This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”
I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.
There are a few stories that follow this pattern... my favorite is the one about Starcraft development. While Blizzard was making nothing more than "Warcraft in space", a competing studio showed a beautiful and fluid RTS at trade shows that got everyone's attention. The Starcraft team had a hard time getting their product to the same level, and had to scrap a lot of code. It turned out that the other studio was just showing prerecorded videos at trade shows, while employees mimed the appropriate button presses to make it look interactive.
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This reminds me of how when Apple created the UI for the Lisa (and then the Mac), they thought that on the original Xerox Alto, windows could overlap, so Quickdraw had to handle overlapping windows [0]: “Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front.”
I thought I read somewhere that Jobs specifically asked for this, (mis)remembering having seen it at PARC, but I cannot find the quote at the moment.
[0] http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story...
There are a few stories that follow this pattern... my favorite is the one about Starcraft development. While Blizzard was making nothing more than "Warcraft in space", a competing studio showed a beautiful and fluid RTS at trade shows that got everyone's attention. The Starcraft team had a hard time getting their product to the same level, and had to scrap a lot of code. It turned out that the other studio was just showing prerecorded videos at trade shows, while employees mimed the appropriate button presses to make it look interactive.
It was Dominion: Storm over Gift 3, from Ion Storm.
http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/starcraft-orcs-in-space-go-d...