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. 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 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. 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. 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 -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.