I live my life a quarter century at a time

[kelnos]

This is a fun story, but also just reminded me of how destructively eccentric Jobs could be. All the shenanigans to pretend the author lived in the US, flying him back and forth from Ireland, planning his interactions (or lack of interactions) with Jobs so the deception wouldn't be exposed, and everything. What a colossal waste of time, money, and stress just to cater to the ego of Steve Jobs.

And then they threw all that work away, seemingly mainly because it was done out of the wrong office. Presumably the final Dock that shipped was significantly different from the author's version, but throwing away all the code and doing a full rewrite is rarely warranted.

[yapyap]

> how destructively eccentric Jobs could be

last thing he destroyed was himself, by going the bonkers “alternative healing” route on cancer.

not saying he deserved it but he had an out and he chose to ignore it till it was too late, hard to feel sorry at all for him at that point.

also I heard he was a massive twat irl

[rob74]

I assume that the Cork development team was built up before Jobs took over, which also explains why they were all laid off shortly after the author quit. Jobs probably wanted to have all (significant) software development happening in Cupertino? If he were still around, he would probably hate home office/remote work and join Elon Musk in the "people can have all the home office they want as long as they work 40 hours per week in the office" camp...

[interludead]

Maybe (I think so) it was more about aligning every detail with the standards Jobs had in mind...

[pavlov]

> “how destructively eccentric Jobs could be”

I miss Steve Jobs. He was clearly an asshole at close range, but at heart he was a humanist and a bit of a hippie. He made money but also left the world a better place.

Such a massive difference to today’s crop of tech billionaires like Thiel, Andreessen and Musk.

[jpm_sd]

Great story, and a thought-provoking title. I LLOLed at "We’ll just tell Steve you did move."

I'm 45, so I'll mark my 2nd quarter-century in the not-too-distant future.

Very approximately, so far:

0-25: learning

25-50: doing

50-75: TBD

[pavlov]

> "I was shown some prototypes and basically told that six people had seen it, and if it leaked they would know it was me that had talked"

This near-paranoid level of secrecy was because Apple leaked like a sieve in 1997 when Jobs returned as interim CEO.

There were sites like Mac OS Rumors that reported about internal meetings and projects in almost realtime. Nothing that was started before Jobs's return was secret. Leaking seemed to be part of standard office politics at Apple.

Jobs wanted to clamp down on that. Who knows if they actually had measures like described in the article (which suggests that every screenshot of Aqua carried a steganographic hardware id) but the threat worked.

The leaks were obviously bad for Apple, but as a teenager in my first tech industry job I found them fascinating reading. It was a rare insight into the inner workings of famous tech company in faraway California (even if it was the company that everybody in the media was convinced would be bankrupt in a year or two, but that just made the product drama more poignant).

[lukeh]

I remember an internal website (circa 1997) having the Mac OS Rumors logo with a big cross through it. :)

[MichaelZuo]

Yeah Jobs was probably afraid of anyone involved in sensitive stuff, not based in Cupertino, to be engaged in games or tricks like that. And they would be too far away to closely monitor.

[runamuck]

I laughed at the title! My friends and I say the original quote way to much, even 25 years later. (From "Fast and Furious - Vin Diesel says "I live my life a quarter mile at a time.")

[bthrn]

At work I coined the phrase "Fast & Furious Planning" to describe teams that plan only a quarter at a time (without regard for longer term thinking).

[eru]

Small tangent:

> As a final note, when I left Apple for the last time, and emptied out my drawers, at the very bottom of the last drawer I found my distinctly unsigned NDA.

I wonder if that legally makes any difference? There's probably an oral or implied contract for this kind of stuff, if you keep showing up to work and they keep paying you?

[JKCalhoun]

I've always wondered about the opposite. That is can an NDA even be legally enforced?

[rcbdev]

How do you "imply" non-disclosure?

[p_l]

The mention of Finder being built with Carbon APIs using OS9 as dev environment makes me wonder if that's not why some Finder APIs in 2020 still used classic Mac pathnames (with colons as separators).

Had to find some gnarly AppleScript to convert pathnames when interacting with Finder

[lukeh]

I suspect using Carbon also helped shake out Carbon itself. Eventually the Finder was rewritten in Cocoa. Maybe one day it'll be rewritten in SwiftUI and some SwiftUI bugs will get shaken out ;)

[nxobject]

I wonder as well how much the early Finders were platform-independent: are there builds that ran on MacOS 8, for example?

[rm445]

> You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).

On a website with huge margins at the sides. I think the OSX Dock is a pretty good thing, but it makes so much more sense to keep it on the side of the screen and preserve vertical pixels. Unlike (some versions of) the Windows Taskbar, the icons are all square with no text, so you're not even sacrificing readability.

[abroadwin]

I just set mine to auto-hide. Right now it's showing just shy of 30 icons, and I feel it really benefits from the additional horizontal width.

[Lammy]

> I loved doing UI stuff, but somehow ended up working on a command line Mac OS X Server authentication component for At Ease that was to be used with a new line of diskless netboot computers that nobody had actually seen. It turned out I’d actually been on the iMac project all this time, and in the end they got hard drives.

Relevant: Macintosh Network Computer

— https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-...

— https://web.archive.org/web/20130603044116/https://sw.thecsi...

— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220160908/http://www.macwee...

— https://web.archive.org/web/19961220043823/http://www.macwee...

