News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

March 19, 2008

geekery

The birth of the iChat bubble

Posted Mar. 19, ’08, 2:44 PM PT by Dan Pourhadi
Category | Geekery

iChatBubbles3.jpgIt’s fun to learn about the origin of your favorite thing…or anything, really. We tend to take things for granted, and it’s hard to really appreciate it until you’re able to see the original idea behind it, the process involved in implementing that idea, and its evolution through the ages.

So I enjoy looking at posts like this one by Jens Alfke, where he details the basic genesis of Apple’s iChat and its neat-o bubble UI — including a sketch of the bubble idea drawn in ClarisWorks in 1997.

This was based on my experiences with MUDs and IRC, having a really hard time keeping track of many-way chats. I think the only IM app available then was ICQ, which I hadn’t heard of. (IIRC, AIM came out later that year, at least for non-AOL users.) This also predates Microsoft Comic Chat, which used speech balloons too, although in a very different UI: theirs was for novelty, mine was for usability.

Check the post for the full sketch and more details on the origin of the interface, and what “novel features” actually made it in iChat — and what didn’t.

[via Daring Fireball]


1 Comments

fletcher Author Profile Page said:

I hate those bubbles. They use up a lot of space and don't add anything to the interface.

March 19, 2008 4:07 PM

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