From: CheekyGeek
On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:32 AM, Larry Colen <[email protected]> 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.
I don't consider it such a "obvious troll line". Learning to deal with a
command line wasn't that hard. It was a bigger deal regaining speed when
the GUIs took over. What I used to be able to do with just a few typed
commands now took a lot longer opening and clicking menus. Especially
with the overhead of painting the screen.
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.
But it's still more difficult to do stuff Apple didn't already think of
on an Apple than it is to do stuff Micro$oft didn't think of on a PC.
And Apple doesn't make "things that just work pretty much the way you
think they should work"; they make things that work the way Steve Jobs
think they should work, just like Micro$oft makes things that work the
way Bill Gates thinks they should work.
And yeah, Windoze looks like a Mac ... because they both stole the GUI
from the same place at Xerox.
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
