Class moves to Imaging Science Bldg Tomorrow!!!!! (25 October 2004)
We'll be attending this lecture tomorrow
From 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, Oct. 26, Atkinson will give a presentation about the design of the Macintosh computer, sharing rare photographs illustrating the choices made in designing the graphical user interface. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Macintosh. Atkinsons presentation, Twenty Years with Macintosh, will be held in the Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science auditorium."
Please place urls to your interface design sketches and/or database design documents in the new post under the projects tab on the blog.
If you did pencil and paper, scan 'em. We'll discuss 'em thursday in class
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I wanted to leave my feelings on the presentation today.
First off, I have alot of respect for the first half of the presentation. I thought it was amazing to hear the process of iteration while designing the interface for the Lisa and Mac, and when he was showing the poleroids of the actuall process, I was just floored. He is really an inovator.
When he was talking about the idea of getting rid of the keybaord and replacing it with a touchpad, I was extremely interested. It could be done, but I feel it may be too complex, and that peope would spend too much time looking down at the touchpad instead of at the screen. With keys, we know what we are pressing because it is alwyas the same. He made it seem like the underlying keys would be able to be changed, which would lead to too much confusion.
Finnaly, I was not pleased with his lengthy presnetation about his book. Although I felt his photo's were amazing and his new technique for printing was interested, I do not knwo a single thing aobut printing, nor do I have any interest i learning how. But... for those who are interested in that sort of thing probably enjoyed his last hour much more then myself.
Overall, I learned alot, and I got a kick about how he still says they didnt "steal" the idea of the GUI and mouse from Kodak. Yes ,they did reengineer it, but without Kodak, they would not have implemented it that quickly.
--mark
Posted by: Mark on October 26, 2004 07:58 PM | Permalink to CommentI found the overall presentation interesting. Interestingly enough, I’m not big on photography or anything, but I found the second half of the talk to be of more interest than the first; probably because I’ve already heard much of the Apple history before. I’m not big on rocks/minerals either, but the stones in his book are amazing.
I found his innovative keyboard talk fascinating because I did undergraduate research on a project similar to his idea. The project I worked on was a keyless keyboard/mouse; a smooth surface similar to a large touch-pad from a laptop. It’s a gestured based device, a keyboard/mouse all in one and very ergonomic. The major difference between the two devices is that the one I worked on is void of the customizable functionality (i.e. no phrase or word auto-complete, no intelligence). The professor that I worked with is currently marketing his keyboard (visit http://www.fingerworks.com/ for more details).
I too got a kick out of how he maintained that they didn’t steal ideas from Kodak and Xerox. They had no problems thrashing Microsoft though.