James Thomson:
So, we are coming up on a little anniversary for me this weekend. On the 5th of January 2000, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Aqua user interface of Mac OS X to the world at Macworld Expo.
Towards the end of the presentation, he showed off the Dock. You all know the Dock, it’s been at the bottom of your Mac screen for what feels like forever (if you keep it in the correct location, anyway).
The version he showed was quite different to what actually ended up shipping, with square boxes around the icons, and an actual “Dock” folder in your user’s home folder that contained aliases to the items stored.
I should know – I had spent the previous 18 months or so as the main engineer working away on it. At that very moment, I was watching from a cubicle in Apple Cork, in Ireland. For the second time in my short Apple career, I said a quiet prayer to the gods of demos, hoping that things didn’t break. For context, I was in my twenties at this point and scared witless.
Not sure how loved the Dock is these days, but it certainly made for impressive demos in the early Mac OS X days1. James writes about his experience at Apple working on an early implementation of the Dock that was developed as part of the Finder on Mac OS 9.
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My favourite was holding Shift while minimizing a QuickTime window to the dock and seeing the window warp with the genie effect while it continued playing video. Like this YouTube video, except with a QuickTime movie. ↩