> The second aspect of the original Mac that stands out today as Apple-like is putting just enough whimsy into the experience. Most famously, the smiling Mac you saw as the system booted. Had anyone prior even considered a smiling computer?
Come on, man. Computing has been full of whimsy from the beginning. To imply that Apple has some kind of monopoly on cute jokes is absurd.
Give an example. I remember going in to my mom's dorm room and playing on her Mac when she was at USC in the early 90s. It was like nothing I'd used before.
The Xerox Star did that before Apple. Interestingly enough, it had hardware keys for it [0] - no mnemonics required.
Raskin (Macintosh team) ended up really liking dedicated keys (cf. the Canon Cat and his book) after all.
I would have agreed a few months ago; but as someone who is slowly forcing himself to become a touch typist because I was getting irritated at how much my hands moved over the keyboard when there was no need for them to, I prefer chording keystrokes :)
They solved the same problem (associating menu items with keyboard actions) in 2 different ways - xerox with dedicated keys, Apple with keyboard shortcuts. Xerox was the first to have to solve that problem though.
I would not call Gruber particularly sharp or good. He's not bad by any means, but his writing is subject to a massive pro-Apple bias and his writing tends to be high on emotion and low on information.
I read Daring Fireball because it often has interesting links, but I wish I could easily filter out the non-link bits like this one, because I just don't learn anything from them, and they sometimes (not in this case, but in others) angry up the blood.
The whole purpose of this article was Gruber sharing his experience with his audience. All you were supposed to "learn" was how Apple changed the way he looked at computing.
Come on, man. Computing has been full of whimsy from the beginning. To imply that Apple has some kind of monopoly on cute jokes is absurd.