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Users Hack Aqua to Make It More Usable
edibleplastic writes: "Wired is running an article about how many beta testers of Aqua are hacking the software in order to return it somewhat to its previous appearance. From the article: '"The most distressing part is feeling like a complete novice again." McIntyre said. "I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation."' Among the hacks are a desktop trash bin and the OpenStrip, an Open Source version of the Control Strip."
They were generally under typical use... Your point about GUIs being designed for the lowest common denominator is valid, but what about those who aren't the lowest common denomninator? Should we have to suffer with an interface that just doesn't work in a way we're comfortable with? Having the defaults target "the typical person" is fine, but if you don't provide options for more advanced users, you'll just wind up frustrating people.
-RickHunter
I've been using and programming Macs for ten years, and now I'm sitting in front of it going 'What? Huh? How do I launch an application? Where did my icons go?' Talk about disorientation.
/Applications, which is accessible from the Go menu, or by hitting Command-4.
This is silly. You launch applications by double-clicking then. They're all stored in
- scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
This is nothing. Wait until people are rewriting the hardware abstraction bits of the Mach microkernel to add support for non-standard hardware and then creating unauthorized ports. You can do that, you know-- i've talked to people who have recompiled their darwin kernels and installed them under os x and had it work perfectly. So once people start using this to make os x work on non-apple or non-supported hardware... ooh, that should be interesting to watch.
Which isn't to say apple doesn't secretly want that. Apple has a pretty firm history of denouncing such activity, then turning the blind eye of "unsupported" to a hell of a lot of things you'd think they'd be reacting against. Or writing in things to make such activity easier and then refusing to document them.
No way of knowing what would happen, of course. Apple Computer is the single most unpredictable force on earth.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I've been using os x pb for a while now as my primary OS. I've also been a mac user since before they were shipping to customers, and a linux user since kernel 2.0. What I have to say about reaction to the gui is it depends on what kind of user you are. I won't go back to the old GUI...even though I love it so....I get things done so much faster, smoother, and I find that i actually enjoy computing a whole lot more with aqua...i call it the "whistle while you work" factor. The thing is that it takes a few weeks to hit your stride with the interface, and a lot of people are willing to deride and hack at it before they get a rtrue feeling for what it does for them.
/etc does nothing? Neat ssh and sshd are installed alraedy"
../ what happens if I nmap this box?"
There are three types of os X PB user.
first week of usage:
Unix guy: "Hey, the filesystem looks all funky, how come editing half the stuff in
Mac - Linux guy: "Where's the chooser? Where am I? screw it...cd
Mac guy: "Where's my damned tabbed folder...where's the chooser?"
Week 3:
Unix guy: "Cool...NetInfo does all the etc stuff...not to self, do not give anyone UID 500"
Mac - Linux guy "Sweet...got X-windows apps running in aqua, screw classic environment to run pshop...I've got gimp. Macos 9 gui is butt ugly compared to aqua"
Mac guy: "Ok...I can put an alias on the desktop, that'll be kinda like tabbed folders. I can get to the fileserver through the go menu. Internet Explorer is a piece of crap that doesn't know how to save files...classic is slow"
Week 5:
Unix guy "holy crap...if I type >console at login, I get a console....sweet"
mac - linux guy "cool, I can customize the desktop and GUI to my liking at the prompt....this is WAY better than ResEdit...I can get all the things I mis....wait, I don't miss the finder at all"
mac guy "I think I can work with this"
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Damn straight. The most bone-chilling comment on Aqua that I've read so far came from Bruce Tognazzini, usability guru and founder of the Apple Human Interface Group -- the main guy responsible for the stuff you love/hate about the Mac GUI. His quote:
Tog was probably gone by the time OS 8 added tabbed windows, but I definitely would have a bad time using a Mac without them. And FinderPop.
Just like when Windows 95 users ran progman.exe to get their old folders and icons back, and those who run X just to have multiple X terms... some eventually change, and others just stay for whatever reasons: ease of use, no desire to learn new ways, or just to get things done without having to worry about changing the way you work.
