If you’ve been a Mac fan for more than a few years, chances are you’ve seen or even used Apple’s most famous computer models. What you don’t often see are the machines that Apple kept to itself—the prototypes that never reached the market.
To explore this hidden world, we’ll take a look at four Macintosh prototypes from Apple, and one from an early Mac clone maker. When you’re done reading, we’d love to hear (in the comments at the end of this article) whatever tales you might have of your personal encounters with legendary Apple prototypes.
The Macintosh (mainly Mac since 1998) is a family of personal computers designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple Inc. Since January 1984. The original Macintosh is the first successful mass-market personal computer to have featured a graphical user interface, built-in screen, and mouse. Apple sold the Macintosh alongside its popular Apple II, Apple III, and Apple Lisa families of computers. A vindicator chasing a Villager. Vindicators are hostile toward players, iron golems, adult villagers, baby villagers Java Edition only, wandering traders, and snow golems. When attacking, a vindicator raises its main hand brandishing an iron axe. The Power Mac G5 was announced. Apple previewed Mac OS X Panther, moved Safari out of beta with version 1.0, and introduced “iApps” (now called the “iLife” suite). BASEBALL South Range’s Trey Pancake homered as one of his four hits, and the Raiders pounded Lakeview, 14-2. Pancake, who also doubled, drove in five runs. Aiden English picked up the win,.
Translucent Macintosh SE (circa 1987)
During the testing process for many Mac models, Apple’s engineers routinely created a few prototypes of a particular computer with translucent plastic housing for air flow testing. Here we see this practice illustrated to stunning effect in this particular Macintosh SE prototype, although other Apple machines—from the Apple IIc to the Macintosh Portable—have been discovered with translucent testing cases.
Why translucent? With the help of a little smoke, engineers could easily see which components were or were not being cooled adequately and then make adjustments accordingly. It would take a new generation of designers to actually utilize translucent plastics in shipping products.
Twiggy Macintosh (circa 1983)
For most of the Macintosh’s early life in development, Apple intended its diminutive GUI-based machine to utilize Apple’s FileWare (aka “Twiggy”) disk media, a proprietary 5.25-inch floppy disk format that Apple developed for the Apple Lisa.
And that’s what you see here: a rare, early Macintosh (that actually works) with one internal Twiggy drive. This particular model, owned by collector Adam Goolevitch, is currently the only one known to exist in such a complete state.
FileWare drives never shipped in a Macintosh, however. The Lisa launched with two Twiggy drives in 1983, but the drives proved slow and error-prone in practice. Worried, Mac engineers devised a plan to include Sony’s new 3.5-inch floppy format in the Macintosh instead.
(That particular episode resulted in an amusing story about a Sony engineer hiding in a closet—an anecdote that you can find expertly told by Andy Hertzfeld at Folklore.org.)
The final, shipping 1984 Macintosh included one 400K 3.5-inch microfloppy drive, and that inclusion helped popularize the new disk format. It’s hard to imagine what the Mac platform would have become if it had stuck with the problematic Twiggy drives.
Colby Classmate (circa 1991)
Electronics engineer Chuck Colby is something of a minor (albeit little-known) legend in Macintosh lore. His company, Colby Systems Corporation, created some of the first Macintosh clones, including the portable MacColby.
In 1991, Colby created the world’s first Mac-compatible tablet computer, the Classmate, which would have included a 68000 CPU, a 20MB hard drive, a floppy drive, a trackball, and a touch-sensitive membrane keyboard. At 5.4 pounds, it wasn’t as portable as an iPad, but it was a start.
While the Classmate came close to production, it never reached the market, and Colby left the Macintosh development world to work with video technology.
Apple Paladin (circa 1995)
In the mid-1990s, Apple tinkered with creating an integrated, all-in-one office appliance that included a computer, telephone, scanner, fax machine, modem, and printer. The result was the Apple Paladin prototype. It combined the guts of an Apple PowerBook Duo 230 (including its grayscale monitor) with a StyleWriter 1200 printer in a sleek white enclosure.
Early tests of the unit proved problematic, and after an internal corporate reshuffle, the Paladin was left without a division to call home, so it never reached the market.
Apple MultiServer (circa 1985)
In 1985, Apple announced the Macintosh Office system, which would combine AppleTalk networking, a laser printer (the LaserWriter), and a networked file server for use in a business environment.
