In retrospect though, the company wasn't making a technology decision. They were making a decision between Jobs and Gassee. Jobs came with NeXT and Gassee came with Be.
I don't think the technology mattered that much in the large scale of things.
Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.
As a former Be employee who ended up at Apple by way of Eazel, there are two ways to answering your question about the UI direction; 1. If Apple did not acquire Be, Apple most likely would not be in business or would be a much different company. 2. Assuming Apple did survive, Steve Jobs used the industrial design language of Jony Ive for the look of Aqua. Bas Ording was the primary designer of this and was directed by Steve with daily updates. The further evolutions of brushed metal, skeumorphism, etc. were all directly driven by how Steve wanted things to look with minimal input from others. The current bland minimalist UX disaster (IMHO) would probably not have happened, because for all of his faults, Steve had very good attention to detail and was in general a good proxy for the user.
The extent of my writings are here in HackerNews comments. I don't have the time or discipline of Andy to be able to sit down and write like he does. Maybe someday, but for now I am using the free time I have outside of work to make music and ride bikes as fast as I can.
This question is forcing me to do some deep thinking about my time there, which I haven't done is quite a awhile.
Some people left early, like Don Lindsay. Don was instrumental in bringing Aqua to life, along with Bas of course, and led the team up and through the release of Cheetah and more. This task wasn't easy at all. To me it seems like he was finally going to receive some reward of those hard years of work. But instead he chose to leave to go to Microsoft. This boggled my mind, as leaving to Microsoft to me seemed incomprehensible. Maybe Don had enough of the abuse? Maybe he was sick of the increasingly crowded commute? The daily visits from Steve pointing out every detail of the UI that bothered him? Did you know the UX designed many of the big banners and posters for the WWDC events. Steve didn't want any old graphic designer to do those, so Bas, Imran and others would work on them. Don had to deal with that too.
When Steve left to receive cancer treatment in 2004, he still had influence, Bertrand Serlet was running engineering, Jony Ive was focussed on industrial design. We were working on Tiger with the brushed metal interface and there was a lot of activity on that. Tim Cook was running the business, but Bas and others were keeping the ball rolling on the UX with remote input from Steve.
I wasn't around for the next two leaves of absence, the last one being final, but heard that things were becoming increasingly fractious with camps emerging around Tony Fadell, Scott Forstall, Jony Ive and general politcal unpleasantness as Tim Cook was given various ultimatums about "I won't work with this or that person." Everyone was trying to say that they represented the vision of Steve and somehow knew what would Steve do given any sitution. Geez, if we knew what Steve would do or wanted, there could have been a lot of really distressing confrontations avoided over the previous years.
This type of internal sniping didn't happen with Steve around, or if it did, it wasn't very effective. I think it would have gotten you fired. Tony Fadell pushed it to the limit with Steve and Scott. I remember someone once asking Steve about getting free lunch at Apple, like you could get at Google and they were told "If all you want is free lunch, then you should be working at Google."
For me, there was a certain amount of clarity that came from Steve's abusive behavior. It could wear you down on one level, but also brought focus and drive to getting things done. I think it was very unhealthy one one level and very exciting on another. There weren't endless meeting on calendars discussing minutia. It also meant that the obvious horrors of the Tahoe wouldn't happen. Steve himself would have grabbed the windows with different corner radii, stacked them up and excoriated whoever was responsible. Some of my work was called "real bottom of the barrel shit", "the worst he has ever seen" and told "this is not the way we do things at Apple." I assure you, what he was complaining about was nothing remotely close to what we are seeing in Tahoe.
I still have friends who work there. Some of them came to Apple from Be or Eazel, and are still working on Finder, Safari, Dock, etc. A lot has changed and in my opinion not for the best. Compared to them, my time there was a flash in the pan. When I look at Safari, Finder and the general state of the UI, I am deeply saddened. I see a bizarre combination of stagnancy, gratuitious change and general aimlessness across the desktop and mobile. I also have a deep distrust of anyone who works at big company, let alone a big company on one component for a long amount of time. To me, it leads to a focus away from external customers and to becoming an expert at internal politics. I probably need counseling, but I loved the dictatorship of the Steve era. Yes, we can point to flaws like the Mac Cube or the hockey puck mouse, but I really appreciated someone just maniacally fixated on getting things done and cutting through the BS that I saw later on in jobs in big tech.
It would be nice if veterans of the post-Steve era would post on here. Maybe they are scared, bound by NDAs or could care less. Like I said, I need some mental health treatment about my time(s) at Apple I was there working on Final Cut Pro after Be, went to Eazel, and then rejoined Apple as part of Steve's mass hiring of Eazel employees at the behest of Andy Hertzfeld.
I worked on Finder/TimeMachine/Spotlight/iOS at Apple from 2000-2007. I worked closely with Bas Ording, Stephen Lemay, Marcel van Os, Imran Chaudry, Don Lindsey and Greg Christie. I have no experience with any of the designers who arrived in the post-Steve era. During my time, Jony Ive didn't figure prominently in the UI design, although echoes of his industrial design appeared in various ways in the graphic design of the widgets. Kevin Tiene and Scott Forstall had more influence for better or worse, extreme skeumorphism for example.
The UX group would present work to Steve J. every Thursday and Steve quickly passed judgement often harshly and without a lot of feedback, leading to even longer meetings afterward to try and determine course corrections. Steve J. and Bas were on the same wavelength and a lot of what Bas would show had been worked on directly with Steve before hand. Other things would be presented for the first time, and Steve could be pretty harsh. Don, Greg, Scott, Kevin would push back and get abused, but they took the abuse and could make in-roads.