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What is news, is the fact that Apple has provided simple commands to change almost every aspect of how your desktop looks. Want a semi-transparent terminal? How about the trash on the desktop? Maybe you want that useless Apple in the middle of the Menu bar to actually do something, I'm sure you can do it. What's also cool is that "$man netinfo" pulls up a nice manual (read book) on the database for system settings, or that "$man perl" pulls up a damn BOOK on how to code Perl. OS X has the first functional man pages I've seen in my life (that is, they aren't written in geek speak for coders).
Burn Hollywood Burn
Not entirely true. Do Macs not have superior color calibration capabilities, and thus is the preferred platform for graphics designers? Furthermore, some of use Macs because the PHB uses them (lots of PHBs in academia use Macs).
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Santa Claus: "Ho ho ho!"
NO CARRIER
I'm glad they rectified the problem. I just don't feel like an elite, hard core, down-to-the-metal hacker unless I have on my computer desktop a group of pixels in the shape of a garbage can.
Cheers,
Now that I think of it, this reminds me of the mess MS made with their stupid "one click to launch" and active desktop moves. The number one request they had was to turn them off by default, since the majority of users hated them.
put the following in /etc/hosts (most unices) or c:\windows\hosts.txt (Win9x)
127.0.0.1 goatse.cx
127.0.0.1 slashmirror.tripod.com
127.0.0.1 slashtroll.org
Never again will you see anything from those servers.
0 1 - just my two bits
Kind of shows that you've never actually touched a Mac... The mac's been customizable forever... Apple's even included hooks, a la, the appearance manager, to make it easier for developers to do. But programs like Kaleidescope, which gave Mac's the ability to change their Windows looks and behaviors to match that of NextStep, Win3.1, Win95, BeOS, Motif, et al, have existed for a while. Programs like GoMac let you put a start button on your desktop, just like in Windows. You could even (i forgot the name of the extension) have it display it's start up sequence DOS stile, if you wanted...
Running all 3 of those would completely piss off the network admins at one of my last jobs... They'ed make it a point to stop by my desk once a week just to see "what Lucas had done to his computer this week".
All that's happening now is apples releasing a new OS which lacks some features which users really enjoyed. So, said users are readding those features like they always have. Darwin isn't making this possible. Open source isn't making this possible. It's always been possible. And it's always been done.
Yeah. It scares them so much that these customization features magically appeared in their software without being written.
Apple has usually been pretty indifferent about UI customization programs like Kaleidoscope. Apple keeps the UI consistent for newbies, but quietly writes in hooks for more advanced users to play with the system. Why do you think they released ResEdit as freeware years and years ago? They don't advertise what you can do, but it's all there. Apple seems to quietly approve of Mac users who like to tweak their system.
It's the blindness of people who are reliant on text files and CLIs to configure their system that leads to the Mac having a reputation of being uncustomizeable. Read any old Mac publication back-issues for a span of 3-4 months if you want to find an article on customizing your system. It was a pretty common thing.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Many user interface studies have shown that it is significantly faster to have the menu on the top than on the top of Windows. Why? The menu height is infinite so there is much less need for fine motor control - you just jam the mouse to the top of the screen. The reason people don't think it is faster is that when accessing a menu on the top of a Window, users are using that fine motor control and lose track of the time it is taking. In other words, you may perceive it to be faster, but if you use a stop watch, it is actually slower. The orignal Macintosh user-interface designers studied this very carefully when they made the decision to put it on top.
See this article on AskTog (go to question #5)
A lot of the more popular interface hacks are simply people turning on functionality that's built into the OS but which they haven't written an interface for yet by default. For example, you turn on mounting disks directly on the desktop just by flipping a bit in a property list. Likewise, the terminal app has built in support for translucency that you can turn on just by adding a property to your prefs file. People are discovering more of these goodies every day.
