Kiss Boring Interfaces Goodbye With Apple's New Animated OS:

The shift toward nonstandard interfaces isn't necessarily new. Kai's Power Tools, a set of plug-ins for Adobe Systems' Photoshop, featured what was at the time a revolutionary interface for editing image files. But the developer, Kai Kruse, was too far ahead of his time -- the majority of Mac users disliked the novel interface, which broke with conventions and ignored Apple's Human Interface Guidelines, or HIG.

I'd love to read a more in depth history of the evolution of the Mac OS outside of the HIG (with a focus on tools like KPT), because my guess is that the HIG is overly romanticized by design bloggers today.

Comments

[jkottke]

But there's also the fact that the interface for KPT wasn't that good. Different != good. It would have worked just as well with clearly labeled sliders. As for Disco's smoke, it's a neat effect but it's not useful. It makes you feel happy when you're burning a CD or DVD, and that's an important effect and often overlooked by designers, but it has diminishing returns, both for Disco and for anyone else who tries to use a similar effect (like if NewsFire burst into flames every time it finds new items). You see it on Disco and you're like, whoa. On NewsFire, it's "oh, heh, that's like Disco", and by the third time you see something like it, you're longing for an app that works well and optimizes your continuing experience with it, something that was maybe built using a set of guidelines for developing interfaces to be used by humans.

[David Jacobs]

I don't disagree, but I think that KPT really inspired a whole generation of designers and hackers to have a broader idea of how computers should work and look. We need consistent guidelines, but when I read folklore and other sites about Apple history, those rules are treated like Hammurabi's code, but my argument is that the hacker's culture surrounding OS X today is closer in spirit to messing around KPT and hacking with Resedit.