Lisa Melton, who ran the team that created Safari, regarding her interactions with Steve Jobs:

When Steve asked you a question? You didn’t ramble and, whatever you did, you didn’t make up an answer. If you didn’t know, you just said that you didn’t know. But then you told him when you’d have an answer. Again, this was just good advice to anyone “managing up,” as they say.

This is A+ advice for dealing with anyone, period. If you don’t know, say “I don’t know.” So many people have a deep aversion to saying that. And if you can say “I don’t know, but I’ll find out in «some short amount of time here»”, say that.

Here’s the bit that’s relevant this week:

Steve didn’t like the status bar and didn’t see the need for it. “Who looks at URLs when you hover your mouse over a link?” He thought it was just too geeky.

Fortunately, Scott and I convinced Steve to keep the status bar as an option, not visible by default. But that meant we had a new problem. Where should we put the progress bar to indicate how much of the page was left to load?

Before, the progress bar lived inside the status bar. So we needed to find it a new home. We discussed all sorts of silly ideas including making it vertical along the edge of the window.

Remember, this was back in the day before the spinning gear or other smaller affordances were widely used to indicate progress. In the age of barber-pole blue Aqua, it had to be a bar.

The room got quiet. Steve and I sat side-by-side in front of the demo machine staring at Safari. Suddenly we turned to each other and said at the same time, “In the page address field!”

Smiles all around. Which I followed with, “I’ll have a working version of that for you by the end of the week.” Over-committing my engineering team, of course.

But I didn’t care. I had just invented something with the Big Guy. True, it was a trifle, but there’s no feeling like sharing even a tiny byline with Steve.

This of course, is contra John Calhoun’s offhand recollection (in a Hacker News thread last month) that Steve Lemay “also invented the early Safari URL text field that also doubled as a progress bar”. Melton is a direct source, so there’s no reason to doubt her recollection of having conceived of the idea alongside Steve Jobs. These recollections are not, of course, mutually exclusive — perhaps Lemay was a designer assigned to flesh out the idea, and Calhoun remembers him as a proponent of the idea.

Anyway, this whole essay from Melton just goes down like butter. So good.

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Steven Troughton-Smith:

If you want to pixel-peep on iOS or iPadOS, it also has the Zoom accessibility setting, and can be controlled via touch, keyboard, or trackpad. It works for display mirroring too, and has other options like a minimap and HUD (‘Zoom Controller’).

These settings are in Settings → Accessibility → Zoom. I prefer switching the Zoom Region from the default Window Zoom (which gives you large magnifier glass window to drag around the screen) to Full Screen Zoom, which is more like how zooming works on the Mac.

On iPadOS, you should go into the Keyboard Shortcuts panel (inside Accessibility → Zoom) and turn on Zoom with Scroll Wheel. This lets you zoom Mac-style, using the Control key, when you have a keyboard and trackpad/mouse connected.

(You can, of course, zoom on VisionOS too.)