Keith Ohlfs, NeXTSTEP Designer, has passed away

https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/31/keith-ohlfs/

by rayshan • 10 years ago

181 36 10 years ago

Every new release of (mac)OS( X), I rush to see whether the Grab.app creepy eye camera[0] has been replaced, and every time I breathe a sigh of relief. Sadly though, a few versions ago it stopped following the mouse cursor.

0. https://imgur.com/a/xT3Od

Razengan• 10 years ago

Nice easter egg! I just checked it myself. Although the eye doesn't "follow" the cursor, it still animates when you move the cursor, if you choose Capture -> Selection or Screen, but not if you Capture Window.

mikestew• 10 years ago

El Capitan here, creepy eye is still creepy and following my cursor around. Don't have Sierra machine to test at the moment.

ksherlock• 10 years ago

still present in sierra.

polpo• 10 years ago

Me too! It's one of the first things I check when upgrading. I was worried it wouldn't survive the first Retina version of Lion and then the flattening of Yosemite, but nope, it's still going strong. I hope they're leaving it in as an Easter egg intentionally.

flomo• 10 years ago

I had no idea that Grab.app was still around, because Preview.app does mostly the same thing. I'd guess it is hanging around as a backward-compatibility thing.

protomyth2• 10 years ago

I loved his folders and icons. For a number of years I used the NeXT icons on my windows box at work. RIP good sir.

galonk• 10 years ago

For some reason, the string around the folder icon seemed brilliant to me. It was the kind of thing you could only do in the kind of giant icons they had on NeXT.

protomyth2• 10 years ago

The converted font did look pretty good on Windows. I wish I knew who I got it from, but this is way back in 96. I still have my NeXTSTEP and OpenStep discs. The ugly blue of the current plain icons makes me long to figure out how to put them on my Mac again.

dictum2• 10 years ago

Rest in peace, Keith. I'll always hold a special place in my heart for the NeXTStep interface and general look.

----

Anyone notice some visual parallels between the icon aesthetic since El Capitan and Keith Ohlfs's icons?

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This guy recreated the NeXT icons (with some creative liberties):

http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1380

http://galgot.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1410

frik• 10 years ago

no wonder, as MacOSX/OSX/macOS is the direct successor of NEXTSTEP (the OS), when Steve Jobs came back he managed that Apple buy his company. From Interfacebuilder (nowadays XCode) to Mail, several things in early MacOS X 1.0 server looked similar to the previous NEXTSTEP version (decorated with a MacOS 8/9 theme). http://toastytech.com/guis/osxsv.html

Compare yourself, see the "Apple MacOS "X section:

http://toastytech.com/guis/indexapple.html

tonyarkles• 10 years ago

And if you've ever wondered what the NS in the Obj-C libraries stands for...

cm3• 10 years ago

Do you know of an icon set conversion of those that would work with gtk3? Even most icon themes that work with gtk2 are incorrectly structured for gtk3, with wrong icons display for, say, +/- controls. Using the ugly Adwaita set because it's the only complete and working one. The Haiku icon set also only works with gtk2.

patrickg_zill2• 10 years ago

I remember speaking with him once, not knowing he was at a competing company, and first, thanking him for the excellent UI I had the pleasure to use (I had a NeXT machine on my desk for about 8 months at a job I was at); then asking him if he was available for work (he wasn't).

Gracious guy, and I believe today that the NextStep v3.3 GUI was about the perfect GUI even today; I miss it.

Esau• 10 years ago

I have to agree. To this day, I still prefer the NextStep UI to the OS X UI.

kps• 10 years ago

There were giants in the earth in those days.

patrickg_zill2• 10 years ago

Yes, it was called "NeXT Cube 040 Turbo with NeXTDimension board" and it had a Motorola 68040 @ 33Mhz, with a hardware accelerated NeXTDimension board that could run 24bit or 32bit color and had a dedicated i860 or i960 CPU running the Display PostScript interpreter on the card itself.

I think, you could take such beasties all the way up to 128MB RAM.

agumonkey• 10 years ago

Haa 52, damn young...

NS icons were unique, just enough shine and hue to compliment the "dull" (some would perfectly non distracting) widget theme.

Thank you for the dreamy eyes you got me.

jdswain• 10 years ago

His NeXTStep user interface also strongly influenced Windows 95.

For a long time Keith had a web site called pixelsight.com. It used a NeXT computer and the display postscript rendering to generate images from options you could select on the web page, you could use it to generate buttons and other types of icons. It was probably one of the first uses of a web server as a front end for a program.

smaili• 10 years ago

Anyone happen to know the cause of death? 52 is quite young.

Audiophilip• 10 years ago

Heart attack.

oautholaf• 10 years ago

That's very sad. He was a hero of mine in the NeXTStep era. I always figured I'd run across him sooner or later but time ran out...

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

Hm, do you guys know any doctors that custom tailor lifestyles and treatments for the sedentary lives of software engineers?

I often times find my inquiries dismissed because I'm young and slim.

rayshan• 10 years ago

I was extremely lucky to be able to work side by side with Keith at Montage Studio. I am grateful for all Keith has taught me and all he has shown the world. I will always remember the late nights we spent together. My condolences to the Ohlfs family. Rest in peace Keith.

outside1234• 10 years ago

I worked with Keith at WebTV and besides being a fabulously smart person to work with, he was also a super nice and gentle soul. Rest In Peace Keith.

bitmage• 10 years ago

The NeXT had such a clean aesthetic, even on the original B&W displays that were limited to just four shades of grey. I still use the house icon from the later color systems on my Linux desktop.

cha-cho• 10 years ago

I cobbled together a NeXT-compliant Intel box in '95 so I could get NeXTSTEP 3.2 installed. What started it all? An old BYTE magazine article that featured a screen capture of NeXTSTEP. It looked so good that I just had to try it out firsthand.

mistermann• 10 years ago

This thread makes me feel like I'm on the old slashdot, in a good way. :)

saretired• 10 years ago

The NeXT interface was wonderfully designed. Back in the day, its competition was Openlook and Motif, plus the classic Mac desktop and whatever Windows and OS/2 had at the time -- it was really a wonderful, integrated, beautifully executed desktop that made sense soon as I first sat down to use it.

danaliv• 10 years ago

Still have my Turbo NeXTstation. Beautiful UI, beautiful machines.

jpalomaki• 10 years ago

Would be interesting to read a book related to this topic. Not about how to design user interfaces, but something that would tell more about designers like Keith and their work. Examples and then commentary by the designers. Any pointers?

Keith Ohlfs, NeXTSTEP Designer, has passed away

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