On 28 Jun 2009 at 9:30, dhbailey wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > [snip]> I don't know. While one could say that Apple had an > agenda, MS came > > late to that ballgame. > > > > Why would Apple and Microsoft have an incentive to misrepresent the > > research? What good would it do them to design their products to be > > less useful than they could be? > > To sell mice.
*snort* Yes, that's it -- Microsoft's mice are such high-profit items that they want to sell them. BTW, MS's mice are some of the best in the business. Certainly MS has an interest in promoting a high-quality mousing experience as a way of making their GUI easy to use, but I've always thought of MS's mice as more a matter of demonstrating to the other manufacturers how to make a good device, rather than as a profit center. But, please, provide us with sales figures and demonstrate to us exactly how important the sales of MS mice are such a crucial part of MS's cash flow that they'd purposefully design their OS's and all their software around a UI that is inferior, just so they can make money selling hardware that costs less per unit than the OS itself. > The "less useful" concept isn't an accurate one in my > opinion -- I think that both Apple and Microsoft design > their software more and more for the lowest common > denominator of user, not the power user. Look at the menus > that appear in Word -- it really pisses me off to have to > click on "more" to see all that should have shown up on a > menu in the first place, because most of the time what I > want to do is hidden in the "more" category. Yes, I could > edit the menus (all software should have user editable > menus!) but if they weren't trying to hide the entries which > are more confusing to the casual user or to the person who > only types business letters, I wouldn't have to. Microsoft has acknowledged that adaptive menus were a huge mistake. Indeed, dynamic menus completely contradict the whole purpose of a menu, which is to present a MENU of all the available choices. If you hide some of them, it defeats the purpose of a menu. Certainly, Windows and all the MS apps have always allowed the user to turn off adaptive menus (and I certainly do at all opportunities), but they decision to implement themm was a mistake, an effort to reduce the complexity of menuing systems that had become too complicated for users to comprehend. The ribbon interface was MS's effort to address the problem definitively. Whether or not you believe MS made the right decision depends, I think, on how you use MS's applications. I'm agnostic, myself, but I haven't used the ribbon interface much at all. I admire the forward thinking reflected in attempting to redesign a major UI component to address the problems that have developed in the old system. I don't know if it is ultimately a plus or not. The rest of your absolutely ridiculous post, I'll leave unaddressed, except to say that: Mice don't cause cancer. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
