Jef Raskin On The Mac

der Kopf writes "Jeff Raskin, one of the creators of the Macintosh and inventor of the click-and-drag interface, states in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian that "the Mac is now a mess. A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete. Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine."" While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.

Comments

Not jaded at all

[AKAImBatman]

And in this corner, we have Macus Nastolgious; a species of computer user who misses the way Macintoshes were before The Great Migration to a modern and flexible operating system. Be very cautious around this beast as it will use any information, no matter how irrelevant to the topic, to prove its supposed "point" about Mac OS being "superior" to Mac OS X. It is also very good at selective hearing, often ignoring words and phrases such as "modern", "virtual memory", "true multitasking", "protected memory", and "brushed metal".

If you are attacked by one of these creatures, your best course of action is to appease it with a lollipop and a Cherry iMac running Mac OS 9. Ignore the sobbing that may result, as it is only an opening for renewed attack.

In case anyone's interested, Wikipedia knows who Jef Raskin is.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of attacking the person, try to attack his points. Wow, look at that, you can't. This probably has to do with you not knowing anything about the actual topic of programming and user interfaces, and not another Mac OS vs Mac OS X vs Windows pissing match

Re:Not jaded at all

[William Tanksley]

Jef didn't like the old MacOS either, so your argument is beside the point. His problem with it was user interface, not technology. His complaint about the new interface is that it's more of the same, with a few inconsistencies thrown in just for good measure.

-Billy

Re:Not jaded at all

[AKAImBatman]

Instead of attacking the person, try to attack his points. Wow, look at that, you can't.

You lose sugarpuff:

A third party manual (Pogue's The Missing Manual) is nearly 1,000 pages, and far from complete.

As another poster so helpfully expanded on for me, Mac OS X has an entire Unix subsystem and feature set that are designed for power users and developers. Your average user knows nothing of these, nor do they need to. That doesn't stop people from documenting all those extra "cool" features in OS X.

Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

An unsubstantiated statement. I suppose he felt that his statement about the manual should have given him the right to make this statement, except for that statement being based on flawed logic.

My original vision is outdated and irrelevant.

He recognizes that the original Mac interface is unsuitable. But then he goes on to say:

The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then.

Ok. But what does that mean? He gives no examples of proper interfaces, nor does he explain why OS X fails to achieve the "People first" status.

And the iMac G5? Was the original iMac a step on the correct path?

The unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk?

Ouch. You'd almost think he doesn't like the thing. But then he says:

It is a practical and space-saving design.

So which is it?

The truth of the matter is that he didn't actually make a single significant point in the entire article. He made several claims to the effect of Mac OS X being "a poor user interface", but never once gave an opinion as to why or how to fix it. Granted, that may be the fault of the editor, but then we need a better article. There were NO points made in this one.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Jef Raskin needs to step off and get a job somewhere making his little fabulous interfaces that he cries about on every website. If he's so damn smart about creating the perfect OS, then where is his creation? He can't produce one because he has to work 60 hours a week at Burger King to make ends meet. Jef, your time has come and gone and it's OVER for you. Nobody even finds the dumb spelling of your name cute--Jef is NOT spelled with one F, not even if you did invent the Mac OS. You should stop your whining and go back and work on the OS X team. Maybe they would find you as annoying as I do, duct tape you and throw you out the window after about 3 hours. Do us a favor and get down off of your soapbox for once and PRODUCE this perfect OS you speak about.

Re:Not jaded at all

[AKAImBatman]

Jef didn't like the old MacOS either, so your argument is beside the point

Fair enough. The article didn't state that clearly, so I didn't realize that he simply hates all interfaces.

One thing I do find amusing, however, is that he's apparently a big proponent of Zooming User Interfaces like Pad++. Yet the ultimate irony is that the Display PDF layer of Mac OS X makes it the perfect OS to add Zooming interfaces to! Apple has clearly demonstrated this with the Éxpose feature. Somehow, though, that doesn't seem to sink in with this guy.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Ohreally_factor]

Apple now does development by accretion, and there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.

Because every time you want to add a feature, you should redesign the OS from the ground up.

