This is a labor of love. My goal is to recreate the original Mac OS 3 experience, with as much fidelity as I remeber, in Flash/ActionScript. What’s great about this project is how I get to relearn what is critical about user centered design. Surpassed only by the iPhone UX, the original Macintosh environment was a revolution that set the bar for every computer that came afterwards.
Why Mac OS 3 and not 1 or 5 or 7? When I joined Apple Computer in 1992 the Mac OS was available in lovely 32-bit color with thousands of APIs and hundreds of Applications. But it was the original Mac OS 1-bit graphical environment that inspired me to join Apple in is mission to “change the world, one desktop at a time.” Mac OS 3 embodied a clean, tight, well thought out UX where once you knew 10% of the user interface you could easily intuit the other 90%. Later versions of the OS simply added color, complexitity, and the occasional UX gaffe. Mac OS 3 was as close to perfect as humanity has ever achieved in it’s works of art and deserves to live along side the Parthenon and Claude Monet’s Water Lilies.
This page will always have the most current version of the Mac OS 3 Simulator. As I develop the project I’ll blog about my trails and tribulations and post works in progress.