Contrary to all the people wailing about how lost they feel, I'm excited to be spelunking in new territory, finding and being turned on to new details and fun shit every day. There's a lively network of young sites (macosx.com, osxtalk.com, macosxhints.com, etc) where people can swap bits of new knowledge. This is the fun part of an OS's evolution, before people's ingrained habits and the backwards compatabilty albatross start to become a drag. I know I'm not missing the fricking Apple menu.
-d.w.
Watching the mac community i have seen it simply split in half between those who want Aqua and those who don't. Those who have discovered aqua works for them are happy and have the luxury of getting to simply label anyone who doesn't agree with them as closed-minded and reactionary; those who don't are simply having to face the reality that for the next God knows how long they will hve to either live with this or screw up their system with half-assed, patchwork third-party hacks. Those in the second group are becoming desperate, and are probably closing themselves to some of the [very few, in my opinion] interface changes in os x that needed to be done. Apple, meanwhile, is (i'm afraid) going to wind up so inundated with DUDE WHY DID YOU GET RID OF TEH AAPPOLE mENU!!! you SUCK!!! That they will probably be somewhat closed off to any real, constructive critisism.
From my end, this is not about resisting change. It's about customizablity, and apple's dogged resistance to allowing it. The mac os, since version 8.5, has had the most advanced theming system ever designed for anything; apple refuses to release the specs on how to design for it. Themes exist based on reverse-engineered specs, and most of them are quirky and/or slow. Apple seems to have some kind of seige mentality.
Aqua is everything some people need. It doesn't fit everyone's needs. It was designed to be as simple as possible, to be straightforward for imac users and not overwhelm people. The problems from go from practical -- that os x, rather than doing things in a different way, simply removes huge blocks of functionality (say, an easy heirarchal interface to common things, or an easy way to knock windows out of the way such as windowshade as opposed to a minimize that turns the window into an postage-stamp white blur eating up the single most precious piece of screen real estate you have) without providing new ways to do it -- to personal -- in my opinion, maximize/minimize and excessively paned interfaces are hideous, clumsy concepts, and this is simply the way i feel and the way i've always felt -- to the simple fact that aqua, with its glaring white lack of contrast between different screen areas, gives me and many other people literal splitting headaches with prolonged use. (the headaches have stopped now that i've installed a far uglier but at least darker theme.) Obviously not everyone will feel these way. Some people will find the way the dock lets them do the practical things efficient, some people have different personal preferences, some people won't have the headache problem.. and i am happy that these people get to use mac os x and are satistfied with it. But apple needs to recognize that people's opinions will differ, and build in the greatest amount of customizability they can...
Or maybe they're forcing everyone to use the aqua interface as a test. Maybe they're preparing at the same time a completely old-school os 9 interface you'll be able to switch between at will with an aqua interface. There is already signs of this; there is a quick, simple command (defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSInterfaceStyle nextstep) that will let you completely convert all cocoa apps to an old-school completely nextstep interface, both in appearance and behavior. (Minimizing even works the old, cool, freeform nextstep-dock way.) Maybe apple is forcing us to use the new interface because they want us to all give it as much of a chance as we can so we can overcome our initial misgivings and give real, informed feedback on it instead of just switching into an OS 9-style shell without giving it a chance, and once the real os x is released they'll suddenly give us all these options that were hidden before. But i don't feel terribly optimistic.
Quick note to Prophet of Doom and Ex Machina: Yer idiots. Both of you. OK, maybe not idiots. But you are at the least uninformed. OS 9 was customizable. There were more wierd interface hacks for every Mac OS i've used since 7 than you can imagine, interface customizations that ran deeper than anything i've seen as part of windows. Maybe the proverbial sheeplike mac user who will accept whatever they put in front of them unquestioningly exists, but i don't know where they are. Most mac users either use it unquestioningly because they *like* it that way-- and if they don't, they switch to windows or download an extention or something. meanwhile: OS X will The "customizable" things here have nothing to do with the bsd code inside. The part we are talking about customizing here is the interface, which is not part of the open source core any more than GNOME is part of the linux kernel. Yes, it is possible now for us to compile our own kernels, which is wonderful. But in the end it isn't the least bit relevant to aqua. In the end it will be more possible to make os x "hackable" than it was for OS 9, but this has nothing to do with anything apple will do and allow and everything to do with simple subtleties of the way Objective C and the apis work, everything to do with nib files and messaging.. basically not becuase apple makes it easier to customize in os x, but because os x makes it easier to go around apple.