There's some good background on Raskin at Folklore.org, including my favorite, I Invented Burrell

Re:Not jaded at all

[geoffspear]

Well, to be fair it's an article in the Guardian, where discussing the finer points of interface design would be above the head of the average reader. If it was an interview in a technical journal (or even somewhere like Wired), I think your criticisms of what was left out would be more deserved.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

the wikipedia link is a redirect to 'sodomy' atm

Re:Not jaded at all

[john82]

More to the point, it seems that Raskin has had some chip on his shoulder since Jobs kicked him off the Mac team years ago. Raskin also uses this as another opportunity to hock his book. This is not even the first time this year. Witness an earlier occasion with Berkeley Groks in March of this year.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what out of article body sideboxes are for, so that you can have some specific bullet points detailing what should be fixed. The Guardian is terrible at anything to do with computers, so this criticism is probably more vaild than you think.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, to be fair it's an article in the Guardian, where discussing the finer points of interface design would be above the head of the average reader.

Actually, discussing the finer points pissing yourself would be beyond the average reader of that rag.

Re:Not jaded at all

[poot_rootbeer]

words and phrases such as "modern"

A meaningless term when applied to operating systems.

"virtual memory"

Irrelevant to user interface

"true multitasking"

Irrelevant to user interface

"protected memory"

Irrelevant to user interface

and "brushed metal".

Eye candy with no performance benefit -- rendering vector or bitmap graphics in the window painter will never be as efficient as a simple color fill.

Re:Not jaded at all

[johnnyb]

Trust me, authors use every opportunity possible to hock their books. Just look at my sig!

Re:Not jaded at all

[RZeno]

The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then.

Ok. But what does that mean? He gives no examples of proper interfaces, nor does he explain why OS X fails to achieve the "People first" status.

And that's the crux of it. People promote "principles" but developers and designers need to know how to assess and improve the interface. "Hire me and I'll do it" or "Buy my book" aren't solutions to this problem.

Re:Not jaded at all

[William Tanksley]

You're being silly. He only hates all current interfaces, and he states very clearly why. And yes, he likes zooming user interfaces, but simply supporting Display PDF and Expose doesn't magically change OS X into a zooming user interface. By the way, the features of Display PDF are insufficient and unneccesary to support a zooming UI. It's handy to have OS help in scaling, but a zooming UI needs program involvement as well.

-Billy

Re:Not jaded at all

[orasio]

You could start by reading his site at http://the.sourceforge.net

It started as a page for "the humane environment", starting with a text editor, using things that are now common, like a kind of non-modal incremental searching. The project aims to implement a full working environment for computer related tasks, getting read of the concept of desktop, and application, and files.
The page hosts now his personal site, too.

There is a lot of material that I had read in his book. He addresses important issues that come up everyday with computer usage, and solutions he proposes.

He talks about the need to have someone with knowledge (not JR himelf, but someone who has read a couple of books con cognitive sciences, and interface design) in the designer team.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Jeremy Erwin]

But virtual memory, multitasking, and protected memory ultimately have quite a lot to do with the user interface. Virtual memory allows a user to run a great many programs at once, without having to worry too much about cleaning up-- no need to close the web browser before writing a letter; no need to worry about memory fragmentation.

Protected memory ensures that if a misbehaving program crashes, the entire system isn't brought to a screaming halt. It's annoying when one's word processor crashes while one is writing a letter. It's even more annoying when the entire system is brought down as well, necessitating a lengthy reboot cycle. A user of a protected memory system need not worry about running finicky programs in the background, or discovering that an application really doesn't like being run on Tuesdays or months ending with "r"-- a program crash need not bring everything on the computer to a screeching halt.

As for multitasking-- the macs used to feature cooperative multitasking-- wherein each program would voluntarily give up control of the system. I suppose this might have been a boon for running a Real-Time Application, but many programs proved to be resource hogs. Ultimately, if one is running multiple programs at once, each with the same degree of urgency, it's better to let the operating system handle prioritizing time-slicing.

Now, some might still argue that puny humans are only capable of doing one thing at a time, and that it would be better to focus one's efforts on a single-tasking operating system-- but I believe most people are familiar with the practice of letting one's email client fetch mail in the background while responding to silly slashdot posts.

Re:Not jaded at all

[KKin8or]

...but never once gave an opinion as to why or how to fix it.

Probably because he wants you to read his book.
I've had it lying around for a few years, but haven't managed to finish it. From what I've read, he doesn't say, "This is a spec for a good interface," but more talks about the what should be taken into consideration when designing a good interface.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Krusty Da Klown]

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Hawk

Re:Not jaded at all

[Golias]

Instead of attacking the person, try to attack his points.

When he has one, I'll give it a shot.

OS X is vastly more simple for a beginner to use than the old "System 7" Macintosh. He's coming at OS X the same way a Windows geek does, as somebody who is used to the way a different operating system does things, and therefore a slanted opinion about the way things "should" be done.

