Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [16]
What’s NeXT?
After buying NeXT, Apple had to figure out how to turn NeXTSTEP into a Macintosh operating system. At first, the job looked so big that Apple’s programmers decided they should take the old interface in Mac OS 8 and try to graft it on top of the NeXTSTEP codebase. According to Cordell Ratzlaff, the manager who was charged with overseeing the job, the interface graft didn’t look like it would present much of a challenge. “We assigned one designer to OS X,” he recalled. “His job was pretty boring: make the new stuff look like the old stuff.”
But Ratzlaff thought it was a shame to put an ugly facade on such an elegant system, and he soon had designers creating mockups of new interface designs. He told me that the mockups were designed to show off many of the advanced technologies under NeXTstep’s hood—especially its powerful graphics and animation capabilities.1
Ratzlaff, a soft-spoken design director at Cisco, worked at Apple for nine years. Starting as a designer, he rose through the ranks to lead the human interface group for Mac OS. In this role, he was in charge of the look and feel of Apple’s operating systems from Mac OS 8 through the first release of OS X.
Interfaces these days are colorful and dynamic, but in the late 1990s, both Apple’s and Microsoft’s operating systems were plain and gray, with boxy windows, sharp corners, and lots of bevels. Then Apple came out with the tear-shaped iMac, a computer with a transparent plastic shell and curvy organic lines. It was a big inspiration to Ratzlaff and his colleagues. They soon had mockups of colorful, airy interfaces with see-through menus, soft edges, and round, organic buttons.
Ratzlaff’s boss, Bertrand Serlet, now Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, admired the mockups but made it clear there was neither the time nor resources to implement them. OS X’s lone designer continued to graft the old Mac interface onto NeXTstep.
After several months of work, Apple held an off-site for all the engineering groups working on OS X to gather a status report. Ratzlaff was asked to show his mockups, mostly just for kicks. His talk would be some light relief at the end of a long, hard week. He was scheduled as the last speaker on the last day. But he secretly hoped there’d be support for the new designs and they’d be implemented, although he didn’t rate his chances. As the two-day event wore on, it became clearer and clearer what an enormous project OS X was. Everyone was wondering how it was ever going to get done. “And then here at the end, here’s me saying, ‘Oh, and here’s a new user interface. It’s translucent, there’s real-time animation, and a full alpha channel,’” Ratzlaff recalled. “There was literally laughter in the room because there was no way we were going to redo the user interface. I was pretty depressed afterwards.”
“You’re a Bunch of Idiots”
Two weeks later Ratzlaff got a call from Steve Jobs’s assistant. Jobs hadn’t seen the mockups at the off-site—he hadn’t attended—but now he wanted a peek. At the time, Jobs was still conducting his survey of all the product groups. Ratzlaff and his designers were sitting in a conference room waiting for Jobs, when he walked in and immediately called them “a bunch of amateurs.”
“You’re the guys who designed Mac OS, right?” he asked them. They sheepishly nodded yes. “Well, you’re a bunch of idiots.”
Jobs rattled off all the things he hated about the old Mac interface, which was just about everything. One of the things he hated most were all the different mechanisms for opening windows and folders. There were at least eight different ways of accessing folders—from dropdown menus to pop-up menus, the DragStrip, the Launcher, and the Finder. “The trouble was, you had too many windows,” said Ratzlaff. “Steve wanted to simplify window management.” Because Ratzlaff was the one primarily responsible for these features, he started to get nervous about his job, but after twenty minutes of withering criticism,