Apple Visionary Bill Atkinson Dies at Age 74
Bill Atkinson, a pioneering figure in Apple's early history, has died at the age of 74 due to pancreatic cancer. His passing was announced by his family on Facebook, prompting tributes from across the tech world. As Apple employee number 51, Atkinson made lasting contributions that helped shape the personal computing revolution.
During his time at Apple, Atkinson worked on several groundbreaking projects. He was instrumental in the development of the Macintosh, contributing not only code but also creative ideas that defined the user experience. Moreover, he played key roles in creating the Lisa computer and QuickDraw, a graphics engine that became fundamental to Apple's graphical interface. He also developed the Magic Slate, an early touch interface that foreshadowed the iPad, and HyperCard, a software tool often seen as a conceptual predecessor to the World Wide Web.
A Legacy of Innovation and Creativity
Atkinson's impact on Apple and the broader tech world cannot be overstated. His work not only influenced future products but also shaped how people interact with computers today. HyperCard, for instance, introduced concepts like linking between cards, which anticipated the hyperlinking used on the internet. This made Atkinson not just a skilled engineer, but also a visionary who saw the potential of technology before others did.
Although he eventually left Apple, Atkinson remained deeply creative. After his time in Silicon Valley, he turned to nature photography. This new passion reflected his lifelong appreciation for beauty and precision. When he was diagnosed with cancer in 2023, he acknowledged the richness of his life, writing that he had 'already led an amazing and wonderful life.'
Tributes from the Tech Community
Following the announcement of his death, tributes poured in from prominent voices in the tech industry. Apple CEO Tim Cook praised him as 'a true visionary whose creativity, heart, and groundbreaking work on the Mac will forever inspire us.' Additionally, technology writer John Gruber said that Atkinson 'may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived.'
While his physical presence is gone, Atkinson's influence endures in every touchscreen swipe, intuitive interface, and link we click.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Arabian Post
36 minutes ago
- Arabian Post
Apple's App Excellence Crowned with Balatro, Neva and Dredge Triumphs
Apple awarded top honours across its six categories at the 2025 Apple Design Awards, celebrating innovation, aesthetics and social impact across apps and games. Standout recipients included Balatro, Neva and DREDGE, which secured wins in key categories and reflect the diversity and creativity of today's digital creators. Balatro, developed by Canadian indie studio LocalThunk, claimed the 'Delight and Fun' game category. This roguelike, poker-infused deck-builder has gained acclaim for its addictive stakes and clever mechanics, combining classic card play with strategic depth. Apple described it as a 'captivatingly innovative card game' that reaffirms the potential of indie titles. Its creator, working solo under a pseudonym, has emphasised the joy in balancing playful randomness with carefully crafted gameplay. In the Interaction category, DREDGE from New Zealand's Black Salt Games attracted praise. It merges slow-burn horror elements with maritime exploration, putting players at the helm of a fishing vessel navigating eerie islands and hidden mysteries. Apple highlighted its 'seamless interactions' across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Nadia Thorne, CEO of Black Salt Games, commended the award as a recognition of the careful adaptation process for mobile controls and atmosphere. ADVERTISEMENT Neva, released by Devolver Digital, secured the Social Impact award. This atmospheric action-adventure tells the tale of a girl and her wolf, journeying through seasonally shifting landscapes and exploring themes of environmental loss, care and connection. Apple noted its 'visually stunning and emotionally resonant' approach, framing it as a contemplative meditation on the bonds humans form with the natural world. Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, Susan Prescott, emphasised at WWDC that these awardees exemplify boundary-pushing creativity, well-crafted design, and meaningful user experiences. The event also recognised excellence across app categories. CapWords, from HappyPlan Tech in China, won Delight and Fun for its intelligent language-learning tool. It transforms everyday images into interactive word stickers, offering immersive multilingual engagement. Productivity and creativity saw innovation rewarded with Play by Rabbit 3 Times, a SwiftUI-based prototyping platform that bridges Mac and iPhone workflows. Inclusivity was honoured with Speechify, which offers extensive language-to-voice conversion for neurodiverse and low-vision users, and Art of Fauna, a wildlife-themed puzzle game combining conservation and accessibility features. Visuals and Graphics awards went to Feather: Draw in 3D by South Korea's Sketchsoft, and Infinity Nikki, a richly animated game from Singapore's Infold Games. Watch Duty, a wildfire monitoring app, earned the Social Impact app award for delivering evacuation data, fire perimeter updates and wind information during California wildfires. Its volunteer-run team continues to rely on community feedback to improve communication effectiveness. ADVERTISEMENT The awards, featuring 36 finalists across six categories, reflect Apple's criteria: technical proficiency, design craft, accessibility, user engagement and social responsibility. Notably, the 'Spatial Computing' category from 2024 was omitted, underscoring a renewed focus on cross-platform usability. Each winner demonstrates a commitment to both form and function. Balatro delivers addictive mechanics; DREDGE provides immersive controls and atmosphere; Neva offers emotional and visual storytelling; apps like Speechify and Watch Duty place real-world needs at their heart. Industry analysts say the Apple Design Awards play a significant role in spotlighting independent developers. Tech site AppleInsider noted the retention of all six core categories this year, marking a notable departure from 2024's emphasis on spatial apps. The awards can boost visibility in the App Store, offering small studios a major platform. Balatro's prior accolades — including Game Developers Choice Awards' top honours and DICE recognitions — align with its Apple accolade. DREDGE's win underscores its mobile design excellence, while Neva's recognition continues the narrative trend toward socially conscious storytelling in games. This year's awardees also highlight Apple's focus on global representation. Winners and finalists span China, South Korea, Austria, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, representing varied genres, languages and development scales. Of special note is Apple's call to developers to integrate accessibility in mainstream gameplay. Winners Speechify, Art of Fauna, and Neva incorporate VoiceOver, haptics, and adjustable modes, affirming the platform's push for inclusive tech. These awards were timed to coincide with WWDC 2025, presenting creators with high visibility and the chance to be featured by Apple. For example, apps like CapWords and Play benefit from showcases in the App Store and WWDC sessions. The unified messaging from Apple and the developers interviewed emphasises a baseline of high-quality experience. Whether crafting elegant UI, refining user engagement, or embedding purpose-driven features, the recognition from Cupertino underscores a shared standard: excellence must be felt by users.
