On Wednesday, 30 October 2013 at 21:18:16 UTC, Timon Gehr wrote:
On 10/30/2013 11:01 AM, Chris wrote:
"Poorly designed firmware caused unintended operation, lack of
driver
training made it fatal."
So it's the driver's fault, who couldn't possibly know what
was going on
in that car-gone-mad? To put the blame on the driver is
cynicism of the worst kind.
Unfortunately, that's a common (and dangerous) attitude I've
come across
among programmers and engineers.
There are also misguided end users who believe there cannot be
any other way (and sometimes even believe that the big players
in the industry are infallible, and hence the user is to blame
for any failure).
The user has to adapt to anything they
fail to implement or didn't think of. However, machines have
to adapt to
humans not the other way around (realizing this was part of
Apple's
success in UI design,
AFAIK Apple designs are not meant to be adapted. It seems to be
mostly marketing.
Forget about the marketing campaigns for a moment. Xerox (back in
the day) started to develop GUIs (as we know them). The
developers later went to Apple. Apple was one of the first
companies to go for user experience and try to design things in a
more intuitive way, i.e. how humans work and think, what they
expect (I know the command line crowd hates GUIs). I'd say that
Windows is at the other end of the scale. Try to find info "about
this computer" on a Mac and try to find it in (each new version)
of Windows. Don't forget that you shut Windows down where it says
"Start". Ha ha ha!
That said, Apple is going down the wrong way now too, IMO. 10.8
is just annoying in many ways. Too intrusive, too patronising,
too much like a prison.
Ubuntu is very good now too).
The distribution is not really indicative of the UI/window
manager you'll end up using, so what do you mean?
Ubuntu is quite good now UI wise. I recently had a user that
found everything almost immediately, although she had used Ubuntu
before nor does she know much about computers, nor does she like
computers. That's what I mean. Intuitive, i.e. the computer is
arranged in the way the human mind works. Things are easy to find
and use.
