On Fri, 30 Apr 2010 10:49 -0500, "CheekyGeek" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > > 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. >
All of that may well be true. In fact I'm happy to concede that it is even though I've never used an Apple computer. What I do know is that way back when I was looking into getting a computer (I'm talking pre Windows 3 here), the only thing I could afford was one of the IBM 'clones'. Anything made by Apple was at least twice the price. If Apple's pricing had been reasonable, maybe I'd be using the latest and greatest Mac now. But it wasn't and I'm not. And, as far as I can tell, nothing much has changed. Cheers Brian ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Brian Walters Western Sydney Australia http://members.westnet.com.au/brianwal/SL/ -- -- http://www.fastmail.fm - Or how I learned to stop worrying and love email again -- 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.
