inessential by Brent Simmons

Really old weblog editor screenshot

I ran across a really old screenshot of the prototype of the weblog editor that went into NetNewsWire 1.0 and later became MarsEdit.

I like software archaeology—it’s interesting to see how far things have come. It looks like I was still calling my app NetNewsWire Pro—I hadn’t yet decided to just call it NetNewsWire. WebKit didn’t exist yet (there was a basic HTML renderer before WebKit).

This is probably on OS X 10.2, autumn of 2002. In those days folks thought drawers were pretty cool.

I have no idea why I was separating paragraphs with two brs. There was probably a technical reason for it, but it completely escapes me.

One thing that stands out about the older OS X releases is the boldness of the stripes. Wow. But another big deal, that didn’t get nearly the attention it deserved, was the improvement in text rendering that came in with 10.3. Look how blurry that text was.

Update a couple minutes later: the post I was writing in the screenshot was actually posted.