[JKCalhoun]

No doubt. I wonder how long it would have taken though.

As a Macintosh fan since 1985 (when I first got my hands on one) I am always curious at the types of apps that began first on the Macintosh. That PowerPoint began on the Mac was not something that I previously knew about but when I saw the Mac screenshot in the article it all became clear to me somehow.

People of course take issue with this, but I feel the early Mac interface and Mac-native apps encouraged a kind of creative way of thinking and so brought about even more creative apps to the platform.

As a contrapositive (?): I dislike the user interface for Adobe Reader (Acrobat) on the Mac, very un-Mac-like. I was told by someone on the team that this was deliberate — trying to fit in with Microsoft's stable of "office apps".

Maybe that's more of a discussion of whether an app should conform to the UI of a platform or the UI of a popular "suite".

[OnlyMortal]

What does Reader give you that Preview doesn’t?

I think Excel and Word were originally Mac products.

[jasomill]

Word for DOS (and Xenix!) predates Mac Word, and even the Macintosh itself, but Word for Mac predates Word for Windows by several years.

The DOS predecessor to Excel was Multiplan, which again predates the Mac, but Excel 1.0 was indeed a Mac-only product; Excel 2.0 was the first cross-platform version.

Another interesting example is Halo, which was originally planned as a Mac exclusive and introduced as such by none other than Steve Jobs during a Macworld keynote. Then Microsoft acquired Bungie while building up a stable of exclusive launch titles for the original Xbox, and it didn't see a Mac release until after the Windows version shipped a couple years later.

[goosedragons]

Halo was never going to be Mac exclusive. It was going to be Mac/Windows like Bungie's other recent stuff at the time like Myth II. It was introduced at Macworld but it was always intended to have a Windows version.

[JKCalhoun]

Kid Pix, Sim City, Myst and Photoshop also come to mind.

Was there anything like the After Dark screensaver on Windows before it exploded on the Mac scene?

[OnlyMortal]

I remember the Halo demo in the keynote.

I’ve also had a product I worked on in a keynote by Jobs. A nervous time.

[JKCalhoun]

No, I totally prefer Preview. (I worked on Preview for many years though.)

Besides the odd PDF that CoreGraphics/PDFKit can't handle, I like that Reader gives me "booklet printing" in page setup so that I can print 2-up with the correct page ordering to get a (5 ½ x 8 ½, U.S.) folded book in the end.

I like nothing else about Reader.

[OnlyMortal]

Ah ok. Some basic pagination features then.

You might take a look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RpNFa6_OiY

[JonathonW]

For those who don't want to click through for the video, macOS has booklet printing system-wide (in anything that uses the standard Print dialog); it's one of the options for two-sided printing in the Layout section of the print dialog.

[JKCalhoun]

Holy hell, when did they add the Booklet option to Page Setup?

EDIT: Wait, I don't see that in Preview, MacOS Monterey. I wonder if it is a feature of the printer driver (tried both my Brother and HP, no go).

[OnlyMortal]

I’d be surprised if it was a printer only thing. The 2up would be a software thing typically.

I used to work on Agfa’s RIP back in the day.

[mgsouth]

I recall it being printer-specific also. Dell laser would do it, Brother (?) wouldn't. There was even an app (Booklet Maker?) for n-up challenged printers.

I imagine it's a printer-implemented feature, like duplex, with a very high-level option flag. A Postscript printer with a full-page RIP buffer could probably do it pretty easily if it wasn't extremely resource constrained. A RIP that did banding internally, re-compositing the PS source several times (are there [still] such things?) would have a hard time. A bitmapped printer (the cheap all-in-ones) would need to hold the entire page in memory on the Mac. Back in the day (way, way back), at least, drivers would process in bands, and the apps were required to re-draw the relevant parts of the page for each band. There wasn't any provision in the API to work on multiple pages at once. I don't know if application-level banding is still a thing, but could see echoes of incompatibility remaining.

Edit: n-up implemented in the OS can be tricky for Postscript printers. It requires nesting pages inside pages. Ill-mannered, but legal, Postscript can cause issues. It might be better with newer versions of PS, but the OS would still need to support older printers with old versions.