Thanks to Matthew Thomas' excellent dissection of a bad confirmation dialog, I came across a link to The GUI Gallery. It's a great look back at some old UI's, as well as new. It's made me even more interested about the Lisa Office System. The Lisa Office System was far more powerful than most versions of the Mac OS that proceeded it, and has some interesting features that bear reminiscence to an OpenDoc powered Mac OS or to Mac OS X (in some ways).
For example: Documents are created by "tearing" a piece of "paper" off of a "stationery pad". That is, double-clicking the stationery icon creates a new document icon. There are also no "applications", only "tools" that must be present for you to work with the documents.
This kind of user interface eliminates the need to start applications directly and the need to "save as".
The stationery metaphor is extended to all applications on the Lisa, even LisaTerminal. The "LisaTerminal Paper" in this case represents a connection configuration file. Interestingly the Win9x HyperTerminal kind of does this but you must start the program directly to create a new connection.
Other LisaOS terminology that differs from most GUIs:
Set Aside - Minimize the window to an icon on the desktop.
Put Away - Close the window and, if necessary, save any changes.
Duplicate - Copy a file.
Housekeeping - Disk management options.
Pictorial view - icon view.
[Nathan Lineback, "Lisa Office System", viewed Feb 8 2003]
Some small things of interest are the Set Aside / Put Away actions. Looking at the animated gif of Lisa Write menus, the actual menu entries are "Save and Put Away" and "Save and Continue". "Set Aside" is interesting, and seems similar to the minimization effects on current UI's. The verbiage seems more familiar to physical desktop use, as you may set aside your calculator or the current chart you're drawing to clear up space for a moment.
The Lisa also looks like it actually could multitask. Unlike Mac OS versions 1-6, where only one application could run at a time (unless Multifinder was used), the desktop and other applications could run side by side in the Lisa. This also leads to an interesting difference between the Lisa UI and the Macintosh UI - windows on the Lisa include an icon in the corner detailing what the window is (hard drive, calculator, Lisa Write document, etc), an effect used in Windows. Mac OS 8 brought this feature back to the Mac, somewhat, and with some cool side effects (that actually showed up earlier in the NeXTStep UI) in that the icon in the title bar of a TextEdit document, or the folder in a Finder window title bar, is a live object that can be picked up and dragged.
The most interesting piece of the Lisa Office System, to me, is the use of stationery. As I've mentioned before, this was a big feature of OpenDoc. When you use Microsoft Office, AppleWorks, or many other large applications these days, they all have some sort of "templates" or starting point option, like a business letter or resumé. Stationery Pads are the same concept, except that they exist at the file system / operating environment level instead of at the application level. Stationery Pads showed up in the Mac OS in System 7 ("Blue"). Marking a file as a stationery pad means that when you open the file, it launches like any other file and shows up already filled out in the application/editor of choice. Unlike opening a normal file, the "this is a new file" flag is set, and the first time that you hit "Save", you're prompted to save it as a new file. Since OpenDoc, and the Lisa Office System (by the looks of it), didn't have the concept of "New" in its editors (since in OpenDoc there is, by default, no application to decide what "new" is), you'd have to start from a stationery pad. Instead of launching an application like Keynote and selecting "New" to start a new presentation, you'd use a stationery pad object of "Blank Presentation" (or maybe "Sales Presentation") to start one from the Finder itself. I think that while OpenDoc's stationery pads would prompt for a "Save As" dialog box upon first save off of a stationery pad, in the Lisa Office System you would select a stationery and use the menu item "Tear Off Stationery" to create a new file/object of that type. What does this mean? It means that there is no need for "Open" or "Save As" dialog boxes, a problem mentioned by Matthew Thomas in his post "When good interfaces go crufty" (interestingly, this long running cruft appears to be a result of the technical shortcomings of the original Mac OS, which could only run one application at a time). Interestingly, Stationery Pads still exist in Mac OS X and their behavior is different than in "Blue" (Mac OS 7-9) and closer to that of the Lisa Office System. If you mark an item as a Stationery Pad in Mac OS X, then when you double click to open it, the Finder makes a copy (called "Copy of whatever") and opens that file.
While we're all used to the current way of doing things, and in some cases I heavily prefer it (ie - when dealing with large behemoth applications such as Adobe GoLive, or when firing up BBEdit or OmniOutliner to do quick scratchpad type actions that I don't want to save), I wonder how different things would be if the Lisa operating system could have run on the original Macintosh's. Would everyone else that came along after the Mac OS have offered "Open / Save As" dialogs? Would there have been a "Quit" menu item? Would OpenDoc have survived? OpenDoc, especially, was right there. Maybe the parts couldn't be embedded, but the paradigm was entrenched in the Lisa. Files were the first class citizens, not applications. In fact, the Lisa didn't even call them Applications, but "Tools". Tools helped you work with files, much like OpenDoc's "Part Editors" existed to help edit parts of a document.
I wonder where, in this model, tools like NetNewsWire or web browsers would fit? Would a web browser be treated more like a Desk Accessory, like many of the Brushed Metal apps in Mac OS X seem to be? And if that's the case, is the choice of a Brushed Metal UI for Safari actually right? It definitely makes me wonder.
And nothing would make me happier than to see a sneaky rebirth of OpenDoc show up in Mac OS 10.3. I doubt it will happen. But I'm increasingly convinced that the OpenDoc / Lisa Office System way is right for many many things. And I think computers would be better if either idea had actually taken hold.
