Lisa UI

[ZombiePhysicist]

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/242388.242405

[Rhetorica]

To get a broad feel for the result of the above, https://lisagui.com/ is an in-browser recreation with an ever-growing number of applications. I'd be very jealous if it wasn't just a bunch of Javascript smoke and mirrors. It's heavy on the UX paradigms, though, and anyone who's only used an old Mac will be in for a treat with how many expectations it violates.

(Just make sure you clear your site info for alpha.lisagui.com if you've seen it before—or you'll be stuck with an old version of the disk.)

[ZombiePhysicist]

I loved the original lisa OS with the "stationary" paradigm. There are still somethings from it that I dont see in modern OS/browsers. One think *I think* i remember, is that lisa write had vertical rulers with vertical TABS! Vertical tabs is such a great and useful/simple thing I'm surprised it hasn't been ruthlessly copied.

Then again apple completely ignored many things that were FREE in nextstep. Like live object linking on the machine and over the network/internet. Was kind of magic and pretty well done.

[Rhetorica]

Then again apple completely ignored many things that were FREE in nextstep. Like live object linking on the machine and over the network/internet. Was kind of magic and pretty well done.

Sort of—I mentioned object links here, recently. The short story is that they didn't work well on OpenStep (mixed CPU architectures ⇒ mixed endianness ⇒ serialization methods were unique to each platform) and re-implementing them was never finished. So technically NeXT (and NeXT engineers working under Apple on Rhapsody DR1) dropped that particular ball all on their own over the course of '95–'97.

This may have been part of why I never managed to get NXHosting working between Previous and Windows—between x86 systems was OK, but not otherwise. (It would be fascinating to know if object links worked between black and white hardware running NS 3.3...)

[ZombiePhysicist]

Funny. It worked well for me. I think there may have been an earlier version than Openstep, like even NS3.3. It was super solid on the local machine, and that alone made it valuable. I recall it worked well on a local LAN between two next machines too.

I never tried the internet version because a) not sure that was fully baked beyond demos, and b) i had SLIP dialup back then so you know, not exactly great use case and a lot of other next's to collaborate with. 

But I also remember the openstep for windows betas. And I think I tried an early version on some NT build. It worked shockingly well in some limited cases/apps. But clearly also not ready for prime time, at least the early version i had. I forget where I got that from. I might have a physical disc in some box somewhere. I have yet to go through all my non-backed up physical media as that's a true software archeology project.

Anyway, I do remember using DO (distributed objects) regularly myself between apps. It was fantastic for creating shared header/footers and boilerplate as a pretty sophisticated dynamic templating. And it meant if you had an address change etc, everything just got updated by updating one master link. But again, that was mostly on my local machine, but if I recall, it worked well on LANs internally at NeXT too.