— https://web.archive.org/web/20000531132121/http://www.theapp...

“During a speech trumpeting the network computer for the Harvard Computer Society earlier in December, Larry Ellison, Oracle chief executive officer and Apple board member, responded to a question about Apple's role in the NC space.

Ellison said the Macintosh NC would be available in April, with a near-300-MHz processor and a 17-inch screen. The Mac NC will run on the Mac OS and cost less than $1,000, according to attendees. Ellison added that the NC would not ship with a hard drive, but one could be added to the unit for an additional $100. ”

[nbzso]

This year, I push 50. Ideal time to start learning c/c++ and watercolor painting.

Don't limit your mind to a predefined timeline.

I have a friend, his grandfather 69, completed a law degree and opened an office.:)

P.S. The tech industry ageism is standard which must be outlawed. It is not objective and moves the industry in the wrong direction.

[dukeofdoom]

For the purpose of organization, 15 minute intervals, is how you should look at your day. You only have abut 64 of these in your day to allocate (if you sleep 8 hours) So make the most of them.

[drummojg]

I feel this in my soul. I work in higher education, and every major contribution I've made has been ripped from my hands and either dashed like the first copy of the ten commandments or handed over to someone shinier. I'm still proud of all I've done.

[smorchyborch]

Kinda funny watching people OOoh and Aaaah over something that Windows had launched 5 years earlier with Win95. The Mac/Windows flamewars back then were still as vivid as they are today.

[re]

If you're talking about the Dock demo (vs the Windows taskbar), it's not so much the Dock itself getting that reaction but more so the Genie effect. Mac OS X 10.0 and its Quartz Compositor did enable window effects beyond what Windows was capable of at the time--Windows didn't get a compositing window manager until Vista was released in 2007.

[incanus77]

I don't recall Windows 95 spatially minimizing windows into the bottom of the screen while preserving their dynamically updating contents. Did it? Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents? The Aqua interface was a cut above given the landscape even five years later.

[dcrazy]

The Dock was an evolution of the applets that had originated in NeXTSTEP several years before Windows 95’s UI team iterated the “system tray” into the taskbar that actually shipped.

[kergonath]

The dock has more to do with NeXTSTEP’s than with the Windows taskbar. They really are quite different (though maybe less so these days compared to back in the late 1990).

[bitwize]

Kinda funny watching Windows nerds ooh and aah over something Jobs launched 7 years earlier with NEXTSTEP :)

[varjag]

And whatever was in Win95 was in Motif, right? Come on it was distinctively superior when it came out.

[kernel_cat]

I just hate the Dock. I wish there was a way to make it completely disappear. I have no need for it, everything I can do via Terminal/open, Spotlight, or cmd+tab app switcher. It's really annoying how baked into the OS it is.

Even trying to auto-hide the dock in new versions of MacOS is a huge pain in the arse.

[LeoPanthera]

Right click the divider line > Turn Hiding On

[ghssds]

I live my life four quarter century at a time for I don't ignore 4 simultaneous days same earth rotation. Navel Connects 4 Corner 4s. Bikini Bottom is the signature of your personal creator.

[dcrazy]

I don’t know if you’ve been voted down to discourage joke comments or because people aren’t familiar with Timecube.

[klntsky]

To tell a story about slapping a few desktop buttons in a way that makes it interesting to read is a talent

[myvoiceismypass]

It seems sorta trivial at a surface level but we as developers are always standing on the shoulders of giants. What seems easy and simple was not always so without the tooling, compute, language advances, and knowledge sharing that we have today.

[jbjbjbjb]

As a software engineer from the U.K. I always wondered if mega big tech did any interesting work outside the US. Hopefully things have changed now?

[aardvark179]

They do quite a lot of interesting things, but often either through acquisitions or by collecting up a whole load of specialists when somebody else closes an office. You also find some interesting stuff being done in the UK and the EU because salaries aren’t as high over here.

[JKCalhoun]

Cork had Apple engineering. A lot of work was done in Apple France as well. (For example I worked with the French team that wrote "Data Detectors" when I worked on Preview at Apple). Pretty sure a lot of the French accents I heard on the Photos team were engineers that had decided to move from France to The Valley.

[yodsanklai]

Yes, they do. On the top of my head, Meta Fair labs has a big office in Paris for instance. Google/Meta have offices in Europe (including pretty big ones) and have interesting teams there.

[qingcharles]

Definitely. Megacorps often outsource projects to development shops in the UK, even if they're not working directly for Megacorp. It's just hard to hear about it because NDA hell.

source: experience

[eru]

We did some interesting work at Google Sydney. Google Wave was developed there, for example. (But that was before my time.)

[cactusplant7374]

Drag Thing. What a trip down memory lane. I had totally forgotten about playing around with this application in my youth.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I loved that utility.

One of the things about Aqua, was that it really slowed things down.

We had gotten prerelease OS X, but it basically used Classic UI.

Once Aqua came out, things like window drawing, dragging, and general responsiveness, went way down.

[leoc]

Well, that seems to be a significant new insight into the mystery of what does or does not happen in Apple Cork https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42255412 .

[BLKNSLVR]

0 - yesterday: can't really remember but happy with whatever I did to get here.

Future: stay the course.

I've never much liked who I was yesterday, but I'm (almost) always happy with who I am right now.

[julik]

I wonder how many HN readers remember what DragThing was and have used it... memories.