riveteye

Joined 13 years ago

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They do not take into account the mass introduction of environmental contaminants following the 1880s Industrial Revolution.

Forget Elf on the Shelf: Worry about Hello Barbie, actual child surveillance toy

9 riveteye 11 years ago 1 comments

Comment · 12 years ago

UPDATED:

So this little article has travelled pretty far! There were a lot of good tips, comments and insights into the origin of [x] but none as good as this email that I received from Windows 95 team member Daniel Oran.

“Hi Lauren,

A friend forwarded me your Medium piece, “X to Close.” He remembered that I had worked on Windows 95 at Microsoft — I created the Start Button and Taskbar — and thought I’d be amused. I was! :-)

It’s fun to see how history gets written when you actually lived those long-ago events. I joined Microsoft in 1992 as a program manager for the user interface of “Chicago,” which was the code name for what eventually became Windows 95.

So, who was responsible for this last minute change? As far as I can tell, this person is responsible for the proliferation and widespread use of [x] in UI design today.

It wasn’t a last-minute change. During 1993, we considered many variations of the close-button design. And the source wasn’t Atari. It was NeXT, which had an X close button in the upper right, along with the grayscale faux-3D look that we borrowed for Windows 95.

I wanted to put the Windows X close button in the upper left, but that conflicted with the existing Windows Alt-spacebar menu and also a new program icon, which we borrowed fromOS/2, on which Microsoft had originally partnered with IBM.

Attached is the earliest Chicago bitmap I could find that includes an X close button. It’s dated 9/22/1993. (In attaching the file to this email, I just realized that it’s so old that it has only an eight-character name. Before Windows 95, that was the limit.)

Thanks for your very entertaining essay!

Best,

Danny”

I guess you could say case [x]ed.

Thanks again to everyone who helped track down earlier examples of GUIs and early text editors that used [x] to close as well. Fascinating!

The Origin of X-to-Close in UI Design medium.com

3 riveteye 12 years ago 1 comments

Comment · 13 years ago

I strongly believe that work is not a job.*

Work is what you do in your life every day to create value for yourself and for the people you care about. Your work should make you happy and help you to feel fulfilled. Your work could take 5 hours a week or it could take 60 hours a week. It could make you a ton of money, it could be where you spend your money. Your work could be a volunteer gig at an animal shelter that you do around your 9-5 day job, it could be the all-night code sessions you do as a hobby, it could even be what you do every day as a high-functioning cog in your office cube. It's up to you to find your own glory.