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Follow-up To Critique of BeOS & Mac OS X
UnknownSoldier writes: "Scot Hacker has posted a great follow-up to his Tales of a BeOS Refugee entitled Reactions to Tales of a BeOS Refugee. (Hopefully everyone involved in implementing 'Linux on the Desktop' will eventually incorporate the best ideas of Be and Mac OS X for smoother usability in Linux.)"
...and less is more.
Consistency is vital. A `deep' user interface notion is needed, instead of the concept of the user interface as shallow cosmetics.
You cannot get consistency without coordination; consistency, and a deeply uniform structure in all things noticable, limits choice too.
Less is more. Predictable behaviour over in-depth per-widget configuration is required.
You'll never get there by borrowing here and adding there. A larger vision is called for, rather than ad-hock additions of code, no matter how l337 the c0d3 h@x0rZ be.
buying into a hardware platform that is less flexible than the current x86 standard, is single-sourced, and thus considerably more expensive. If OS X ever makes it to the x86, it will be hard to resist.
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As an old time NEXTSTEP and SunOS/Solaris administrator, I was really skeptical about installing OS X on my friend's beige G3 266 Minitower. But, after slapping 512MB or RAM in there, and formatting the stock 9GB IDE drive in UFS, I was amazed at how _well_ OS X (10.1) runs!
This is the equivalent of a Celeron 300 running Windows 2000 pro in 1600x1200 with all the visual effects on. I am surprised that it runs very nicely.
Of course, I am still running openStep 4.2 on a Motorola 68040 25MHz, and it is fine as well. I have OpenStep 4.2 for Sparc on a 60MHz SuperSparc, and it iis quite usefull as well.
it takes my Athlon 1.2GHz to run Win2K reasonably.
Apple and NeXT just made good tight platforms with very solid HW SW integration. Same with Sun and HP on the UNIX side. Bemoan closed platforms all you want, who here does their daily work and surfing on 13 year old HW? I do. How about on 9 year old HW? I do.
Why? Because I use enterprise grade pro-caliber equipment with OSes made by talented people who gave a damn about the concept and execution of Quality. Quality endures. I have a 18 year old Volvo GLT Turbo that has much more character and fun factor than my 2 year old Jeep Wrangler. Why? Quality.
Well anyways, back to the usability myth. I propose that it is just that, a myth. People think something is easy to use because they feel familiar with it, or they "know" how to use it, that's how something ranks high on the "usability" scale. The Mac mantra has always been how easy it is to use... well.. the couple of times I tried to use a Mac it seemed confusing to me and certainly not "easy" Why???? You may be asking??? Because, all I've ever used have been Windows machines and Unix machines. Those are easy to me. But that's mostly beside the point, which is, if usability was so important than why didn't the public migrate to the Mac? Answer, besides the obvious monopoly thingy, is because usability, for the most part, doesn't matter. Period. People learn how to use a machine to do what they need to get done and it becomes easy to do when you know how to use it.
So, you can make Linux the most "user friendly" desktop OS on the planet and it won't matter at all. If you want Linux to matter then you need to come up with a reason for people to use it, a killer app or a killer tool or something along those lines.
Now before you pundits get your panties all knotted up into a bunch, I'm not saying you shouldn't try to design an interface that is consistant and easy to learn, yes, that's important, but it's not the driving force for the public when it comes to using one operating environment over another.
Thank You.
Well, looks like the site is already slashdotted, so I haven't read the article yet, but let me shed some light on a few things.
I'm a UNIX person. I've run Linux, Solaris X86, IRIX (yes I had an Indy) at home. I like UNIX. It's what I do for a living, I'm a SysAdmin.
I LOVE OS X. 10.0.4 blew dogs. It's what came with the new iBook I bought this year. 10.1 is prime time, if not ready for the masses. I recently started a new job and was given my choice between a 500 MHz Intel machine running Linux or a G3 at 350MHz running OS X. No brainer dude. Aqua is hands down the best window manager I've ever seen (I never saw a NeXT machine.) Rendering everything in PDF is just mind blowing, and the ease of application development in Cocoa is equally dope.
Here's the thing though. If you're a hardware hacker it's not for you. Plain and simple, neither was the Indy, or the NeXT, or an Ultra Sparc. There are things you just can't do with workstation class machines that you can with desktops.
