Exploring the NeXT user interface

[Rhetorica]

In ages past, I had a fairly popular thread (somewhere else) called Oddities and aberrations of the NeXT user interface. Unfortunately it is now lost. This thread will be an expansion and rehash of that series, featuring better organization, although since I am writing it over from scratch there will be a fair bit of differences between the two in terms of actual content. Fortunately I've also learned a good deal about NeXT and its history since I started that old thread, so there will also be some corrections in this version!

Planned Topics:

• Imperfections in icons & other image assets
• How widgets and windows (are meant to) be drawn
• Derivatives and peers: Workbench 2, Windows 95, Motif, and OS/2 Warp
• History of UIs in Rhapsody
• NSInterfaceStyle: Rhapsody's secret weapon
• The zoom (resize) button
• Platinum: Rhapsody vs Mac OS 8
• The most beautiful gradient in the world and the NS 3.0 tertiary palette
• Timeline of trends in UI design
• OpenStep for Solaris; is OpenStep always better than the old NextStep APIs?
• OPENSTEP Enterprise & YellowBox on Windows
• OPENSTEP Enterprise for Solaris and HP-UX
• The Complete Guide to Misusing NXHost and NSHost
• Gallery of retired software (≤3.2)
• Evolution of ProjectBuilder
• Evolution of Edit and TextEdit
• The afterlife of OPENSTEP 4.2 at Apple; WebObjects
• Remnants of NeXT UX in early OS X
• One-off views and controls
• Metrics: 16px icons, 8px gaps, 3px right margin, Mecca's Intel roots, "standard" UI density
• When does Apple end and NeXT begin? Gil Amelio and Apple OpenStep
• Clones: grading WindowMaker, GNUstep, AfterStep, and more
• Noteworthy third-party interfaces

I'll update this post with links as these articles are written.

[Rhetorica]

Time to finally sit down and work on this! Starting with...

Imperfections in Icons and Other Image Assets

Most of NeXT's graphical assets were either created or reviewed by Keith Ohlfs using his image editor, which was a fork of Icon.app. This was divested as AppSoft Image during the great 3.0 demo purge. Its replacement, IconBuilder.app, is a much less capable tool than what Image became.

Keith was not only a talented graphics designer, but also a curious and imaginative programmer. He regularly pushed his self-made tools to their limit, as we'll discuss later in The most beautiful gradient in the world and the NS 3.0 tertiary palette. However, there are a few flaws in NeXT-made image assets that we can find, roughly groupable into four categories:

a) Images with stray pixels

Probably the best-known imperfection in the NeXT interface, the color version of winchester.tiff has several stray pixels at the top of the image that appear to just be noise. These errors aren't present on all versions of the disk platter icon:

...this reveals a genealogy of the icons: it was hard to remove (or re-do) the yellow ray once it was created for openWinchester.tiff, so every asset designed based on it (like mac_HD.openfs.tiff) was free of the yellow pixels. Probably DOS_HD.openfs.tiff (not shown, but free of the yellow pixels) was made before DOS_HD.fs.tiff, and then spliced together.

Since the most prominent pixels are yellow, I suspect the junk originated as an erased rough draft of the open ray that targeted a different part of the icon. Likely it was invisible against a pale transparent matte, perhaps aggravated due to the NeXT's unusually high gamma (2.2).

b) Images with baked gamma

Speaking of gamma, if you've used a NeXT machine for any time at all, you've certainly run across icons and other assets that look poorly lit on modern displays. These are almost entirely a third-party software problem, and they're usually caused by gamma conversion when importing a photo from a camera, but not always:

However, notably, there are some NeXT assets that suffer, like the CD player:

A purposefully-designed "dark" interface on a modern display would not still have such bright highlights. The NeXT gamma curve was specifically chosen so that #555 (33%) would be 50% brightness and #aaa (67%) would be close to 75% brightness. This is actually a key source of the enduring appeal of NeXT assets—displaying them with a modern gamma makes the gradients seem brighter and richer than they were meant to be!

The biggest and most familiar error, though, is the login screen. Here's what it looks like:

See how bad the "Name" and "Password" text looks? Clear evidence that the gamma is wrong! Here's a reconstruction of what it should probably look like, based on a 'modern' gamma:

(Unfortunately I had to replace the 'Name' and 'Password' asset, but the graphics are otherwise original. The Restart and Power glyphs are much less jarring now.)

c) Images with rough alpha edges

NeXT was a pioneer in using alpha channels in the interface, but there were always places where corners got cut. For whatever reason, most of the ugly specimens are part of, or adjacent to, Mail.app, which was unusually demanding in the number of color graphics it needed during the 3.0 color uplift:

d) Bad digitizations

Most prominent in the Mailbox icon, whenever there's a photographic element or a 3D render being used as a NeXT asset, it generally has distracting pattern dithering applied to it. This has a multitude of causes ranging from inferior camera sensors to sloppy conversions to 12-bit RGB, but it will never not remind me of the muddy images produced by a GameBoy Camera...

I will also will never not be annoyed at the lazy lock icon—it violates Art Lebedev's law of perpendicular alignment, and is probably the single worst asset in NEXTSTEP, from a production perspective, even though it doesn't have a bad alpha edge.

The timezone selection map asset had an unusually long afterlife and was last seen (complete with bad dithering) in Mac OS X 10.1:

...but we'll talk more later (much later) about the gradual extinction of NeXT UIs in Rhapsody and OS X.

[ZombiePhysicist]

You mentioning Art Lebedev made me re-regret not getting that short lived OLED keyboard, the full one! I thought for sure there would be a version 2 (of the full version) etc. Could have would have should have.

https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

[Rhetorica]

You mentioning Art Lebedev made me re-regret not getting that short lived OLED keyboard, the full one! I thought for sure there would be a version 2 (of the full version) etc. Could have would have should have.

https://www.artlebedev.com/optimus/maximus/

Yeah... I read a review once where the reviewer said that it was so huge and solidly-built that he would rather use his Optimus Maximus to defend against an intruder over a baseball bat. But I think the keys were so large that they were pretty awkward to use.