July 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Marching Ants
Yesterday, Apple donated the source code for MacPaint into the Computer History Museum. MacPaint was a bit before my time, but learning more about it, it’s amazing the influence it’s had on every graphics program since.
When Bill Atkinson was writing MacPaint, he had to figure out how to do rectangular selection. The solution he came up1 with was the—now standard—animating dashed...
2 tags
Speed is a feature
For the next version of Gmail, one of Google’s goals is to get it to load in under a second. They stated that for them, “Speed is a feature”. I couldn’t agree more. It’s something that Google seems to take seriously in most of their applications. Their user interfaces are pretty minimal, but they’re fast. Sure, they could focus on adding other features,...