The dock, the new multi-tiered finder, and the "no button" mouse are all ultra-friendly on-ramps for a new user to get up and running on all the basic apps. Once the stuff "grandma" needs to learn to do e-mail and surf are mastered, digging deeper into the OS is remarkably simple. After a year or so with her first iMac, my previously-computer-illiterate aunt is comfortably trouble-shooting her own network issues.

The old Mac OS was simple and elegant for the apps and environments which existed in 1989, but ten years later it was getting awfully long in the tooth, and some of the paradigms which seemed like simplicity itself did not adapt well to the way people are using computers today.

Pat yourself on the back for making something which was way ahead of the pack at the time, Raskin, but stop being a crybaby now that your work has been eclipsed and made redundant.

You don't hear this kind of whining about the web from people who used to write CD-ROM encyclopedias, but this article is pretty much the same sort of thing.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Golias]

He talks about the need to have someone with knowledge (not JR himelf, but someone who has read a couple of books con cognitive sciences, and interface design) in the designer team.

Which all assumes that Jobs did not hire design people who understood such issues.

The truth is that NeXT, while a commercial failure, had a UI which was already superior to the Mac in several ways, and included many former Mac-heads among it's fanatical followers.

OS X is an improvedment on the NeXT concepts, which also retained many of the best things about the old Macintosh interface.

At the same time, it gave the option to dump things it supplanted... As a former MacOS7/8/9 user (I couldn't afford a NeXT Cube), I originally was keeping my internal HD's mounted on the desktop, just like any Aplle True Believer would probably insist on. The Finder for OS X has become so useful, however, that now the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting. I'm sure Apple would turn it off by default if it weren't for all the Jeff Raskin types who consider the old desktop metaphor such a vital security blanket that the thought of accessing all their drives through that icon on the left side of the dock merely frightens and confuses them.

The more I use OS X, the more I like it, and the more certain I am that I would never want to go back to the way that OS 9 organized the UI.

Re:Not jaded at all

[badasscat]

But virtual memory, multitasking, and protected memory ultimately have quite a lot to do with the user interface. Virtual memory allows a user to run a great many programs at once, without having to worry too much about cleaning up-- no need to close the web browser before writing a letter; no need to worry about memory fragmentation.

Protected memory ensures that if a misbehaving program crashes, the entire system isn't brought to a screaming halt. ...

As for multitasking-- the macs used to feature cooperative multitasking-- wherein each program would voluntarily give up control of the system.

You're missing the point. Not one of these things has anything to do with the user interface. User experience, yes, but the user interface is a subset of the overall user experience that these technical matters have nothing to do with.

The user interface is simply the method with which humans interact with a device. Whether the multitasking is done cooperatively or not makes no difference to the user interface - to the user, they click an icon and a new application runs in either case.

Mac OS X is a far more advanced OS than Mac OS 9. But what does that really mean as far as the user interface? I know people who use Macs that complain that things they've done a certain way for years were just arbitrarily changed in OS X. I know designers at my place of work who refuse to install OS X because it forces them to waste time re-learning the system. I don't honestly know how valid those concerns are, but the fact that they are concerns at all suggests something about the UI in OS X. (Or maybe it suggests something about people who use Macs.)

Re:Not jaded at all

[phaxda]

Speaking of hawking books, O'Reilly Media will release Andy Hertzfeld's Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made in December.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Jeremy Erwin]

You're missing the point. Not one of these things has anything to do with the user interface. User experience, yes, but the user interface is a subset of the overall user experience that these technical matters have nothing to do with.

Jeff Raskin left the Macintosh project early on. About the only thing he contributed to the Mac's design was his insistence on a modeless interface. But according to your strict semantic construction, he didn't help design a man machine interface-- he only contributed to the "user experience".

The Macintosh was successful in part because all applications, even the games, used a consistent interface. You'd probably relegate that "consistency" element to the "user experience" ghetto. It's a common mistake--many creators of poorly designed applications use the common elements of various widget sets in new and exciting ways, forgetting that it is the consistency of the interface and not the mere presence of various widgets that make for a usable program.

Re:Not jaded at all

[jsin]

The "better article" would be his book, which I fear would still leave you wanting, since it's not a sequential list of bullet-points on how to do things right.

I hear this argument against Raskin over and over again and I think people who make it are either unimaginative or simply lazy.