Here is my snapshot of Stephen from the time. He presented the UI ideas for the intial tabbed window interface in Safari. He had multiple design ideas and Steve dismissed them quickly and harshly. Me recollection was that Steve said something like No, next, worse, next, even worse, next, no. Why don't you come back next week with something better. Stephen didn't push back, say much, just went ok and that was that. I think Greg was the team manager at the time and pushed Steve for more input and maybe got some. This was my general observation of how Stephen was over 20 years ago.
I am skeptical and doubtful about Stephen's ability to make a change unless he is facilitated greatly by someone else or has somehow changed drastically. The fact that he has been on the team while the general opinion of Apple UX quality has degraded to the current point of the Tahoe disaster is telling. Several team members paid dearly in emotional abuse under Steve and decided to leave rather than deal with the environment post Steve's death. Stephen is a SJ-era original and should have been able to push hard against what many of us perceive as very poor decisons. He either agreed with those decisions, or did not, and choose to go with the flow and enjoy the benefits of working at Apple. This is fine I guess. Many people are just fine going with the flow and not rocking the boat. It may be even easier when you have Apple-level comp and benefits.
My opinon; unless Stephen gets a very strong push from other forces, I don't see that he has the will or fortitude to make the changes that he himself has approved in one way or another. Who will push him? Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller? The perceived mess of Tahoe happened on the watch of all of these Apple leaders.
Production methodolgies for animated films have progressed massively since 1995 and Pixar may have not found the ideal process for the color grading of the digital to film step. Heck, they may not have color graded at all! This has been suggested. I agree that someone should know better than to just take a render and push it out as a digital release without paying attention to the result.
I worked at DreamWorks Animation on the pipeline, lighting and animation tools for almost ten years. All of this information is captured in our pipeline process tools, although I am sure there are edits and modifications that are done that escape documentation. We were able to pull complete shows out of deep storage, render scenes using the toolchain the produced them and produce the same output. If the renders weren't reproducable, madness would ensue.
Even with complete attention to detail, the final renders would be color graded using Flame, or Inferno, or some other tool and all of those edits would also be stored and reproducible in the pipeline.
Pixar must have a very similar system and maybe a Pixar engineer can comment. My somewhat educated assumption is that these DVD releases were created outside of the Pixar toolchain by grabbing some version of a render that was never intended as a direct to digital release. This may have happened as a result of ignorance, indifference, a lack of a proper budget or some other extenuating circumstance. It isn't likely John Lasseter or some other Pixar creative really wanted the final output to look like this.
Steve lived on for quite some time in an undocumented key command you could use in the Finder. I forget the exact sequence; ctl-alt-cmd-shift space or something. It has become more broken over releases and may be gone now. We added it to make all animations go very slow. We would invoke it at Steve’s request in demo to him and he would open and close windows, show and hide sidebars, enter and exit TimeMachine and more. This shipped in numerous version of OSX.
Apple's culture of secrecy used to be to just not talk about what you were working on and don't talk about vapor projects. There was a big thrill to keep things secret for MacWorld, WWDC, whatever. Things changed, social media and various websites created motivation for people to get whatever small satisfaction you get when you leak.
There was a big change after 9/11 of the overall security posture.
Internal security measures kept ramping up year after year as people started leaking. You used to be able to walk pretty much unhindered through all the buildings. Some lab areas would be locked, but things were open in general.
I never understood the leakers. They were usually caught and fired.
Yes, I was that day. And I had probably been there since 6:00 am the previous day. Pulling multiple all-nighters on various "super important" projects was typical for me and others. In retrospect, my advice is not to do such things, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The email and all the security events happened right after the second plane hit, which seemed like it was closer to normal start of day hours.
Watching the footage on this site reminds me of how I watched the events unfold on 9/11. I was at work at Apple in IL2 (Building 2 of the Infinite Loop campus.) People started getting calls on their desk phones and co-workers coming in started to share the news. An email came from Steve Jobs which I can't remember the exact contents of. One thing the email did have, was a link that was a live video news stream of the events unfolding.
The campus entered a type of lock-down. The gates to the parking garages were closed, the front-doors to the building were locked and security blocked the entrances to the campus with their vehicles. At the time, work was sort of my family so I didn't consider that some people probably wanted to leave right away to be with their loved ones. I assume they were able to do so with some effort.
Things obviously changed in the world that day. At Apple, the underground gates to the garages were always closed and you had to badge in. Security personnel were posted in the lobbies and badging in and "tailgating" were taken very seriously. The doors to the inner campus were now locked and you had to badge in and out. These were all really minor things, but it made you realize that things were no longer going to be the same as before.
Reading this was a ton of fun. It captured the joy and sense of discovery that comes with figuring out how to do something you really weren't meant to do.
Yes and no. The core of the purchase decision was really based on the technology. Ellen Hancock (Apple's CTO at the time) actually did a decent analysis of BeOs and NeXTStep. She was actually against some aspects of the purchase, and was not in favor of Be. She was also not in favor of the NeXT kernel. It is painful to say as a Be employee at the time, but Be internals were fragile, some technologies were very shallow, the kernel was brittle and under constant churn and we had big problems with our decision to have a C++ API. Gil Amelio liked Steve and Steve did a good job selling both a vision and the NeXT technology. BeOs was a really cool demo that was getting pulled into the direction of a real OS but had a long, long way to go. There actually was a possibility that Apple could have also gotten the Be code, but the board didn't go for it. As it turned out, most of the primary BeOs developers ended up at Apple via Eazel. The ones that didn't ended up at Google via Danger Research/Android.