> Nah, more like iOS. Unless you think iOS is like MS-DOS or Windows? iOS? That's the Wii.
>> Second, multi-tasking -- doing two different things at once -- may be >> a bad idea. > > Yeah, for humans. The machine multitasks so that I don't have to. > Multitasking and multi-processor systems are spectacularly good. I like > getting email while editing a document. Well, if Dashboard style things are still around, then you still can. Heck, think back to applets and co-operative multitasking. One real, full app, and a bunch of little applets. Mail might become an applet, then you can get mail while doing something else. The real problem is: While humans don't do two tasks at once well, using two or more tools at once for a single task is something we're really good at. And a "Single-App" system prevents that. > Most people don't sort things with folders, most people don't know how to (or > at least don't want to) arrange multiple windows on the display to work in > more than one application. > > Most people just read their email, browse the Web (a page at a time), talk or > video conference with Skype, and perhaps play some games or watch a movie. Yea, working with files in folders is a disaster in every system I've seen, even on Linux. Explain to me why you have one feature rich icon interface that is suddenly not accessible from inside a program? Why file operations don't allow "examine" and "delete" at the same level? Why Microsoft Windows allows too many "accidental modifications" during file opens, and Apple Aqua prohibits almost everything interesting during open or save? Why we still use a hierarchical file system today instead of a RDBM-and-tag based file system? Why there is no support for hard links in either MW or AA GUI systems -- and the aliasing system in either does not permit the reverse path lookup? Why the concept of "One file in multiple locations" doesn't exist anywhere? Why neither one truly has support for "Show the relevant folder" operation for an icon in every case? Why we see this silly assumption (again, both systems) that if you are doing an operation on a graphical file, you are interested in every graphical file in the same directory (But oddly, not assumed true for any other type of file)? Why you assume that some file types are in a separate part of the file system (for example, "My Pictures") when those files may be associated with something else (most computer people with experience that I know of organize by project or subject, not by file type -- yet not one user interface is based around directories of projects)? Computer GUI systems are horribly designed -- so rather than fix the GUI design, they want to restrict what users can do so that the users don't see the design limits? That's a bad design idea. Gestures, Right clicks, versus old school (Windows 2 and 3) menu bars: With old school menu bars, you knew where everything was. You might have to search for them. You might need for things to be organized well. But you could find them. Now? Nowadays you need to right click on everything to try to find what's valid here and not there; you have to hope that you didn't miss something that the program considered an object; you have to deal with right-click blockers; you have to learn gestures that often are not intuitive, and often different in every program (even today, sometimes two fingers and drag on the mousepad will move a window, and sometimes it will zoom, and this is without official gesture support. One window per screen per app? Gaack. Seriously: At some point in the past, it was possible to say that the window you clicked in wasn't the front window -- you could have something in front of you while you were working elsewhere. You know -- back when you had manual typewriters, your eyes were on a paper, and your hands just typed where you knew the keys were, without having to look at the typewriter? When was the last time you could use a computer, and not have to double check what the computer was doing? When was the last time you could look at a document, and type without looking at what you were typing? And if you think you can do it now, why can't I say "I want to look at this document, and type into that document"? Why not have Mail (as an example) organized with a message display window, separate from the subject list window? Why do I have to sub-divide a window? And ... that's it, in a nutshell. A GUI system is all about managing windows -- I want to be able to put up a bunch of windows, and have one thing per window. Not have to manage multiple things in a window because the window manager stinks at working with groups of windows. Subdividing a window is equivalent to working with multiple non-overlapping windows in a fixed group arrangement, without letting the end-user modify the group arrangement. That's bad. Let the user specify a bunch of windows to treat as a group. Let the user arrange them as they want. Have a "Fix it!" panic button for when the arrangement is messed up. And let the "group of windows" span more than one application. Look at Spaces -- I can specify that I want the windows of an application to be here, or there, but what I want is to specify the windows that make up a functional group over multiple apps. Look at Microsoft's "Group related windows" -- that just means "Group by app, not by function/project" ** Let me have any number of desktops. Let me create a desktop at any time. Let me have one project per Desktop. Let me put windows from different apps on different desktops. Let me work with many windows, rather than forcing me to tile windows together. Give me enough windowing system functionality that I don't need or want browser tabs -- very few web pages all want the same width. Some web sites I want to use a narrower window size, because they don't have a page-enforced large margin, and I have so many sites that do that I'm forced to work with narrow views. (You know what I mean -- left and right waste columns, with the meat in the middle. I have to have a wide window or I can't see the meat; but most of the screen is wasted, and I have to get used to reading a narrow column of text. With over 75% of the web that way now, the few pages that don't force that behavior now need to be in a window with different window sizes, and suddenly the tab model is broken.) Why do we have the tab concept? 