The Now-Vanished Apple "Icon Garden" (courtesy maddi)
or Steve Jobs and the Mystery of the Disappearing “Icon Garden”
There’s been a recent pseudo-controversy over the statement made by Steve Jobs at the iPhone 4 introduction during his WWDC keynote this week. Steve said, (as quoted in Wired)
It turns out there’s a magic number right around 300 pixels per inch, that when you hold something around to 10 to 12 inches away from your eyes, is the limit of the human retina to differentiate the pixels.
Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies took some issue with that, but a good article in Discover Magazine clears things up, so to speak.
But that isn’t what I wanted to talk about.
I wanted to talk about the way that Steve hate pixels. He’s hated ‘em ever since he came back to Apple, at least, and possibly longer.
A bit of history: When Apple first built the “Infinite Loop” R&D campus in Cupertino, they cut a deal with the city to create a “park”, with some “art” in it, on the property. What they created was a patch of grass populated by gigantic versions of the standard Mac OS icons, in all their 32 pixel by 32 pixel glory. You can see them pictured above. The tallest was maybe ten feet high.
When Steve became “iCEO” after the hasty departure of the unlamented Gil Amelio, we were in the beta part of the development cycle for Mac OS 8.5. We came into work one day to discover that, where the icon garden had been only a day before, there was now a bare patch of grass, with only a few circles of dirt to show where the icons had once stood. Clarus, the DogCow, “moofed” no more. There was no explanation from management or HR about it.
The persistent rumor was that the icon garden had been removed at Steve’s direct order, but no one was entirely sure what it was about the garden that had bothered Steve.
Someone actually opened a bug against the Mac OS “Icon Manager”, stating, “I installed the latest build of Mac OS 8.5, and when I came into work the following morning, the icon garden had disappeared.” This bug report got passed around and commented on, despite persistent efforts of management up to and including Avie Tevanian (EVP of software) to kill it, by three hundred or more people.
Steve finally fessed up at a comm meeting and admitted that he was the one who’d ordered the icon garden removed. “I hated them!” he said. “They were so pixellated!” He actually offered to sell them to one of the engineers, but the offer was rescinded before we could raise money to follow through on that. Presumably, they’ve either been melted down for scrap, or are residing in some Raiders of the Lost Ark-like warehouse in Cupertino.
At any rate, Steve hates pixels as much as he apparently hates porn. I guess he’s gotta feel as though he’s winning on both fronts there.