However, if you're like me and could give a rip about the hardware and tweeking the hell out of it, well Mac OS X is SWEET! It reminds me of the early days of Linux when I'd download something and actually HAVE TO COMPILE IT! Hehehehe, yes i compiled bash, and the fileutils, and even vim on OS X, no problem at all. And since I can't fiddle with the WindowManager I'm not going insane trying to get the current version of Enlightenment (heh a one word oxymoron there) and all it's assinine libraries to compile. I was always partial to WindowMaker anyway, and here's the upgrade!
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Well, its a matter of your hardware becoming obsolete. Yes it runs classic really well. OSX requires a bit.. more. Fortunately and unfortunately. Newer hardware supports OSX wonderfuly. Not sure if its anyone's fault really. Just the desires of having a "really cool" OS.
;)
As for the software thing, give it time. Just like how linux and the bsd's went from a.out -> elf, it takes time.
OSX isn't unfortunately suited to the population of mac owners who can only run classic and need them. Luckily, photoshop isn't my biggest need.. yet. And office is finally out, so I'm happy.
Just think of it as X11R6 with a really neet window mangler
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Speaking as a recovering BeOS user/developer, I can say that BeOS is/was great software. But because it was closed source, it is now orphan-ware, getting more obsolete every day. When I to upgrade to a new machine, I most likely won't be able to run it at all anymore, since the new hardware won't be supported. If BeOS had been open source, it would still be a viable OS today, since the Be developer community would have taken over development when Be keeled over. (indeed, they are still trying to do just this, but Palm couldn't care less)
The moral of the story is this: for certain "platform" types of software that require a lot of time/money/software investment from the user (such as operating systems, APIs, languages, etc), one of the most important "features" that must be considered is whether or not the software product will continue to be supportable and developed. You can either make that guarantee by being too rich to ever go out of business (if you're Microsoft), or by making the code open source (if you're anybody else).
Or to put it more succinctly, it's gonna be a bummer for all the OS/X users if/when Apple goes out of business, and drags OS/X down with it. Users of open source operating systems have no such worries.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I've been following criticism of OS X on slashdot for a while. It seems that people here mainly reject OS X because either it's closed source or the hardware's too expensive.
Well, criticizing OS X because it is closed source is ridiculous. Choose a product based on quality, not ideology. Linux will never gain many mainstream users because of ethics- people will choose the best product offered to them. Granted, compatibility, available software, and conformity may play into this more than some would want, (perhaps explaining why my parents use MS) but it is still a matter of quality.
The cost of the hardware is a valid issue. However, the computers are well built, especially the laptops. If you're obsessed with customizing beige boxes, then stick to a different operating system. But, regardless, stick to criticizing features, not attitudes.
OS X is unfinished to say the least. I was pretty excited when I got a new iMac with OS X to play around with. But when I got around to integrating it into my Linux-base environment, it really fell apart.
/mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work.
NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local
SMB is nearly as bad. At least you can reliable mount samba volumes. However, it's highly unstable. Changing files on the server will cause OS X to behave unpredictably. Updating an app binary, for example, will cause subsequent execution of that app to fail with bus errors.
NIS? Good luck. Not supported. There is an FAQ for enabling it. But my success with this has been limited at best.
Until they get the basics sorted out, it'll just sit on the kitchen counter as a nice little internet and recipe browser for my wife.
Take a deep breath! You are about to dump core, or something.
You seem to have confused expansion capability with aging, but they just ain't the same.
**As far as being widely useful for getting work done** Macs last longer than PCs. That is what I believe the other poster is talking about.
As far as Mac OS X and its interface, its nice that people used to generally weak interfaces think it is so great, but us long time Mac users are suffering a severe downgrade with Mac OS X and it Just Isn't Worth It for most of us.
Now that's laughable, try posting something that's anti-linux in slashdot and watch the rabid dogs come after you!
I think we've kinda missed something here. If your needs never change then neither does the usefullness of your hardware - PC or MAC or, heck, Amiga. If it works, it works.
If, on the other hand I now have a need for newer software, different hardware etc, then the question of life span becomes more important.
In this case, though - the statement "Macs last longer than PCs" is clearly BS for the reaons stated in this parent's parent.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.
Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.
Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).
Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.
PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right? ;-)
Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).
Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.
