On 4/30/2010 8:49 AM, CheekyGeek wrote:
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Larry Colen<l...@red4est.com> wrote:
Apple is very good at making it easy to do the things that they think you
should do. It can be very challenging however if you think differently.
While this is a fairly obvious troll line, I must respectfully disagree.
Anyone who lived through (and with) the popularization of computers
among the masses must remember what it was like to learn DOS and to be
fumbling through a manual to learn the cryptic command that one must
type (without syntax errors) to accomplish ANYTHING before the
Macintosh. In contrast, upon seeing the first Macintosh running in an
Office supply store without knowing anything at all about it, one
could walk up... grab the single button mouse (which I had never seen
before) and it was immediately OBVIOUS what one would do with it.
Click, select, drag. One could easily learn to use both applications
MacWrite and MacPaint without ever cracking a book. It was a paradigm
changer: a computer which worked virtually as you thought it should.
This is indeed where we differ. At least the modern macs have the
option of opening up a console and getting to the intuitive bash prompt
rather than trying to figure out some arcane heiroglyphics to get
anything done.
There are a lot of things that I like about Macs, and have been using my
Mac more than my linux desktop at home lately (primarily because I've
been spending most of my time working on a computer in lightroom) but
I'm constantly going up against that weird, arcane, counterintuitive
user interface.
Apple's Macintosh Interface Guidelines brought a certain sanity to the
user. You didn't need to learn a different location for the menu
command to open a file, or quit a program, or print. Or to close a
Exactly. The reason that it works is that you aren't supposed to think
differently, you have to do it the same. In this case, it is a good thing.
window, etc. This made learning a new program so much easier as there
were commonalities to the basic functions, for those programs that
stuck to the Guidelines. By any objective standard Apple has made it's
reputation on the opposite of what Larry says they have done: Making
things that just work pretty much the way you think they should work.
My first attempt to use a mac was back in '84 or '85. At that time, on
any given day I might use four or five different keyboards: VT100,
Televideo, TRS80, TRS80-model 100, etc. and Likewise several different
operating systems: TRS80, CP/M, whatever was on the PDP-8, MSDOS. Every
single keyboard had the backspace key in a different place. However, on
every single computer, if I needed to backspace Ctrl-H worked. Then I
tried to use a Mac.
The fact that others have followed along and attempted to do some of
the same things (i.e. Windows) and that such things are taken more for
granted today, can still be seen in their more recent products such as
the iPod.
I will grant that the guys at Xerox PARC came up with some good ideas,
that were subsequently adopted by others.
But the sheer arcaneness of the Mac OS, and the inability to combine
simple steps to do something that the original designers didn't think
of, would not be a problem if there was something resembling usable
documentation. There are not any reaches of hell deep and dark enough
for whoever wrote the Macintosh help pages.
Mind you, it's still a lot better than the Windows XP that I use at my
new job, but that's kind of like debating which kind of cancer it's best
to die from.
Darren Addy
Kearney, NE
"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."
~ Dorothea Lange
"98% of all cameras and lenses are sharper than 99% of all photographers."
~ Anonymous
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