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   Apple Produces Gorgeous Site for Mac's 30th Anniversary

   Adam C. Engst

   In honor of the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh today, 24 January
   2014, Apple has unveiled [1]a museum-quality interactive Web site that
   I hope will remain available indefinitely. You're greeted with a
   3-minute Mac 30 video with brief sound bites from designers, artists,
   musicians, teachers, and scientists whose lives were changed by the
   Macintosh. The video is everything you'd expect from Apple in terms of
   content and top-notch production values, but it's only the intro to an
   even more interesting site.

   [2][tn_Mac-30.jpg]

   Organized as a timeline, the Mac 30 site breaks down the history of the
   Macintosh year by year, introducing you to someone who was drawn to the
   Mac in that timeframe and used it as a tool to enhance human
   creativity. Each year of the timeline also describes a particular model
   of the Mac that was released or, later on when Macs ceased to have
   unique names, updated in that year.

   [3][tn_Mac-30-timeline.jpg]

   Equally as interesting as the biographies and the rundown of a
   particular Mac model is a visualization of what people say they did
   with that particular model. The usage data requires some
   interpretation, because it comes from another part of the site that
   [4]asks what your first Mac was, and what you did with it. For
   instance, Tonya's and my first Mac was a Macintosh SE, and the tasks we
   used it for as undergraduates at Cornell University in the late 1980s
   are very different from how we've used our Macs in subsequent years.

   The choice of the featured Macs is a little surprising in places,
   including such oddities as the Macintosh TV in 1993 and the Twentieth
   Anniversary Macintosh in 1997 (thanks to [5]MacTracker for confirming
   for me that it celebrated Apple's 20th anniversary, not the Mac's). And
   I'm dying to know if the PowerBook 1400 in 1996 has no usage data shown
   due to a bug on the site or because no one has yet selected it as their
   first Mac. It's hard to imagine the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh
   being anyone's first Mac either, given its near-$10,000 initial price.

   The Mac 30 site also features a slider-driven visualization of how
   people have used Macs over time (again, with each data point being how
   that person used his or her first Mac), and while it's interesting to
   see the size of different circles change over time, I'd love to see the
   data graphed differently so you could better understand the changes.
   Although I selected 'Internet & Email' for our SE in 1987, thanks to
   what we did at Cornell, that category first appears in the overview of
   all data in 1989 and achieves its category-leading position starting in
   1998 and continuing through the rest of time.

   [6][tn_Mac-30-data.jpg]

   I presume that data is continuing to flow into the system at a quick
   rate, so hopefully the information it's presenting will represent what
   was true in each year with ever-increasing accuracy. A revisit will be
   in order in a week or so.

   Finally, there's also an Easter Egg of sorts in the site. As iOS
   developer Greg Barbosa discovered, Apple created [7]a special font
   containing icons of numerous Mac models. It's a strange font that uses
   a special private area for the characters, so you can't just type the
   icons from the keyboard. Instead, once you install it in Font Book, you
   can copy and paste individual icons out. I wouldn't be surprised if the
   characters fail to appear correctly in all apps (they're not showing up
   right in BBEdit for instance, but do work in TextEdit).

   [8][tn_Mac-icon-font.jpg]

References

   1. http://www.apple.com/30-years/
   2. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-01/Mac-30.png
   3. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-01/Mac-30-timeline.png
   4. http://www.apple.com/30-years/your-first-mac/
   5. http://mactracker.ca/
   6. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-01/Mac-30-data.png
   7. http://images.apple.com//v/30-years/a/fonts/mac-icons/mac-icon-standard.ttf
   8. http://tidbits.com/resources/2014-01/Mac-icon-font.png

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