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From: jww@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU (Joel West)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Steve Capps speaks out at MIT
Message-ID: <3708@sdcsvax.UCSD.EDU>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 11:00:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: sdcsvax.3708
Posted: Mon Aug 24 11:00:31 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 02:45:30 EDT
Organization: Palomar Software, Inc., Vista, CA
Lines: 66

In the better late than never department, here's a summary
(from my notes, not memory) of a meet-the-programmers talk
that Steve Capps gave at MIT during the Boston show.  The
talk was sponsored by the Boston Computer Society.

Steve followed a talk by two MacApp programmers, including
Larry Rosenstein (I arrived late, so I missed the first guy).
Larry's pitch for MacApp was impressive, and he had a nice set
of tips for optimizing QuickDraw performance (can you share
these Larry?) but as a current Apple employee, his remarks
were, well, not as colorful as those of Capps.

Steve seemed intent, in fact, on being controversial.  One
of the first things he said was "I think the IQ of Mac
programs is going down fast."  By that, he meant, the
newer programs seemed unimaginative and conformist.  He
held up SuperPaint as an example of a user interface that
was "ugly."

"Everybody says you have to follow Mac standards.  It's not
using your brains, it's using an excuse," he continued.

To illustrate a counter example, he pulled out Studio Session,
and showed its context-sensitive editing capabilities.  Instead
of having a separate tool palette for each function - selecting
for the clipboard, moving the note up/down, etc. - the tool
was made context-sensitive.  You want to change a note, you
grab it.  You want to select a passage, click on the selection
bar below the score and the score is selected.

(Also on Studio Session, he pointed out how he got 6 voices -
and could have had 8 - when the standard Sound Driver is only
4.  The standard Sound Driver uses a 22 kHz sampling rate,
but the -3 dB point of the electronics is 8 kHz, so most of
it is wasted; Steve said he used an 11 kHz rate instead.)

On the Macintosh, Steve said two people really deserved
all the credit: Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson.  Although
Andy Hertzfeld did QuickDraw, it was a transcription of
Bill's graphics code from the Lisa, according to Steve.

Capps told several stories about how things were designed,
for example, the iterative design of the Standard File dialog
by Atkinson and Capps.    There wasn't any theory, but just
a series of designs that were being presented to Jobs for
the yeah-or-nay approval.  In retrospect, he wishes the
ellipsis were used in the middle of a long file name, not the end.

Capps also felt that the Finder had evolved through accretion
and was long overdue to be thrown out and started over.
"It's like a grandma you're keeping on a life-support system."
There was too much code, he contended, that was left over
from the days of the 128K Mac that should be removed.  His
favorite finder was 4.1, which had more features than its
predecessor (1.1g?) but was smaller or nearly the same size.

On the relationship of Hertzfeld's Servant and Apple's new
MultiFinder, Capps joked "Ripping off is the sincerest form
of flattery" to which a heckler replied "...if they pay you
six figures."

Steve showed his graphics/sound demo that was used at the Mac II
intro.  He confessed that it required a special high-speed hard
disk and 8 Mb of memory.  And, in fact, for technical reasons
he was unable to explain, the system was a little slow for
the demo and the sound track finished before the video portion.