Welcome to guidebook, a website dedicated to preserving and showcasing Graphical User Interfaces, as well as various materials related to them. Site last updated on 6th October 2006: two articles about Xerox: “Xerox xooms toward the office of the future” and “The lab that ran away from Xerox”, and a funny essay about... the cow metaphor New set of posters with mouse pointers: The icons for Windows Vista will reportedly convey over 1500 times more data (but not information!) than icons for original Macintosh System (196608 vs. 128 bytes each). Since in 1987 RISC OS was still not ready for prime time, and the new Acorn Archimedes machines were about to ship, ArthurOS was written as a temporary replacement. As you can imagine, it was pretty limited, but already introduced several concepts that survived in RISC OS for many years – for example the icon bar at the bottom of the screen (by many considered the inspiration for taskbar in Windows 95) and pop-up menus invoked by pressing the middle mouse button. The infamous Dock in Mac OS X is a feature that you can either love or hate. Having its roots in NeXTSTEP, Dock features much more eye candy, while trying to combine the functions of both application launcher and switcher. Acrobat Reader 1.0 had a nice, simple, red/black/white splash screen. Ten years later Adobe Reader 6.0 revisited and, in some ways, reversed that design idea. Four versions in the middle, however, tried to entertain us with colourful drawings. Find out which approach you prefer more.
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