You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Once upon a time I would have agreed with you on the idea that Macs have longer lives. Back in the day, I remember my friends having to get new PC's very frequently in order to run the latest stuff. My Mac Plus and IIvx, on the other hand, served me for five years with only minor expansions (hard drive and RAM) each.
:-) Aside from adding some more drive space and a burner, there's very little I've done to it.
Now that processors are so fast though, and RAM is so ubiquitous, most people don't need much faster machines. Bandwidth tends to be the key limiting factor in what people can do, especially now that CD burners are so cheap. My Pentium II is going on in to its fourth year right now, and it hardly feels aged when I don't browse the game isles
I think PC's, in general, have reached a point where they all have longer lives. Most people are still very productive with Win95, and until recently they could run everything they wanted on it. I think once upon a time Macs used to have the longer life, which made them a much more worthwhile purchase, but now that PC's have surpassed what people need they've switched to features, like firewire. I think the above poster is right to mention expansion. The capability to add a firewire card to an original iMac would add some extra life to the machine.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Well anyways, back to the usability myth. I propose that it is just that, a myth.
...it's[usability] not the driving force for the public when it comes to using one operating environment over another.
Look here, let's get something straight. When the marketing people talk usability, what they're talking about is the learning curve. And there are several ways to turn a learning curve into usability 'statistics'.
One is the very bottom of the curve: with the most idiotic of users. How easily is it to sit down at a strange system and understand it? No one will argue that new users understand a GUI metaphor far better than the command line-- it takes a brand new user training in understanding the CLI metaphor. For most intents and purposes, then, a UI can't be considered 'usable' until it's graphical.
The next two criteria seem to be at odds with themselves most of the time. The first is how error-friendly the system is: for example, can the system tolerate an error in case? For the Linux CLI (Bash most likely) the answer is no (And yes I know there's an option in Bash to change that but it's not enabled by default- which is what matters to a new user)- compare to DOS, which doesn't care at all. In this particular instance, DOS is more usable. But to turn the tables, Linux/Bash has command line completion, which helps prevent typing errors. However, you can't have your UI out-guess the user-- never let it push the user in the wrong direction.
Complimenting error tolerance is how much power is available- how many options the user can select from at once. This is again a balancing act: give the user too few options and you give them no power, and yet if you give them too many at once they will not be able to determine the ones they want to choose. Nesting options helps, but may add to user confusion (that is, it only helps if done in a logical manner And I don't consider the way Windows does its' menus logical. Why is the dialog for changing file associations nested under the View menu? (This is from memory, I'm in Linux)).
There are other things to consider, I will pass them over for the sake of brevity and to mention the way I would measure usability- being a programmer and not a marketroid. My measure is height of the first learning plateau. On any learning curve, there are plateaus- level-- or nearly so-- periods with little to no learning. Having a low first plateau on your curve means that the user will feel comfortable with some very limited parts of the system, yet have far more to learn to be able to manage it all at once. The "best" (most usable) system would employ a UI metaphor that enabled the first plateau to be as high as possible. This is more true with GUIs than a CLI (compare launching a new program-- from a brand new users' point of view) as well as more true of Windows than Linux (compare program installation- with Linux I still hunt dependencies often).
People think something is easy to use because they feel familiar with it
Without a doubt, the portion of usability that most lay persons bandy about is indeed familiarity, but that isn't too limiting a factor. Sit an aveerage Windows user down at a Mac and let them browse the web- you won't get that many questions. (Probably just "Why does this mouse only have one button?") Sit them down at the Mac and give them a reference book- they'll be able to use it quickly. (I assume, knowing the converse is true, that they will read the book.) The problem with the transition is that in each system the baseline skills are the same-- beginning users have no problem transitioning-- but the power users would flounder. Keyboard shortcuts differ. Mouse command keys differ. The control panel on each system works differently. And so on.
What I'm saying here is simple. Usability is not a myth. Having differed with your introdcution, I agree entirely with your conclusion.
Nope. It's marketing. Joe Sixpack drinks the beer his favorite sports star does, wears the same brand name clothes his favorite TV/film star does, and uses the Operating System he is told to on his favorite TV channel. Once Linux registers on his radar at all, then it has a hope of really making it onto the desktop (getting a "respectable" percentage like Mac- as a Linux advocate I'd settle for 10% in a heartbeat! At least the Mac registers on the major software developer's radar). From there, who knows? And I won't prognosticate about that day at all- because I can't even tell if it will come in a year or in a hundred years. I just hope that the revolution comes before computers get outlawed.
