4 landmark software features that were created by accident
It’s easy to look at the finished product of something and think that it is the result of careful, planned designs and processes. But, as anyone who has designed something will tell you, the reality is much more chaotic. We don’t always think about where some of the design elements and features of our software come from, but in the case of these four examples, the “genius” came from an accident.
Adjustable user interface settings
These days we take it for granted on our operating systems that we can change the look and feel of the interface. You can change window colors, system font, appearance of specific elements like buttons, etc. It varies from one OS to another, but the principle is the same. If the user wants to change how things look and work, let them. Even if it makes a UX “expert” cringe.
Now, while I can’t say for sure that this particular incident was the cause of the tweak to the user interface of modern computers and why your mother uses that horrible font on her phone, some development inspired by Steve Jobs could very well have been the start.
As Andy Hertzfeld recounts in Folklore article, and Apple’s first employee, Chris Espinosa, was working on designing a Mac calculator app. But when he showed it to Steve Jobs, he received a long list of criticisms about its appearance.
Jobs was notoriously picky, and in the end, Espinosa had the stroke of genius to simply add a bunch of sliders and settings that would allow his picky boss to sit down and play with every aspect of the application’s interface until he was satisfied. Thus (perhaps) accidentally creating the idea of letting the user decide what the UI should be.
Windows 11 locks these 4 features, but they should be standard
These really should be included in the base operating system.
I’ve waxed lyrical about the excellent (and legendary) Microsoft Intellimouse in the past, which is partly famous for introducing the scroll wheel instead of the middle mouse button. Something that has proven invaluable in the internet age and for anyone who needs to manage documents and spreadsheets.
The fact is, if one of the people who claim to have invented the scroll wheel is to be believed, it was never designed for scrolling. Instead, it was a zoom wheel, at least that’s what Oculus co-founder Jack McCauley said in an interview with IGN.
Whether or not McCauley is the only, or even the main, contributor to the wheel idea, I should point out that we actually use the scroll wheel to zoom in many applications. So the idea of it being a Z-axis controller still holds true in 3D apps and games, but it’s a little funny to think that someone had big ambitions for a new hardware feature and then software developers used it to avoid having to drag a scrollbar.
Stop Using Your Chromebook Wrongly: 7 Features You’ve Probably Missed
I bet you didn’t know number 3!
Undo becoming a permanent feature after a debug hack
We all take for granted that we can Ctrl+Z our way out of most mistakes. In fact, these days, with computer memory plentiful, you can often “undo” several steps of what you’ve done in most applications.
Today, a function that is actually an “undo” feature has been invented several times independently, but it started as a way to debug software. So you can go back through the software line by line until you figure out what went wrong. This was proposed in Marvin Zelkowitz’s 1971 doctoral dissertation. Reversible execution as a diagnostic tool.
Others developed the idea, but it was the programmers at Xerox PARC (where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were “inspired” to create GUIs) who gave us the Ctrl+Z shortcut and “Undo” nomenclature that we know, love, and are often saved for today.
Why I prefer a tiled window manager on Linux
They’re not for everyone, but I can’t get enough of them.
Tabbed Browsing Evolving From a Boring Productivity Feature
When I first started browsing the Internet in the late 90s, tabbed browsing didn’t exist, and I really struggle to remember how we survived without it. In fact, I could only load one web page at a time over a dial-up connection, so maybe that wasn’t the case. that it’s really a problem. Yet when I got my first tabbed browser, it completely changed the way I worked and used the web.
The fact is that there were already applications such as word processors with tabbed interfaces as early as 1982. In fact, I remember my father using Borland Quattro Pro in the 80s and 90s with tabbed spreadsheets. The first browsers with this feature came out in the mid-90s, but like most people, I didn’t start using tabbed browsing until the early 2000s with Firefox. Somehow it took Internet Explorer until 2007 before it also adopted tabbed browsing as an option. But then he was always slow to catch up.
The fact is that even though tabs were not designed for web browsers and were initially only added as an option in some browsers, real browser users quickly switched to tabbed browsing instead of opening each website in its own window. So while we now think of them as synonymous with web browsing, that’s not what they’re intended for.
I typically have 20-40 tabs open spread across three windows and two monitors at any given time. I can only imagine how much less productive I would be if I had to juggle and manage 40 separate windows!