In the meantime if i was happy with a good, modern OS with a nice convenient bash shell and a clumsy interface i would have switched to debian a year ago. But i'm staying with os x because i think i can meld it to what i want, and because i believe below aqua it is the best OS ever created...
OK, I submit now for your flames. I suggest you ignore the question of whether i am making any kind of general point, take some one tiny aspect of what i've said which is flawed, blow it up real big and use it as an excuse to dismiss everything else i or any other mac user has ever said and conclude with a personal attack.
-mr. cranky
i hate slashdot
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
From reading I've been doing, not *everyone* thinks that the Apple Menu was a big loss. Most people who don't - cite that it quickly becomes a huge disorganized mess.
Well - this illustrates two sets of people, in my mind. One set appreciates, and benefits from the Apple Menu - and you hit the nail on the head, it's for relieving the pain of finding and launching applications. The deal is, it isn't going to work unless the user has the ultimate power to configure it. This is where Windows' Start menu fails. There's too much crap in Start menu that you can't configure, and when you do try to configure it, it's kind of a pain in the ass. Apple Menu is very simple, because it's a Finder folder/directory. You click on a folder, instead of drilling into it's contents menu, and that folder pops up, and you can instantly change the aliases within to whatever you like, through the familliar interface of the Finder's file-management. Windows' Start Menu works roughly the same way, but they reserve the top level for, basically advertisements. (AIM launcher, Netscape SmartUpdate, New Office Document - why the hell can't I put my own things there?) Then the lower levels, are not easily accessible, unless you open Expolorer, separately, and drill down through obscure hierarchies to where your profile's menu folder is. And you cannot control sorting (as you CAN in Apple Menu). Windows fails - because it's not configurable to the degree the power user expects it to be. Apple Menu SUCCEEDS because it is very configurable (plus BeHierarchic kicks ass too). The Dock fails miserably, because it is not configurable, or hierarchical. Damn dock.
The other type of user, is "less of a power user" - they don't see that going through the trouble of keeping Apple Menu organized themselves is worth it for simply having a quick convenient popup tray for launching apps. They use "tabbed folders". Also a pretty nice feature, but I never saw any use for it myself. But this is a significant subset of the users out there.
Personally, I think tabbed folders requires too many clicks for the access you get to your apps. It's purely the mechanical difference between the tabbed folders and the menu. However, tabbed folders are probably much easier to keep organized.
The Launcher fails, because it is not as configurable, and is not hierarchical, and uses too much screen real-estate. Apple learned this, I know they did, because the Launcher was installed by default back in the System 7.x timeframe, and then they decided to make it optional later. Someone made that decision based on the information that people thought it sucked.
Now Apple makes the Launcher mistake again, with OS X's Dock, only they make it so that there's no alternative (you can't simply deactivate the dock).
People who LIKE the dock, are probably the majority of users, who use one or two apps at a time, and don't have trouble distinguishing between the big-blue-"E" icon, and the control panel icon, and the mail icon. But add any reasonable amount of RAM to a system, and your user is going to have the capability of launching 5, 6, 7, or more apps simultaneously, and past that point, the Dock does become totally useless. You're entering power-user territory here, and that's why the majority of testers haven't complained, because A). most people aren't power-users, and B), there really aren't enough apps available for OS X yet that get people into situations where they need to run 10-15 apps simultaneously. But I'll tell you one thing. With OS X's stability, it now makes it POSSIBLE to run that many apps. People will be doing it. And with OS X's Unix roots, and the Unix philosophy being - many small discreet apps, each great at one little task, people will be needing a much better method of managing application launching and document windows. The Dock ain't it.
I agree with you about the NeXT dock. That would be a much better solution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.