Apple Desktop Interface vs Xerox Star Interface
アップル・デスクトップ・インターフェース / ゼロックス・スター・インターフェース
Apple Desktop Interface comes from Apple UI and Xerox Star Interface from Platform Screen Languages. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Apple Desktop Interface
This is the design language Apple named itself, in the 1987 guidelines book whose subtitle reads The Apple Desktop Interface. Working with one bit of black and white, it wrote down a house style: halftone dot patterns standing in for gray, rounded window corners, a title bar of stacked horizontal rules, and a heavy bitmap face.
Xerox Star Interface
The screen language set by the Xerox 8010 of 1981. Labelled iconographic symbols stood for folders, in and out baskets, file drawers and other office accessories, which the brochure of that year said amounted to an electronic desk top. Objects on the screen could be moved, copied and deleted with the hand held pointer that the same brochure still had to gloss as a mouse.
| Apple Desktop Interface | Xerox Star Interface | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1984–1997 | 1981–1990s |
| Family | Apple UI | Platform Screen Languages |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | Two tones only, black and white, with gray faked by a checkerboard of black dots / Window corners are rounded and the title bar carries several thin horizontal rules / A menu bar pinned to the top edge of the screen, the Apple mark sitting at its left end / Chicago, a heavy bitmap face whose letters are packed into a cell of 9 by 7 dots | Every symbol on screen carries a text label, so meaning never rests on the picture alone / The symbols stand for things found on an office desk: folders, in and out baskets, file drawers / Objects are grabbed with the pointer, and moving, copying and deleting form one family of gestures / The spreadsheet appears as a grid of rows and columns, with a menu of tools that act on the matrix |
| Best used for | Redrawing early Macintosh screens for an exhibition panel or an article on a modern display · Designing for a device that can only print or light two tones, such as e paper or a receipt printer | Laying out a business application around objects a user already handles rather than around abstract function names · Writing a team rule that every icon must carry a label instead of standing on its own |
| Type | A heavy bitmap sans, letters placed only on whole pixel positions, no anti aliasing; headings differ from body text by size rather than weight. | Put a short noun label under every symbol. The label names a thing on a desk, not a function. |
| Composition | A full width menu bar owns the top edge and everything below it is the work surface; rounded rectangular windows overlap freely and margins step in whole pixels. | Treat the screen as the surface of a desk and place objects on it. Keep commands in menus rather than embedding them in the objects. |
| Material | Black and white alone; middle values come from checkerboard or diagonal dot patterns, soft shadows and gradients are out, and every boundary is a one pixel black rule. | Work in two tones only and draw the symbols as outlines. Fill is either solid black or left white, with no intermediate greys. |
| Caution | Scaling the bitmap face by anything other than a whole number, or letting it anti alias, blurs the letterforms and erases the placed-by-hand dot density the style lives on. | Stretching the desk metaphor to cover functions that have no desk equivalent breeds symbols nobody can name or find. |