Bill Atkinson: Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI

Very interesting. Here are the two other videos in the series: ▶ this video Polaroids showing the Evolution of the Lisa GUI link Bill Atkinson Interview for Lisa’s 40th Anniversary The videos were recorded in 2022, even before CHM published the source code. If you want to navigate the source code which Bill refers to in the video, here is a tool to do so: link

Lisa and early MacOS are tremendously different in their details than the Alto operating system. While there was clearly a transfer of inspiration, Apple engineers like Bill Atkinson made countless small and large innovations to simplify the Xerox GUI model and improve its usability based on extensive in-house R&D and user testing (and in some cases implement features that the Apple team presumed Xerox had but actually didn't exist on the Alto). It is simply ahistoric to build narratives around Apple stealing Xerox ideas wholesale. For more details on Apple's early UI evolution, Atkinson kept polaroids of a variety of prototypes and mockups: ▶ this video

> Home/End don't work correctly (external keyboard). macOS tends to use the arrow keys for this, with various modifiers. Command + the arrow moves to the start or end of things (documents or lines), Option will be at the word or line level. Adding Shift to either of those will highlight those regions. > Cmd-Tab switching between applications instead of windows is utterly stupid. I've never been a cmd-tab user, so I don't notice thins. Once Exposé (now Mission Control) came out, I just stuck with that. I bind it to an extra button on my mouse. > The toolbar is far from the window, leading to extra mouse movements. The reason for this dates back to the original design of the Lisa. Bill Atkinson explains it in this video. It's a trade off between having issues with menus when windows are small, and having to move more. I believe this is why they added mouse acceleration, so no matter where you were, you could get up to the menus fairly quickly. ▶ this video > There is no maximize button, instead it's a full screen button. They're starting to get better on this. The full screen button has a menu to do many things, and one of them is to maximize (they call it Fill). You can also just drag the window to the top edge to maximize it, like Aerosnap on Windows. > If you manage to get a window off-screen, there's almost no way to get it back Windows > Center, will bring the active window to the center of the screen. > I click on Launchpad and find it, but you can't right click on any of the icons in there to do anything with them. You can drag icons from LaunchPad to the Dock to add them. They'll still be where they were in LaunchPad, but now also in the Dock for quick access. LaunchPad is gone in macOS 26 though, so you can either right-click it in the Dock while it's there to tell it to keep in there (or just drag it over to the left and it will remember it)... or find it in Finder /Applications/Utilities/Screenshot > I can not for the life of me figure out how to go up one level in a directory. I usually show the Path Bar whenever I get a new Mac. In Finder, View > Show Path Bar. This shows your path at the bottom of the Finder window. You can click on any parent directory to go to it. If you don't want to do that, or want another way, right-click the folder name at the top of the Finder window. This will show you a dropdown menu of all the parent directories, pick however far you want to go up the tree. > If you have two monitors you can't have an app halfway across both of them, it's always on one of the order. This one annoys me a bit too, and can lead to that window off-screen thing you mentioned earlier. It's one of the reason I went with a large primary monitor instead of having 4 external displays, like I had before. > If I move an app to the bottom right corner the OS will "helpfully" move it back up I think this has to do with the horizontal area the Dock is on being "protected" for lack of a better word, so nothing gets trapped behind the Dock. I agree, that having it do this for off-screen windows would be nice. > When you drag a window sometimes you get this white outline that will resize the window for your screen This is what I mentioned earlier to maximize. It works pretty much like on Windows. It activates not when the window hits an edge, but when your mouse cursor that is holding a window hits an edge. Top edge: Maximize Side edge: Half the screen Corner: 1/4 of the screen By default there will be gaps between these tiled windows, which some people don't like. You can remove the gaps in the Settings. > When you drag a window from a larger monitor to a small one, it will resize it I think this has to do with scaling of the monitors, or just that one monitor is dramatically smaller. My main setup is a laptop + a large monitor. The windows on my main display are bigger than the entire laptop screen, so it makes them smaller so they fit. > Every single t