Re:Not jaded at all

[orasio]

OS X is nice.
It is also much more like MSWindows, in the bad sense.
The guy (JR) is not saying OSX isn't cool, and os9.0 is.
He is talking about fundamentals. Nowadays the desktop metaphor has foundations on our systems. That doesn't make it right.
He says that the evolution went the wrong way. I believe so. It's stupid that by now we don't have systems implemented on better metaphors.
For example, the desktop metaphor is good for a guy who wants to run MSOffice on his machine, but a home user doesn't need to be familiar even with a wooden desktop!!.
I agree that OSX might be cool, and nice with mac users. Those users are already familiar with that, and know what to expect from their system. Anyway, there is a lot of learning involved, much of it unnecesary.
In most of his rants, he talks about changing metaphors, and using systems based on cognitive particularities of the human mind. For example, files and folders are a nice way to represent a file cabinet, but lacking the real world aids they provide in the real world, they do not suffice to represent they way we want to store things.
Thinking about drives in the first place is a complexity that the user shouldn't be thinking about, I believe the users should be thinking about their work, and not the underlying storage subsystem. Files and folders (and thus, the finder) are a broken metaphor, from that point of view. It would be much nicer to have accurately tagged information, and full text search throughout your files, so you can find whatever you need.
He proposes some of that in his book. Think incremental google search throughout your full data. No need of structure, of finder, or file browsers.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeff Raskin left the Macintosh project early on. About the only thing he contributed to the Mac's design was his insistence on a modeless interface.

First, it's "Jef" not "Jeff".

Second, he freaking created the Mac. He envisioned it, then made it happen. (Against the will of Jobs, until he could hijack the project and grab the glory.) No offense, but your rendering of his contribution is just 100% clueless. He left the project and then Apple only when Jobs smoked him out.

He also published on ergonomy and humane computer interfaces way before PARC was founded.

His insistence on modeless interfaces makes sense: Don't let the system interrupt your work. It's that simple.

Why don't you google up a bit about him and his accomplishments? He deserves some respect.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Jeremy Erwin]

Indeed. I did google Jef Raskin.

Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys called "leap keys" to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle), there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.

source

Re:Not jaded at all

[Dixie_Flatline]

I have to disagree just slightly.

Multitasking ends up being an enabling feature. That is, it enables you to run several programs at once.

Because of this, you now have to modify your user interface to accomodate such a feature. How do you switch between applications? How do you maintain consistency across applications? What happens if a background application fails?

Suddenly, there are a lot more things to consider when presenting an interface to the user.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi Jef, glad you could join us!

Re:Not jaded at all

[Bob Uhl]

Many old-Mac afficianados rightly point out that the user interface on the old Macs was in many regards much better. Yes, good virtual memory is great; yes, true multitasking is great; yes, protected memory is great (although there was this one cool old Mac program which would let you change numbers in memory--thereby allowing one to cheat wildly at games): but those are just things which should be under the covers. There's no fundamental reason that the old-Mac interface couldn't have had them.

As for the brushed metal interface, that's just a theme, and themes do no good useability make. Check out Ask Tog or Jakob Nielsen for some work on what real useability means.

Hey--I'm a Unix geek, and I think that it's cool that Macs now have a Unix layer. I just think that it's sad that they've lost much of their original UI advantages.

Re:Not jaded at all

[MisterSquid]

[. . .]the first thing I do when I work with a new Mac is turn off desktop drive mounting.

I'm an old-time Mac OS 6-9 user and switched to X about a year ago. Only recently have I started exploiting just a teensy fraction of the power of OS X.

For example, the ability to write scripts (yes, I write in PERL) and have them execute when I add or remove an item from a directory is something I just didn't get until this last weekend. I have a triple-head monitor set-up and having a web browser open along with a terminal window and my text editor, I sometimes had a hard time finding those pesky desktop icons for the hard drives, which I've always and forever lower-left clicked (my trackball has 5 buttons) to open.

At some point I recalled that one could open a Finder window by using Command-N. But after reading your post, I realized that desktop icons for drives are simply unnecessary. I've been using Apple machines since 1982 and Macintosh OS since 1992, and it took me a year for my behavior to change with regard to exploiting the availability of PERL (or whatever language strikes your fancy) scripting and the way the finder works in OS X.

In other words, my memory of OS 9 inhibits me from grokking OS X. Thanks for the tip.

Re:Not jaded at all

[jcr]

The truth is that NeXT, while a commercial failure, had a UI which was already superior to the Mac in several ways, and included many former Mac-heads among it's fanatical followers.

Don't forget that the designers of NeXT's UI included several key people from the Mac team. Bud Tribble, to name one.

-jcr

Re:Not jaded at all

[jcr]

The project aims to implement a full working environment for computer related tasks, getting read of the concept of desktop, and application, and files. ..which will ship about five years after we get Xanadu working on GNU/HURD, right?

