Text 1932, 107 rader
Skriven 2006-06-07 13:45:00 av Robert E Starr JR (2378.babylon5)
Ärende: Re: Atheists: America's m
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* * * This message was from Josh Hill to rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.m * * *
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@MSGID: <pa0c82h0h0pkino1epn6er9bd2tkvi0ma0@4ax.com>
@REPLY: <yI7gg.3677$n91.1519@fe09.lga>
On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 11:38:02 +0000 (UTC), Gregory Weston
<uce@splook.com> wrote:

>In article <7h79825nnsspe8c1ka5edi22utlsc52hp1@4ax.com>,
> Josh Hill <usereplyto@gmail.com> wrote:
>

>> Then too, their icon-obsessed, one-button philosophy is very
>> frustrating to those who want both elegance and power. I hate the
>> kludginess of Windows, but I have to agree with the judgment of a
>> friend who said that whenever he used a Mac he felt like he was typing
>> with mittens on.
>
>Um. You may agree with it. I honestly don't even understand the metaphor.

There just aren't enough ways to do things in a Mac. In the PC, you
can do everything from the keyboard and the interface is feature rich.
For example, only fairly recently did the Mac acquire context menus,
and only very recently were they right-clickable. But any PC user who
had used them could tell you that they save a /lot/ of time. And there
was no scroll wheel. And even, at one time, no /delete/ key, just the
backspace. That omission alone made Macs virtually unusable for me,
back in the day. And so forth. 

On the whole, I'd say that the Mac interface tends to be consistent
and elegant but underpowered, while the PC interface is feature rich
but lacks the consistency and reliability that would make them useful.
So it's sort of a wash.

>> Combine that with Jobs's stubborn insistence on removing power and
>> expandability from his machines -- the tiny built-in monochrome
>> monitor on the original Mac, yada
>
>You might want to think back to the context in which the Mac existed 
>when it was designed and the market for whom it was intended. You seem 
>to have lost some context in the intervening 22 years.

I mentioned that because we were addressing reputations, which in this
case were for the most part formed many years ago.

>> -- and the platform's proprietary
>> elements, and I think it's no accident that it was seen as a computer
>> for high school kids and artsy technophobes.
>
>It was certainly intended to be accessible to non-technicians. What I've 
>never understood is the group of people who seem to believe that a 
>system that is not hostile to people who aren't technical is somehow 
>inherently hostile, or at least needlessly and unavoidably limiting, to 
>those who are.

I don't believe that, never have. I don't like systems that are geeky
or aren't friendly, and there's plenty of that. But I don't like
systems that are cutesy and talk down, either, or that substitute
visual orientation for ergonometrics, or that reduce the power user to
the least common denominator. And I think that, too frequently, the
Mac has done all those things. I mean, I can figure out how to use a
two-button mouse. I want to be able to see file extensions. And
there's a reason we invented the alphabet: when I see a bunch of
supposedly-friendly icons that have no text attached to them, I want
to a) scream and b) put the folks who designed the interface in an
ancient Egyptian tomb and let them decorate the walls. Icons are fine
in an ancillary capacity, for helping to distinguish
frequently-accessed items at a glance, but more often than not they're
the very antithesis of friendliness for anyone who's already taken his
fingerpainting exam.

Not that I'm opinionated or nuthin' . . .

>> >There's an active anti-Mac subculture that doesn't seem 
>> >to comprehend that both the Mac and the context in which the Mac exists 
>> >have changed continuously over the last 22 years; they're working from 
>> >deeply ingrained "knowledge" much of which isn't true now (if it ever 
>> >was) but which is too well-known to be questioned.
>> 
>> That may well be true. OS X is certainly a better OS than Windows XP:
>> I don't know of anyone who has used it who hasn't spoken highly of it
>> Certainly, everyone I know who's used OS X hasn't spoken highly of it.
>
>What I was more referencing were people who hadn't ever used it but felt 
>prepared to speak authoritatively about it anyway. People who never took 
>the time to confirm that their arguments were correct in the first 
>place, let alone checking to see if they've remained so since they were 
>first made. I'm still hearing, in 2006, that the Mac isn't a serious 
>computer because "it doesn't have real multitasking."

I agree that that's a problem, but it does seem to be a given of human
nature. I've heard the same thing from Apple users who thought that
the PC crashed all the time or was hard to use, long after it had
become more robust than the Mac and had plug and play and a very
simple GUI.

-- 
Josh

"I'm not going to play like I've been a person who's spent hours involved with
foreign policy.
I am who I am." - George W. Bush
                                                                               

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