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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'!"
Making things hard is easy by Microsoft!
"Unix nerds" who are switching to OSX are not Unix Nerds.. they're Unix Wannabe's that like aqua..
chicks dig console...
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
The type of easy that regular users can find everything in a snap or the kind of easy with big shiny icons that n00bs still have problems with?
First people have to know what they want in order to get it. We can't solve stupidity and/or ignorance can we?
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
(sig reply) And do you also file your toenails using a chainsaw?
Why make things easy when it is just so much more fun to create something that the user has to read pages of configuration instructions then go to a support forum where they can get laughed at and degraded for asking such a simple n00b question?
Software isn't meant to be productive. It's meant to help people get a laugh at the expense of others.
That's okay, I just read it as "Interface Engineering".
-- Alastair
And we lived in a shoebox full of dirt, and ate ground glass... AND WE LIKED IT!
Not to mention that with sentences such as "(Side note: parallel port? What year is it in the Raymond household?)" he's making fun of most of the Third World. You know, the ones that do not have all the money, and that think Open Source is a big advantage in terms of cost and narrowed "digital divide".
I'm not complaining at you, of course, I'm bitching at the author and at some people in the OS community (*Cough* Havoc "who needs transparent window moving? Everyone has a powerful CPU" Pennington *Cough*).
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
Ducks? Ducks? Where? Oh my god ducks! NOOOO!! NOT DUCKS! NOOOO!!!!
Typical Macinbot -- Mac OS X has the most intuitive GUI! -- Just press Command-Option-DoubleClick-Q!!! Way easier than Windows!
I click "New Document" then I spend 2 hours writing then I click "Save".
;)
I hope your Auto-recovery works well....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Notepad is, of course, more usable than vi.
Because if notepad is open, I can quit it easily and go open medit. This takes me about 2 seconds.
But if vi is open, I have to either flail at the keys trying to remember what the fucking exit sequence is, or just kill the job. Then I can go open medit. This takes me about 2 minutes.
Therefore, notepad is both more usable and more learnable!
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
AFLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC!!!!!
Yes. You need to throw the battery away and buy a new one. :P
And yet Open Source is still churning out high quality software at a rate to make MS blush, and only a food would think that the quality of the Linux kernel was entirely about the number of developers working on it.
When food can judge the quality of the linux kernal, that's the point where genetic modification has gone too far.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!