-jcr

Re:Not jaded at all

[zsau]

In case johnnb's sig is ever changed, I contain here for posterity the sig in full:

New Programmers Click Here

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me, authors use every opportunity possible to hock their books. Just look at my sig!

Maybe they'd have more luck if they hawked their books instead.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no monthes that end in "r"

Re:Not jaded at all

[sydres]

when macosx first hit the shelves I remember saying to someone that it'd be easier for a pc user to switch to using it than a classic macos user because they are so deeply devoted. people on pcs tend to expect change

Re:Not jaded at all

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

He gives no examples of proper interfaces

That's a serious flaw in the interview. Anyone curious about how Jef Raskin envisions an interface should go on an archaeological dig and find a Canon Cat or Apple ][ Swyftcard.

"Radical" barely describes them. If memory serves, there was no file system. One floppy was one document. All file operations were done with a single key, called Disk. If you had just inserted a floppy it loaded a document. Otherwise it saved the current one.

A document was a text stream. If you wanted database-like functionality you used the incremental search, which you triggered with keys close to your thumbs because that was good ergonomics.

If you wanted to do anything remotely elaborate, the Swyftcard had escapes to Applesoft Basic, creating a huge chasm between routine and advanced functionality.

Debatable as hell, but explains why he sees OS X and XP as more similar than different.

Re:Not jaded at all

[orasio]

Which will serve, at least as a prototype so sample ideas already found in many books, and not implemented anywhere.

Other projects can take those ideas, and attach some aspects to their projects.

For example, as you yourself state, the GNU, as it was originally conceived, with a microkernel, was never finished. On the other hand, that "Linux" thing everybody is talking about would amount now to not much more than what Minix is now, just a toy kernel, if it werent for the huge part of the GNU system that was ready when Linus wrote a free kernel himself.

It is not always about shipping products, and achieving deadlines. The discipline advances further because of projects that do not have those restrictions, too.

That kind of attitude you are showing (releases, releases!!) is what has brought us to the current state of affairs, MS 95/98/2000/XP/2003/XXX(kde, mono) all implement short sighted goals, and not much is built taking into account the nature of the user. We only have bigger, more powerful systems, with beautiful interfaces, but year by year we don't get an improvement on interfaces. That's because developers need to focus on shipping in time, and releasing familiar, ready to use stuff.
I like the fact that some other people are experimenting with future ways the interfaces could develop. I don't mina whether they ship something useful. Well, I _do_ mind but until I get my degree, I cannot help them so it's the same, for now.

Re:Not jaded at all

[good soldier svejk]

I've never understood Hertzfeld's position on this. How can the man who wrote the System Resource Toolbox say that "the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology" were "the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device?" The two most defining characteristics of the Macintosh were the basic concept of an appliance like consumer computer designed entirely around the user experience, and the WSYWYG interface. Both were entirely due to Raskin's efforts (although the implementation of the interface was mostly Atkinson and Hertzfeld).

Raskin's 1967 Penn State PhD thesis, entitled A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System argued character based interfaces should give way entirely to bitmapped interfaces with, "the ability to define arbitrary symbols and manipulate them into complex pictures. Such symbols could be representations of furniture and fixtures in floor plans, resistors, transistors, and the like in schematic diagrams, notes and clef signs in music, the individual shapes in flow charts, symbols for atoms and molecular structures, sentence structure diagrams, and so on without limit."

I don't see what difference it makes what type of pointing device Raskin favored. If anything, a pointer which doesn't require you entirely remove one hand from the keyboard has some apparent advantages. But for the record, once they settled on Englebart's brainchild, he was adamant that it not have more than one button (he invented click-drag). When Tesler came over from PARC they had a big debate about it. That actually was a defining characteristic of the computer, and one which differentiated it from all other mouse bearing systems before and after.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Jeremy Erwin]

Perhaps Hertzfeld's ego is large. However, one should note Raskin's reaction to the original macintosh.

-- I preferred trackballs and tablets to the mouse, and I had experimental evidence favoring those devices-- people have taken that to mean I didn't want to have a graphic input device, which I considered absolutely essential. But I also thought it was smart not to force people to use the graphic input device unnecessarily. Bill Atkinson had a different dream, which was to do everything graphically, and never touch the keyboard, which is, unfortunately, impossible. In my scheme you'd use the graphic input device when you need graphics, and otherwise you'd use the keyboard, which is how I was designing it. After I left that was largely thrown out, and it became this thing-- I call it a "hand to mouse existence"-- where you move back and forth [demonstrates] much too much.