Do you like Japanese imports?
I'd like to reiterate what I wrote earlier in a similar thread which some moron scored down to -1.
I think people have had enough of user interfaces that are based on the twenty-some years old ideas that Windows, MacOS, Gnome and KDE are based on.
Where are the attempts at trying to create somehting exciting and radical?
It's hard enough to convince a Windows-user that MacOS makes you more productive - the interfaces are so similar that it's possible to approach both MacOS and BeOs with a Windows-infused mind and miss out all the good stuff. It's possible to build a user interface that is both obviously different and obviously better - even with Linux, but it seems to me that the Linux community lacks the competence. I would like to be proven wrong.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
However, that rule doesn't apply if you put out a shitty product squash competition and name it windows.
Wrong. Windows is not a "shitty" product in the areas that matter, as IBM found out. IBM used to bundle OS/2 and Win 3.1 (yes, 3.1). You had to go out of your way to delete OS/2 and install 3.1. Yet almost EVERYONE did it.
The areas that Windows ruled are:
1) Backward compatibility with DOS apps,
2) Software availability (MS courted developers like anything),
3) Hardware availability
And your ignorance of why Windows is successful is exactly why Linux never will be a competitor to Windows on the desktop.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
not just the UI - it's Making Things Work.
I've used a lot of UNIX machines, a few variants of linux and many PC boxes between work and home. I now have a TIBook and I have to say OS X is my favorite OS thus far because more things Just Work than on any other platform... it comes with great UI tools for many networking tasks if you don't want to waste a lot of time to learn the command line (though if you already know it, it's right there for you). Multiple monitors work as nature intended them too with no fiddling. I tried video creation under PC's and found the xperience exasperating.
I get a combo USB/Firewire CD burner. Under Windows (98, admittedly I've only used NT/98 so far and not used XP so I'm not sure how different things would be) I have to install Special Software. Of course, after burning a few CD's I find that the default is to burn them under a windows format so the can't be read on a mac, and the hidden preference setting to switch to ISO has dire warnings about filename truncation.
I plug the same drive into my Mac and just burn a CD - a handy dialog box comes up to ask if I would like that HFS+ or ISO? No extra software needed.
Windows update feels klunky to me compared to the mac update, though I couldn't say exactly why. Perhaps it's that I've yet to have the mac update fail or render my mac update unusable, as Windows update has done to me in the past.
The only reason you wouldn't want to get a Mac as far as I can see is that your selection of games might suffer somewhat - but in that case just get an XBox or PS2 or Gamecube. That's what I did to stop the rediculous upgrade cycle of PC's. And there are lot of games that come out for the mac so you might not have to suffer that horribly after all (especially true for RTS games which I don't think consoles do as well, or at least the same). As for office software, the Mac version of office has been said to be better than Office XP if you swing that way!
I can boil down all my experiences to this - on my home PC, both under Windows and Linux, I was fiddling a lot more than I wanted to with system settings. With OS X I'm getting more done and fighting the system less, and that to me is usability. I still prefer Linux for servers but for a development box I really like OS X.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have a Mac Plus sitting on the desk next to me that we bought a LONG time ago. Is that "long time" enough for you? I have used MacOSX exclusively since the Public Beta. I dread having to boot into OS9 because of its weak interface. I fully respect your decision not to upgrade (yes *upgrade*). I am however sick of non-converters claiming things like "OSX is good for beginners but us power users need more". If you don't want to use it fine, but do realise that you are being left behind. I'd wager that a lot more people are currently happy with OSX than people who have *tried* it and given it a decent chance but still prefer OS9. It is not the next version of the MacOS, it is the first version of MacOSX. If you keep that in mind and stop trying to turn it into OS9 (like I did after about the first month), you'll have a much better experience with it.
If you've done this (with 10.1, *big* difference) and still aren't happy with it, I'll accept that. I believe that MacOSX cured a lot of the long lived problems with the classic MacOS. Yes, it introduced a few annoyances of its own but with each (free) upgrade that apple puts out their numbers are diminishing quickly. Apple is listening to user feedback. If you have a gripe with OSX, besides "Please kill the Dock", tell them about it.