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Making Things Easy Is Hard
paul.dunne writes "John Gruber of Daring Fireball has written
a long and considered riposte to
Eric Raymond's recent lament concerning the poor quality of user interfaces in free software.
The core of his argument is that 'developing software with
a good UI requires both aptitude and a lot of hard work.' One point that particularly struck me: according to Gruber, 'Unix nerds who care about usability are switching
to Mac OS X in droves'!"
I see a pretty important difference between usability (ease of use) and usability (usefulness) I agree that Mac OS X is pretty easy to use, and UI is pretty important, but usefullness is a different matter; something OS X could stand to work on if they want to take users from linux.
I know that I will be modded down but I have to say it.
Max OS X is like Enlightenment on steroids.
It is totally unusable, just has lots of fast eye candy.
To do anything remotely useful you need to know a milion secret key combos. Mac users are one damn secret handshake society.
Now mod me down and keep bathing in the warm glow of Steve's reality distortion field.
(I do have a Mac)
> One point that particularly struck me: according
> to Gruber, 'Unix nerds who care about usability
> are switching to Mac OS X in droves'!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Stop bitching and hit the customize toolbar button. Insert a path icon, and get on with life.
The customize toolbar is a perfect example of Apple's UI "easiness" actually making things worse. I'd go so far as to say the customize toolbar sheet is absolutely braindead.
Drag the path icon up, and oops, the search box doesn't fit on the bar anymore, and you get the >> pullout. Now you can't drag the search box out of the toolbar. There's no way to delete things out of the pullout.
You have to resize the window so that the search box can fit in the window, then you can drag it out. Or you have to start deleting things you don't want to delete in order to get to the things in the pullout. This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
Also, to save your changes you click "Done" at the bottom. What if I didn't want to save my changes? What if I decided that I wanted to cancel? I can't do it. There is no cancel button!
This is absolutely horrible. It's the last thing you expect. You would be horrified if you opened a document to read it, inadvertently made some changes, then closed the app only to have the app save your changes without saying a word. Yet this is exactly what preference sheets do in OS X. There's no way to undo your changes.. not even Cmd-Z works.
This is an example of where OSX just doesn't work. It's broken by design.
That "just works" is something I really like the idea of
Too bad it doesn't exist anywhere.. except for consumer devices like TiVo.
My D-Link 802.11b wireless card doesn't "just work" on OSX.. in fact I had to *pay* for a driver for it. iChat AV doesn't "just work" for 99.99% of all cameras out there.. it requires a firewire camera.
My friend has an gen2 iPod which will crash whenever he plugs it into his G4.. it works fine when hooked up to his XP box.
A co-worker has a 12" iBook which will always go to sleep when the lid is closed, even if a keyboard and monitor are plugged into it.. so he has to keep it open and dim the display.
OSX will "just work" as long as you only buy Apple products and never try to do something like use iSync with a P800.
Raymond is an arsehole. But Gruber is a bigger arsehole. And they both need to to do something about their egos.