I was not really pleased with the way the Mac came out in terms of ease of use. I was certainly pleased with the attractive appearance of the interface, but in terms of usability it was far inferior-- though one can only guess-- to what would have come out had I been left in charge of the project. Would it have sold as well, or better? We'll never know. I can't answer that question. But it certainly would have been easier to use. But as such, even with what I considered some downgrading of the quality of the interface, it was still far better than anything else out there at the time. I figure that even if I had done no more than orient Apple and the Macintosh project to being user interface-oriented, rather than hardware oriented, that would have been a significant achievement. That some of the actual widgets and things that I designed also got through is nice, too.

Interview with Jef Raskin

Raskin's design choices lost out to Atkinson's. Atkinson's quirky interface, and the consequent emphasis on the mouse, remains present in MacOSX. Raskin's own contribution is "dated and irrelevant", as he puts it.

Re:Not jaded at all

[good soldier svejk]

Your quote exactly support the first half of my position (it does not touch on the second half). Raskin was responsible for the user centric philosophy which is one of the two most defining characteristics of the Macintosh.

Raskin's design choices lost out to Atkinson's. Atkinson's quirky interface, and the consequent emphasis on the mouse, remains present in MacOSX. Raskin's own contribution is "dated and irrelevant", as he puts it.

The full quote reads, "My original vision is outdated and irrelevant. The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then." meaning the interface he envisioned at the time was constrained by the technologies and ideas of the era, notably application orientation, but that his major contribution, user centricity, is still valid. Hertzfeld and Atkinson's interface vision is equally dated and irrelevant.

As far as the mouse thing, there are reallty two issues: type of pointer device and requirement for pointing. I find the first point relatively trivial. The Mac has almost from jump accepted a variety of devices. Personally I am not a big fan of mice or trackballs, but I agree with Raskin about tablets. The second is more interesting. The original Mac did go to great lengths to deprecate the keyboard for system control. But over time that philosophy completely reversed itself. In OS X you can do practically everything from the keyboard.

Both these guys have crazy egos, but Raskin's arguments are always based on valid philosophical arguments. Hertzfeld is obviously a brilliant programmer, but I don't think he is the kind of intellectual or academic Tesler and Raskin are. Did you see the garbage Eazel produced?

Re:Not jaded at all

[Jeremy Erwin]

Interesting. This article rapidly approaches archival status, though, and further comments might not be possible.

It's probably not going to possible to full delineate Raskin's contributions until (and unless) the full "Book of Macintosh" is published. Perhaps the stanford archive might release more materials.

The original subthread discussed the importance of a reliable and stable kernel to the user interface. Others disagreed, stating that the kernel has nothing to do with user interface.

I brought up Raskin because he contributed a number of rather important ideas to how a user might interact with his Macintosh design, but many of those ideas were pretty abstract, and don't fit into the rather limited concept of "user interface" as understood by most slashdotters: the Mac's GUI was designed by Hertzfeld and Atkinson, not by Raskin.

Re:Not jaded at all

[good soldier svejk]

I brought up Raskin because he contributed a number of rather important ideas to how a user might interact with his Macintosh design, but many of those ideas were pretty abstract, and don't fit into the rather limited concept of "user interface" as understood by most slashdotters: the Mac's GUI was designed by Hertzfeld and Atkinson, not by Raskin.

Raskin is an egotist who feels the Mac team screwed up his vision. The Mac they released was more expensive, more complicated and less driven by the user experience than the machine he pitched to Markula. Hence he likes to distance himself from the final execution. But there is no disagreement about whether it was he who introduced pul down menus and click-drag. My point was that he is uniquely responsible for the core concepts which define the Macintosh, and that Hertzfeld's statement to the contrary is on the face of it nonsensical. To say that the Macintosh is defined by two pieces of hardware is to not understand the Macintosh. The idea was to make a user centric, rather than hardware centric computer.

Regarding the original point, kernel memory management is not an user interface issue, it is a user experience issue. However, the Macintosh was never designed to narrowly optimize the user interface. It was designed to optimize the user experience. That was Raskin, and later Apple's, goal. At the time, the UI was by far the greatest area of need in user experience, so that is where the bulk of the effort went. Arguably this is still true, but hardware advances has increased the importance better memory management as a component of the user experience. It has also made such management more feasible. You wouldn't believe some of the hoops the Mac team jumped through in order to get beast to run on 128k of RAM.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

And I contest the claim he invented point and click or click and drag or barf and fart or whatever: WTF were Alan Kay and his friends doing with their mice at PARC? Whistling Dixie?

Just look at the pic Raskin has of himself on his website and you know he's a loser.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

I think his problem is hemorrhoids.

