----- Original Message -----
From: "CheekyGeek"
Subject: Re: K-7 replacement?
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.
I think we are talking about the world of computers today, not what was
happening a quarter century ago.
I suspect that at this point about the only thing that seperates a Mac from
a PC from a customer's POV is that the PC will set you back a lot less money
to get a machine that will perform in a similar manner.
William Robb
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