Of those three components, only two shipped. Apple never managed to release a file server during that era, although it certainly tried to develop one. One such attempt was the Apple MultiServer, seen here in an extremely rare prototype form owned by Jonathan Zufi, proprietor of Shrine of Apple.
Beneath its Apple-branded skin, the MultiServer would have been a rebadged 3Com 3Server, a network server powered by an Intel 80188 CPU. Presumably, it would have run 3Com’s 3+ file sharing software and not an OS designed by Apple.
According to Shrine of Apple, the server was cancelled at the last minute and the unshipped units were used for Apple’s sales offices.
Apple did eventually ship its own dedicated server systems (the Workgroup Server series), but not for another decade.
Paladin front panel image credit: Jim Abeles
Whether it’s playful refresh states, subtle icon movements or complex transitions, beautiful animation is all around us.
Once considered an aesthetic luxury, animation is now used so commonly in modern web and mobile applications that entire websites are dedicated to UI animation patterns.
Further reading on Smashing:
While animations may have great visual appeal, they also make app experiences more intuitive and engaging. Animation can make an app feel more fluid and responsive by providing feedback on user interaction. This means that, for designers, creating authentic animations is increasingly becoming a part of the job description.
The Right Tool For The Job
Traditionally, designers have had to learn complex animation tools from scratch to produce even the simplest of motion graphics. In recent years, a slew of software has come out vying for the attention of prototypers and motion designers, such as Framer, Origami and Pixate, not to mention the old classics such as Adobe After Effects.
However, I found them all to be a bit of overkill for what I was trying to achieve. As a UI designer, I needed a rapid, easy-to-learn, familiar tool to animate my static designs. I needed to produce animations quickly, since my team was iterating quickly on a product we were working on. I also didn’t want to learn an entirely new software paradigm. A bonus would be a tool that integrates nicely in my existing static design workflow (I generally use Sketch and Photoshop).
In my quest to find a tool that is more suitable to these needs, I stumbled upon one that has been on my computer all along — Apple’s Keynote.
Keynote?
Most people know Apple’s Keynote as the PowerPoint equivalent on Mac OS X — presentation software. That is true, but it can also be used to produce surprisingly high-fidelity animations and prototypes. In fact, many employees at companies such as Google and Apple use Keynote on a daily basis for UI design, animation and prototyping.
Last year, Andrew Haskin, interaction designer at Frog, showed us just how powerful Keynote could be when he recreated Google’s material design animations entirely in Keynote.
Learning Keynote
Andrew’s video really piqued my interest in Keynote, and in the past year I’ve used the software to recreate many interactions seen in major apps, including Facebook Paper, Uber, Tinder, Snapchat and more. You can see a reel of that below.
Keynote is fairly easy to pick up, because most people have used some sort of presentation software in their life. It is very much like PowerPoint if you’re familiar with it, so the interface is recognizable and you will immediately understand how to create and edit slides.
One of my favorite aspects of animating in Keynote is that it is straight to the point — there is no code, complicated timelines with keyframes or unnecessary functionality for designers.
The major legwork of the animation is done with Keynote’s “Magic Move” transition effect. With Magic Move, all you need is a beginning and end slide, and you can edit any number of properties between them (scale, position, rotation, etc). Keynote takes care of the rest by intelligently filling in the gaps, creating a seamless transition from one slide to the next.
Magic Move saves a ton of time, and complex animations that would have taken much longer in other tools take seconds with Keynote.
Overall Workflow
To demonstrate how to use Keynote, I’ll recreate a very simple interaction model popularized by Tinder: the left and right swipe animation. Download the assets for this project(link fixed!) (ZIP, 360 KB).
The basic idea is to create the first screen of the animation (beginning) and the last screen of the animation (end). Keynote will intelligently take care of the rest with the Magic Move transition.
Set Up the Document
Open a blank white presentation. By default, Keynote will create a presentation-sized document (1024×768px). Let’s change that to more of an iPhone-sized document.
Go to the “Document” tab in the top right. Under the section “Slide Size,” go to “Custom Slide Size,” and make the size 350 (width) × 667 (height) pixels.
Now, let’s import the images. This step is as simple as dragging the image files from your folder onto Keynote’s canvas.
First Slide
Once you’ve dragged your assets over, you can position them visually. Keynote has useful guidelines that appear contextually, helping you to align the design.
Keynote will assign a z-index to each asset according to when it was imported — it doesn’t have a layers panel. In case you need to change the ordering of the stack, all you have to do is select the asset and right-click (Cmd + click) to bring up the menu, then select “Bring to Front.”