Re:Not jaded at all

[Anonymous Coward]

> after Jef had complained about Steve's leadership

I read the article at the Guardian and knew I didn't like the guy - or rather that the guy wasn't likeable.

I clicked through to his website and knew immediately I was right.

Now I read the above and I'm even more convinced. This guy is bad news. Probably has piles, as someone else suggested.

Re:Not jaded at all

[mooncaine]

That would be Macus Nostalgius, I think. LOL. Love it.

Note that this creature, however you spell its name, would be responsible for that infamous propaganda film, "Dr. Crashlove, or How I Learned To Save Often and Love The Bomb Icon."

GUI design

[BWJones]

Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice. At that point, I will evaluate it but for now, I will stick with OS X. Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers. I know how to use computers and have found very efficient workflows that allow tremendous amounts of work to be accomplished (except when posting to Slashdot of course) using current computer interface designs. The current way of doing business with GUI's is somewhat efficient for noobies, quite efficient for intermediate users, and the GUI combined with the CLI is very efficient for advanced users. By the way, the combined GUI and CLI is done quite nicely in OS X.

Also, Raskin's complaints about Windows and OS X being similar could come down to other explanations: 1) convergent evolution or 2) Microsoft blatantly ripped off Apple in look and feel and continues to do so. I am inclined to believe both options as there are simply efficient ways of interfacing with computers in a GUI paradigm. That said, how many times have we seen MacOS features show up in Windows some time later? I am by no means suggesting they are equivalent however. OS X is so much better than Windows in terms of function and interface, but Windows has made huge strides in the last few years, although I do find myself applying the "standard" Windows scheme on my XP machines.

Re:GUI design

[IAmTheDave]

Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now.

This is an interesting point - we have had, in essence, the same UI experience since Windows 3.x, GeoWindows, and the original Apple user interfaces - it's all, at this point - increased productivity features and eye candy.

Moving away from this UI-locked experience requires radically different thought. While not touting the technology-forward-seeing abilities of movie producers and directors, you'll notice that most "UI" in future computers stand more for "User Interaction" than "User Interface" - that is, interaction becomes more integrated with daily life. Computers track eye movements, "read" thoughts, anticipate needs, and almost always have overly-simplistic and well thought out data displays (my favorites are displays on panes of glass.)

Point is, as pretty as the Mac OSX interface is (and it is...) making it prettier and reevaluating the decades-old principals of PC user interfaces and user interactions are completely different topics.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

"although I do find myself applying the "standard" Windows scheme on my XP machines."

And what does that prove?

Re:GUI design

[GR1NCH]

Personally, I think all the arguements about user interfaces and ease of use are stupid. I think its more of a matter of what you have used in the past and are comfortable with in the long run. Personally I started off with DOS and Windows 3.1 and for me the migration to Win95 and WinXP were pretty easy. At this point I find most Mac GUI's confusing. But it's not because WinXP is more user friendly, its just because I'm used to all the things I've become comfortable with in WinXP. Same thing goes for linux, when I first transfered to linux, it was hard to use. After a short time it was incredibly comfortable. And after using Linux for several years with various Window Managers, going back to the XP system was even hard. Anyway, my point is the GUI's out there may be different, but all this crap about ease of use is exactly that... crap.

Re:GUI design

[Duke Thomas]

Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.

He did, though it was a long time ago. See information on Raskin's Canon Cat. It would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

It proves that Windows XP interface design sucks and that end users would prefer things the old inefficient way they were rather than use the new crappy interface of XP.

Re:GUI design

[Amiga Lover]

Raskin parades on about a few things, one is his newer UI theories on making things simple and easy to use, and another is complaining about systems that are "bloated", where a simple text editor is half a meg, for example.

I think the credibility of his opinions comes into questions when he's put his theories into code, and they just end up a clumsy mess of UI that's painfully difficult to use, and he actually develops these ideas as code so damn slowly, because he's still using the archaic development methods that make for efficient results but long coding time.

Sure, something like Mozilla for example, may be far far bigger and less hyper-fast than it would be if it were written in assembler, but better to get it out, usable, completely workable and oversized in a couple of years than still be waiting for the same features for another decade while development goes along at the same sluggish pace that was OK in 1984, when apps were simple because RAM, cpu speed and storage space were at an utter premium.

Re:GUI design

[William Tanksley]

You don't have to rely on your impression of him, or consider a *possibility* that his ideal machine might be different than what we have now. You could instead read what he's written, but for free on his website and in his book; you could download his "The Humane Editor" and play with the second draft of his ideal interface.

