OS X 10.1 Coming Today (Sorta)

usa35.com writes "News.com has a story detailing the release of Apple's 10.1 update. They say "unveiled" today, probably meaning actually disseminated to us general public folks sometime in the coming days." This is of course the release that regular users can actually use. Supposedly this is a free upgrade. Speed improvements, UI fixes, DVD stuffs. I can't wait to test it out a little. And those new iBooks are pretty reasonably priced (I figure that they can sell them cheap by cutting corners like most of the mouse buttons ;)

Comments

Get an update (maybe)

[update()]

Rumor has it that Apple Stores have been burning free update CD's for customers who bring in a blank CD-ROM. Sounds ridiculous, but As The Apple Turns claims they're continuing to get reports of it happening, and someone wrote to them claiming CompUSA will do something similar. (If it's off the front page when you read it, go to Monday's stories, or search for id#3317.)

Sounds crazy, but it's Apple so nothing is ever out of the question.

Taco: mac users ain't as reliant on the 2nd button

[Ukab the Great]

1. Q: Why did apple ever go with one mouse-button?
   A: The one mouse button was thought up by a guy named Jeff Raskin who is largely responsible for starting the Macintosh project at Apple. He thought that mouses with more than one mouse button would be confusing for new users. This might seem like an oversight, but when you consider how uncomplex graphical interfaces were back than and the fact that virtually no computers in mass production had mice as an essential navigational tool, it really isn't.
   
   
2. Q: How can you mac users live without the right-click contextual menu?
   A: Because we can use the regular pull down menus to bring up a menu. If you take a look at *NIX & Windows UI's, you often see that not all menu items for the program are in the pull-down menus. Often, there are some commands that you can only access through right-clicking (i.e. the contextual menu). When this is the case, you're going to need a 2nd mouse button. Contrast this with the mac paradigm, where is it a cardinal sin to have commands that are not listed in the pull-down menus.
   
   
3. Q: Won't going up to a pull-down menu take you longer to do than right-clicking?
   A: No and yes. Unlike other platforms, macs have the pull-down menubar at the top of the screen instead of on each window, like you usually find on Windows or GNOME or KDE (yes, KDE does have a mac menubar mode, but not by default). A menubar at the top border of the screen has been proven in usability labs to be far faster to access than menubar stuck on a window, because the user can ram the mouse pointer into the top of the screen to click on the inital menu item and they can't overshoot. This illustrates a principle of Fitt's Law, which states that things on the borders are faster to access than things that aren't because they are infinitely large . To learn more about Fitt's law, go here . This being said, contextual menu (i.e. right-clicking) is faster IF you can do it anywhere to bring up the same menu anywhere on the screen, because the mouse pointer can be anywhere and the menu will appear right under it. Unfortunately, bringing up a contextual menu in windows/GNOME/KDE almost always requires that you first land the mouse on a tiny visual target. If you have to click on a tiny 15x10 pixel icon in an e-mail program to bring up a contextual menu for it, any speed advantage of right clicking is negated.
   
   
4. Q: I hear some mac users say that they don't need a 2nd mouse button because they've go all those keyboard combinations. I don't understand.
   A: The reason that mac users use those keyboard strokes is because Apple was smart enough to have the keyboard complement the mouse instead of replacing it. Just like right-cliking is supposed to do on windows. Notice that the command key most often used on macs for the keyboard combinations is located in a spot that is in the center of the keyboard, so a user doesn't have to stretch their fingers 3 miles to hit an out of the way key. Also notice that keyboard strokes using the command key make use of the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand: the index finger and the thumb. The result is that keyboard shortcuts on a mac are easy to do, and they can be done easily with one hand. Why don't Windows users use keyboard shortcuts as often as mac users? Because microsoft was stupid and tried to have the keyboard replace the mouse instead of complmenting it. They added those underline thingies on all the menus (technically, they're called mnemonics), which are far less efficient because you have to hit two sets of keys "Alt+firstletter Alt+secondletter" to use them. This added so much visual clutter and so jammed the users mental keyboard-menu associations that most Windows users also filtered out the keyboard shortcuts (i.e. Ctrl+letter). There is even less incentive to use keyboard shortcuts on windows because the ctrl key that makes use of them is far at one end of the keyboard, which makes keyboard combinations with keys in the center of the keyboard very hard to do with one hand and impossible to easily with the two most dextrous fingers of the human hand (the thumb and index finger). One final advantage of mac keyboard shorcuts is that the command key is represented in the menu system by a symbol that take up one character's worth of menu real-estate as opposed to "Alt" or "Ctrl", which take up 3-4 characters of menu real-estate.
   
   
5. Q:Shouldn't apple add more mouse buttons?
   A: Yes. I don't think you'll find many mac users who are against having more than one mouse button, but they are against some dumb windows/unix geek who knows nothing about macs and who refuses to learn anything about the way they are designed arrogantly assuming that the machine is unusable in some sort of way.