History

History

This application started its life as Mouse Desk by Version Soft, a French company. The authors are Luc Barthelet, Stéphane Cavril, Bernard Gallet, Henri Lamiraux, and Richard Danais with contributions by Alexis Gerard, Jim Gerber, Pat Pahl, and Joel Bernard. International Solutions, Inc (ISI) was founded by Mark Kvamme to market the Version Soft products worldwide.

Mouse Desk Version 1.5 added Desk "Accessories" (Calculator, Date, and Puzzle) and Mouse Desk 1.6 added the Selector program for easier use of mass storage devices. 

Desiring a mouse-based solution for the Apple II line, Apple Computer licensed the software and released Mouse Desk 2.0. It was also rebranded as Apple II DeskTop and released as the initial GUI interface on the Apple IIgs System Software disks, before the native 16-bit GS/OS replaced it in later versions. Some members of the Version Soft team also moved to work at Apple.

The application was developed using the MouseGraphics ToolKit by Apple, which provided the graphics primitives for drawing shapes and text to the complex double hi-res graphics screen, and the windowing primitives such as events, cursors, menus, windows, scrollbars and mouse support. The library and early versions of Mouse Desk initially adhered to the Lisa interface guidelines before evolving to match the look and feel of the early Macintosh.

1985

1986

2003

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

Thanks to Antoine Vignau, Jay Edwards, Bill Cleary and John Brooks for history details.

Releases

Modern Versions

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome - use the Issue Tracker.

Vintage Versions