Originally published at: Marcin Wichary’s Frame of Preference Explores 20 Years of Mac Control Panels - TidBITS
At his Aresluna website, designer Marcin Wichary explores the evolution of Mac settings in Frame of Preference, an interactive journey through two decades of control panels:
As a designer, I’m meant to dislike settings. As a user, I love them. Every year I celebrate Settings Day: a day when I take a look at the options and toggles in all the apps I use. I do this out of curiosity – what was added since the last time I looked? – but also because I love this way of getting to know software: peeking under the hood, walking the back alleys, learning what has been tricky or important enough to be equipped with a checkbox.
During the last Settings Day, I had a realization that the totemic 1984 Mac control panel, designed by Susan Kare, is still to this day perhaps the only settings screen ever brought up in casual conversation.
I kept wondering about that screen, and about what happened since then. Turns out, the Mac settings have lived a far more fascinating life than I imagined, have been redesigned many times, and can tell us a lot about the early history and the troubled upbringing of this interesting machine.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
Marcin Wichary is best known for Shift Happens, his multivolume masterwork about keyboards, edited by TidBITS contributor Glenn Fleishman. While Shift Happens is a visual tour de force, it is limited by the constraints of paper.
In contrast, Frame of Preference animates these historical interfaces in a charmingly interactive way. Each illustration is actually a fully emulated Mac from that era, thanks to Mihai Parparita’s Infinite Mac project. So you don’t just read about Susan Kare’s original Control Panel; you open it on the virtual Mac’s screen. Instructions in the text are shown with odd squares that turn out to be empty checkboxes—complete the action described, and you get a highlight and checkmark. If you click the Details button on the label by the emulated Mac, you’ll find “extra stuff to play with.” As you work your way through the evolution of control panels, you’ll encounter nine Macs and a NeXT Cube.
For long-time Mac users, Frame of Preference offers both a nostalgic journey through familiar interfaces and a deeper appreciation of how Apple’s approach to system settings has evolved. Thanks to Marcin Wichary for making the world just a bit more delightful.
