I started GUIdebook in 2003, and last updated it exactly twenty years ago.

It’s an interesting time capsule itself now, incompatible with mobile reading and sporting an aged design. I have kept it up because it’s apparently used as a reference in various user interface courses, and if you haven’t seen it, it could be a fun browse.

I walked away from it by accident, distracted by a new job, but I always wanted to evolve it into something better as my storytelling skills and my interactive skills grew.

Unsung is GUIdebook’s cousin, of course, especially in pieces like Lisa’s copy (and cut, and paste), Were Touch Bar’s problems software rather than hardware?, and even little things like Anachronisms.

But the direct preview of what I dreamt GUIdebook of becoming was in my last year’s interactive piece Frame of preference. It’s a history of the first twenty years of Mac interfaces told through its settings, it has a proper narrative (I never got to it with GUIdebook), and instead of screenshots, it uses Infinite Mac’s technology to tell the stories via emulation. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out, and you might enjoy it if you haven’t seen it yet.

I would love to try a few more things like it.

But, back to GUIdebook. Keeping it alive for 20 years required multiple updates as PHP evolved, and a more recent rewrite that ditched easily-hackable PHP altogether. (Don’t ask me how I know it’s easily hackable.) None of these were particularly noticeable on the surface, but I recently added one tiny user-visible change – the screenshots are now properly pixellated:

It was fun – and slightly eerie – to update the site’s history page two decades after I touched it last.