The GUIdebook Interview

Thursday, 18 August 2005

Marcin Wichary produces and writes the excellent GUIdebook graphical user interface gallery, where he obsessively collects screenshots of user interfaces, copiously documenting everything from icon design to login screen layouts. GUIdebook is both interesting and amazingly comprehensive, and there’s nothing else like it.

A few weeks ago, Marcin asked if I’d be interested in an interview to discuss the user interface of Mac OS X, and of course I said yes. Topics include the “Welcome to Mac OS X” first-run experience, the Dock, brushed metal windows, and, of course, the Finder. Marcin even managed to dig up a screenshot of the purple “single window mode” button that Apple had proposed putting in the title bar of every single window in the first public demo of the Aqua user interface.

So: “GUIdebook: Interview With John Gruber”.