If you want to lay out assets with pixel-perfect values, rather than by eye, go to the “Format” → “Align” section and input exact numerical values.
End Slide
The second screen will be the last frame of the animation. Rotate the top image and position it off screen — this will be the end position.
The first thing to do is duplicate the first slide we’ve been working with. In the left-hand panel, right-click and select “Duplicate” in the menu.
Let’s begin by rotating the top asset. To rotate, hold down Cmd, and a rotated-arrow icon will appear in the corner of the selected asset. Then, click and drag to rotate.
Now, position the tile off screen.
Magic Move
Now that we have the start and end positions, let’s animate this.
Select the first slide, and go to the “Animate” tab on the left. Under “Transitions,” select “Add an Effect” and choose “Magic Move” in the dropdown.
Magic Move is a transition effect that moves an object from a position on one slide to a new position on the next slide. It intelligently fills the gaps between the slides by moving, fading and scaling the object.
Timing and Acceleration
Magic Move has only two settings, duration and acceleration, which really help your animation look the best it can.
Duration is self-explanatory — it refers to timing, and the correct value is determined case by case. I find that the sweet spot for UI animation is usually somewhere between 0.7 and 1.5 seconds.
The acceleration section has four options:
- “none”: Same speed throughout the animation
- “ease out”: Starts slow, then speeds up
- “ease out”: Starts fast, then slows down
- “ease out and ease in”: Starts slow, speeds up, then slows down again
For our example, I am using 0.90 seconds for the duration, and “ease in and ease out” for the acceleration setting.
Our Animation
Below is the final animation, with some added effects. You can download the Keynote file (ZIP) to see how the rest was done.
What Else Is Possible?
Obviously it’s a very, very simple example. We’ve just scratched the surface of what can be done in Keynote. Magic Move is the simplest of techniques. For more finesse, you can use Keynote’s build ins and build outs.
Build Ins and Build Outs
Build in refers to how an object appears for the first time, and build out refers to how an animation leaves the screen. These are both object-based animations, rather than slide-based (like Magic Move). In other words, every asset can have its own independent animation.
For example, if you want an animation to scale in and bounce a bit, you would use a build-in effect called “Pop.” If you want the object to fade out, you would use the build-out effect “Dissolve.”
To apply a build-in or build-out effect, select any object on the screen and go to the “Animate” tab. There should be three sections: “Build In,” “Actions” and “Build Out.”
Build-in animations have a number of options. I use only a handful for UI design most of the time:
Complicated animations can have many build ins and build outs, and timing when each one appears is important. To do this, open the “Build Order” menu at the bottom of the “Animate” tab, and adjust the timing in the menu.
Sketch and Photoshop Integration
Keynote integrates in my design workflow nicely. Importing from Photoshop, Sketch or Illustrator is as simple as copying and pasting into Keynote. I often design in Sketch and copy and paste over to Keynote to quickly infuse some motion into my static mockups.
A few tips. Copy and paste layer by layer, or else Keynote will combine them, which you don’t want in most cases, especially if you’re animating individual pieces.
Also, if you copy and paste text, it will not retain its text properties, and you will not be able to edit it anymore. When dealing with text, make sure that your copy has been finalized or that you are able to recreate the text in Keynote.
Prototypes on Device
You can also create a prototype and put it on your device using the Keynote app for iOS. It’s as simple as using the “Adding Links” tool to link to different slides in a presentation. Below is an example of an app designed, animated and prototyped in Keynote.
When sharing prototypes with clients and stakeholders, you can export them as HTML and they will be clickable in a browser. Note that the code will not be production-ready; the design will have to be recreated for the final product.
Vindicator (prototype) Mac Os Download
Conclusion
Whether you’re a designer, product manager, developer or anyone else working on a product, Keynote is a great way to communicate ideas quickly. The speed, gentle learning curve and quality of output all make it an ideal tool for your arsenal.
Vindicator (prototype) Mac Os Catalina
To recap, Magic Move is the simplest and quickest of animation types in Keynote; it is used between slides to animate from a beginning state to an end state. Build ins, actions and build outs are used on individual objects in a slide; they control how things are presented for the first time and how they leave the screen.
Vindicator (prototype) Mac Os X
With enough practice, you can do virtually any type of animation in Keynote. Many otherexamples show Keynote being used to create high-fidelity animations.
Vindicator (prototype) Mac Os Sierra
Keynote comes free with Mac OS X Yosemite and above. Give it a try, and happy animating!