1: Gui systems that can't create/destroy windows quickly. 2: Gui systems that break down when there's 50-100 windows around. 3: Gui systems that can't group related windows 4: Gui systems that can't hide windows not relevant to what I'm doing. What's apple's apparent solution? One window per app, one window per screen. One window to rule them all, and in the darkness, bind them. > It is the old dilemma about customization; I want to be able to customize, > but it is even better if the designers did a better job than I could have and > they just provide an optimum solution ready for me to use. Yea, give me a good default setup arrangement of windows, give me a "Panic!" button to get back, and then let me try to customize it from there. Let me remember several new customizations, based on what I'm trying to do at the moment. Launchpad: What's this? (Seriously, I haven't heard of it before this thread) === My big idea: As long as the people who develop the Macintosh operating system, and the Macintosh documentation, still use that system for their development work, then we'll probably be fine. Didn't K&R show that an OS that can compile itself and handle text processing was good enough for everything? > The iOS model is PERFECT for people like that. No folders, but their content > is organized. Where are your iWork files? In iWork. Where are you books? In > iBooks (or based on sales hints from publishers, probably in the Kindle app, > but I digress). Where are your PDFs? In GoodReader. ICK! So if I'm doing a review on a house, I'll have pictures, an inspector's report, a database or spreadsheet, etc., and they'll all be in separate locations? Or in general, how will I do a page layout application that takes a bunch of things from different apps, and tries to fit them together into a page design? That sounds so much like a 1980-1986 organization, where you saved documents from application X in application X's folder, and no other application ever touched those files. ICK. > Spotlight totally enables anyone to skip folder organization. Spotlight STINKS. Sorry, it does. "find" on the command line has more power, and if it could/would use the indexes, I'd be happy. Heck, spotlight would be better if I *** could search inside of bundle directories with it ***, but I can't, and that makes it worthless. It would be better if I could toss it at a subset of the files on my system, but I can't -- even using a finder window (smart folder, or whatever Apple calls it), I generally have a choice of the whole computer, or what Finder thinks is where I want to look, with no way to correct where to actually look. And Spotlight is only good if I know what I'm looking for. I have to know something inside the file. Searching by directory / project name / file name lets me search based on meta information -- would be nice if I could tag files (thank Google for that concept.) > They aren't removing any of those features from 10.7. They are just allowing > for apps to eschew that. No, no, no, no, NOOO. Lets go back and learn from the unix world for a moment. Remember how X windows was supposed to provide all the best features of a windowing system by not forcing any single design on you? You could organize things however you wanted. Except that what you really wanted turned out to be to let the end user customize things for the end user. Instead, every program used a different set of graphical widgets, and no two programs worked alike. The end user could not make a consistent work environment because everything was different. ** I don't want the programmer to decide "I'll use Cocoa here", or "I'll use iOS here". ** I want to have all my programs use my system. Not what the programmer was comfortable with. I hate the fact that Java programs do not behave like native apps on any system. Even with Apple's customizations, they still don't behave like native apps. Even with the default swing behavior looking so much like the Microsoft windows behavior, on a Microsoft Windows system the java apps are different than a normal MW program. Heck, even Microsoft's own programs behave differently than the MS standard. Give me one consistent look and feel. Make sure that 98% of all apps use it. Microsoft windows 3, back when the only program with a different gui was a music player that fit inside the title bar of the active window? Good gui days. Having some programs use a Cocoa interface with one color calibration scheme, others using a carbon interface with a different color scheme (yes, the screen colors change when I change apps), and others using an open-GL based with a third color scheme? Some programs using the screen menu bar, others using window bars, some that can have keyboard shortcuts assigned, others that cannot? Some programs that disable apple-tab, or F9/F8? Ctrl-f4 cycling windows across apps in some apps, and being absorbed by others? No good gui-system manner of handling a function across multiple apps because switching apps forces all of the windows of that app up front? No way to easily copy stuff from one window to another? Some apps where selected text moves when you try to change the selection? The whole "Lets overload a single button with everything", or even now "Lets overload two buttons with everything"? Some apps changing the way the second button works in different apps? The idea that "This is main, this is context" has to be set once for every input device in the system (so that your mouse on the left of the keyboard, and your mousepad that you use your right hand for, both have either left physical, or right physical, but you can't have the right physical on the mouse, and the left physical on the keypad)? And now Apple wants to add yet another example of different apps behaving differently based on what different programmers thought was better for the end user? Heck, I didn't even mention different web sites forcing different text sizes (and no, users cannot fix that with end-user CSS -- I've tried, believe me.) GAAAHH. And people complain that computers get harder to use as time goes on. Guess why? -- Political and economic blog of a strict constitutionalist http://StrictConstitution.BlogSpot.com _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
