Continuing a discussion about the HIG

[fnordius]

Continuing the discussion from The glorious inelegance of the 1990s family computer:

@I wrote

Apple invented the idea of usability guidelines with their famous Human Interface Guidelines. Apple was the only computer maker for a long time with any sort of research into how people actually use computers.

@and then gadgetgirl02 wrote

I’ll give you part of the second sentence because he wasn’t in the consumer computer business as such, but Douglas Engelbart, end of discussion.

In addition to inventing the mouse, he came up with windowed interfaces, copying and pasting between applications, and groupware. Those are only a few items from a very long list. Steve Jobs got hold of some of Engelbart’s work via Xerox.

My dear Gadgetgirl, what you say is factually correct, but it doesn’t contradict what I wrote. Douglas Engelbrecht’s work was mostly theory, and was the basis of the first edition of the HIG. The HIG was the first time a computer manufacturer told its third party developers just how their apps should behave.

This does not change my rebuttal of the accusation that Apple only is interested in aesthetics and not usability. That is a common misconception. another case of misplaced snark becoming conventional wisdom. Much like Kirk the womaniser is a cliche that is based upon snark and not the real episodes.

[gadgetgirl02]

My point is that Jobs gets credit for far too much.

Engelbart didn’t just do theory. He got things to work.

[fnordius]

Oh, if it’s Jobs you’re concerned about, I place the HIG more in the wheelhouse of the CEO Jobs brought in: John Scully. I was always more of a Woz guy than a Jobs guy back in the day.

[gadgetgirl02]

Agree on Woz. That guy doesn’t get near enough credit. I don’t know about Scully simply because by the time he’d come along I’d had far too many Macheads tell me things like, “Steve Jobs invented the mouse”, so is stepped away from that part of computing.

[fnordius]

Rest assured, I never thought that Jobs had invented anything. He was always the showman in my eyes, never the inventor. If anything, his talent was in knowing which inventor to support. The other hero of my younger days was Bill Atkinson, who was the guy who did the most to define the Lisa and Mac GUI, and for an encore created HyperCard. HyperTalk was the fourth language that I learned and the third that I mastered (I was never good in Assembler).