opportunity cost, but at least Jobs made use of it, which is more than you
can say for a lot of executives.

On the other hand, this seems like something that could've been hashed out on
a whiteboard or napkin...

Anyway, I think the real hero here is Espinosa, a programmer who took charge
of documentation and the user manual, and went about his work by dogfooding
his product (Quickdraw in this case).

~~~
macintux
Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when this
story occurred. 1982! The most sophisticated graphical interface at that point
might have been The Print Shop for Apple II....except now I see it wasn't
released until 1984.

~~~
jacquesm
> Think how much harder it was to communicate visual design principles when
> this story occurred.

How so? Pencil and paper were readily available in '82, what else would you
need?

------
yuhong
FYI, they finally had to change the order of the buttons again in System 3.2
in 1986 I think. This has a picture of what the System 1.0 one actually looked
like: [http://lowendmac.com/2005/innovative-macintosh-
system-1-0/](http://lowendmac.com/2005/innovative-macintosh-system-1-0/)

------
blt
The first and last time a manager edited GUI parameters themselves instead of
telling a programmer what to do.

I'm exaggerating, but it seems that every system designed to make GUIs simple
enough for non-developers has failed. Example: CSS. sounds great until you
want something centered. XAML is even worse - it's really powerful, so you try
to fly too close to the sun.

I honestly think that doing UI layout in the same programming language as UI
logic, and manually choosing a set of "manager tunable" parameters to put in a
dead-simple config file, is the way to go. Which is more or less exactly what
is described here.

If the UI logic language is expressive enough, you can still make a nice
declarative DSL for GUIs. Then, when you _inevitably_ need some complex UI
behavior that can't be expressed declaratively, you don't have to deal with a
language boundary.

------
js2
Not to be confused with
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Construction_Set)

And as long as I'm on a tanget, TIL that Will Harvey was 15 when he designed
and wrote
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Construction_Set](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Construction_Set)

------
macintux
Every time I see this story pop up I'm reminded of Dubl-Click's calculator
construction set from the late 80s:
[http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/calculator-construction-
set](http://macintoshgarden.org/apps/calculator-construction-set)

Was so in love with that. Hard to remember how hard it was to discover
software in that era.