Arabian Post
2 hours ago
- Arabian Post
Apple Unveils Unified Games Hub for iPhone, iPad and Mac
Apple has announced a standalone Games app, launching this autumn, to serve as an integrated gateway for gaming across iPhone, iPad and Mac. Displaying a curated selection of titles, social features and gameplay updates in one centralised spot, the app aims to elevate gaming engagement and streamline discovery across Apple's ecosystem. The new Games app will host five main sections: Home, Arcade, Play Together, Library and Search. Users will now see their entire App Store game library alongside Apple Arcade titles within a single interface. The Home tab surfaces timely events and update notices, while Arcade consolidates access to Apple's subscription service, which offers over 200 premium games. Customized recommendations will draw from past play habits, friends' activity, and Game Center leaderboards. Apple is emphasising social engagement in the Play Together section, which brings Game Center friends into the spotlight. Users can track friends' playtime, compare achievements and invitation codes, and start challenges directly from the app. Challenges allow users to invite friends to beat each other's high scores in supported titles, effectively converting solo gameplay into competitive shared experiences. A Game Overlay feature will also allow players to access these tools while mid‑game on iPad and Mac. ADVERTISEMENT Developer reception has been positive: designers from Puzzmo, Doghowl Games and Triband have praised the app's social and discovery features, saying it offers 'a window back into their gaming worlds' and has potential to 'deepen player engagement'. Apple frames the app as an improved mechanism for studios to showcase in‑app events, leaderboards and notifications designed to retain players. On the technical front, Apple is supporting the Games app launch with enhancements to its developer tools. At WWDC 2025, the company introduced the Metal 4 framework featuring AI‑driven frame interpolation and denoising for smoother performance on Apple Silicon, comparable to DLSS in competing platforms. It also demonstrated a Game Porting Toolkit designed to simplify the migration of Windows titles to Mac, signalling a renewed push to bring AAA content such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Hitman to Mac users. But Apple's ambitions extend beyond hardware and software improvements. While the new app is poised to replace the legacy Game Center interface, Apple has yet to confirm whether it will also extend to Apple TV or Vision Pro devices. The company's prior launch of Game Mode on macOS Sonoma and iOS suggests this package fits into a wider strategy to bolster device gaming capability. Still, some commentators have questioned the app's impact, noting that it largely repackages App Store gaming features rather than introducing wholly new tools. Apple will need to leverage its design, developer support and AI enhancements to appeal to discerning gamers, particularly when competing with dedicated platforms. Launch timing remains tethered to Apple's broader OS updates. The company plans to roll out iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS Tahoe this autumn, coinciding with pre‑installing the Games app across device updates. Activation is expected to align with the annual iPhone launch cycle, traditionally in September, positioning gaming as a core feature in their next generation of devices. Apple's renewed focus on gaming underscores its services-driven business model, with gaming representing one of the few remaining growth sectors amid declining hardware revenue. The integration of Apple Arcade, Game Center, and streamlined discovery tools reflects a strategy to deepen user engagement and capture a greater share of in-app spending. At the same time, Apple's move supports developers by offering new avenues for monetisation through in‑app events and challenges. With over half a billion iPhone users identified as gamers by Apple, the company sees a vast, under‑tapped audience that could be mobilised via improved discovery and social connectivity.
Al Etihad
14 hours ago
- Al Etihad
France's Mistral unveils its first 'reasoning' AI model
10 June 2025 23:31 PARIS (AFP)French artificial intelligence startup Mistral on Tuesday announced a so-called "reasoning" model it said was capable of working through complex problems, following in the footsteps of top US immediately on the company's platforms as well as the AI platform Hugging Face, the Magistral "is designed to think things through -- in ways familiar to us," Mistral said in a blog AI was designed for "general purpose use requiring longer thought processing and better accuracy" than its previous generations of large language models (LLMs), the company other "reasoning" models, Magistral displays a so-called "chain of thought" that purports to show how the system is approaching a problem given to it in natural means users in fields like law, finance, healthcare and government would receive "traceable reasoning that meets compliance requirements" as "every conclusion can be traced back through its logical steps", Mistral company's claim gestures towards the challenge of so-called "interpretability" -- working out how AI systems arrive at a given they are "trained" on gigantic corpuses of data rather than directly programmed by humans, much behaviour by AI systems remains impenetrable even to their also vaunted improved performance in software coding and creative writing by "reasoning" models include OpenAI's o3, some versions of Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude, or Chinese challenger DeepSeek's idea that AIs can "reason" was called into question this week by Apple -- the tech giant that has struggled to match achievements by leaders in the field. Several Apple researchers published a paper called "The Illusion of Thinking" that claimed to find "fundamental limitations in current models" which "fail to develop generalizable reasoning capabilities beyond certain complexity thresholds".