And your claim that Jef designs interfaces for novices is purely ignorant. Jef designs interfaces almost completely without regard for novices; all of his calculations are designed to ensure ease of use, NOT ease of learning. He does give lip service (and work) to ease of learning, but all the math calculates and optimizes actual ongoing ease of _use_.

-Billy

Re:GUI design

[saider]

That's not so much as an interface, as a layout. You still use your mouse or keyboard to navigate a "desktop" which represents the paradigm that most people are familiar with. Jef is implying that a new paradigm is needed (although I don't agree).

The issues you stated are simply organizational issues. For instance, You know how to set up a printer, and most GUI's do well to present all the relevant information to you. You just need to know where to click to get that widget to appear. Same thing with menus. They have different names and such, but they all behave the same (click on it and it expands).

In that respect, MacOS, Windows, and Linux (with the appropriate window manager) are all the same.

Re:GUI design

[Chief Typist]

Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers.

This is an important thing that I think Jef and many other UI researchers are missing. There aiming at an old target -- back in the 80's there were a lot of people who didn't know how to use a computer. Having a PC at home or school was rare.

These days, there are kids who have never known what it's like to live in a house without a computer. Or a school that has a computer lab. Like learning a language, it becomes second nature as you grow up. You get to the point where you don't even know that you know it.

As time passes, the proportion of the population that "gets it" becomes much larger than the part that needs a simpler UI.

Of course, there will always be people that need dead simple UI, and it's appropriate for many specialized interfaces (e.g. the iPod.) But it seems to me that research towards more complicated UIs (and how to manage the complexity) would be a better course -- that's where the "computing population" is headed.

-ch

Re:GUI design

[Amiga Lover]

> Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has
> failed the interface test.

I should also add that back in 1984, the idea of an 'intuitive' interface was absolutely central to the success of the mac.

Nowadays, there's no marketing the mac to a world that doesn't know how to use computers, that world barely exists. Kids are trained to use them just by their very saturation in everyday life, that by the time they're 10 that "intuition" in the form of translating common real world tasks to a computer's onscreen actions is meaningless now. The computer itself IS something people are used to in the first place. Ever felt like doing a /me in real conversation?

Re:GUI design

[_Sprocket_]

In that respect, MacOS, Windows, and Linux (with the appropriate window manager) are all the same.

Sometimes subtle things make a big difference. On my WinXP box at work, I've had to install various 3rd party apps to try and duplicate common Linux desktop behaviors (virtual desktops, rolling windows, sloppy focus, etc.). I was kind of suprised at how annoyed I was when I didn't have those features.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

That's bullshit. Try reading about Raskin's opinions on user interfaces before critizising him. A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.

My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now. If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.

He is doing it. It's called The Humane Interface, and you can download it from sourceforge and give it a try.

Given that some strengths of this interface are the same which make the CLI a good tool for advanced users, you should at ponder about it for a while.

If you believe that the current GUIs is "quite efficient" for intermediate users then you have not seen many of then doing something even a little bit complex. This quote from the interview perfectly resumes the real situation:

" There has been immense progress, primarily in the richness of applications. But all this power is lost on many people, and impedes the utility of it for the rest, because of the unnecessary complexity of using computers. "

You have to bear in mind that the human brain is a processor with limited power, it's main bottleneck being it's small short-term memory. Also the Input/Output protocols are constrained by perceptive capabilities. A guy who promotes design ing software optimized for this restrictions is worthy of some respect, moreover given that he is able to provide some actual solutions.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

You're saying that his opinions on user interface theory are not valid because of his practice as a software developer is not top-notch?

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

But it seems to me that research towards more complicated UIs (and how to manage the complexity)

And that's just what Jef Raskin's doing in his daily job. Your point is?

Re:GUI design

[jsebrech]

Raskin has been suggesting for years now that the MacOS has failed the interface test. My impression is that he would prefer an entirely different machine that may perhaps be radically different than what we have now.

I doubt it. I think he wants some simple principles to be acknowledged. Like having a self-documenting interface (which doesn't mean context-sensitive help, but an interface which makes it obvious how to do what you want to do), or like designing an application for the user, instead of for the computer (by starting with the interface, and building a backend to serve it, instead of the other way around), or like actually teaching UI design principles in CS courses, which way too often isn't done at all. That last thing is a bit like teaching someone how to build an airplane and leaving out how to do the cockpit. Yes, your plane might be technically excellent and very capable, but it'll be a PITA to fly. Same thing for computer software.

I think raskin is pissed off that overall productivity for office workers hasn't improved all that much in the last few decades, despite the computer being hailed as a revolution for productivity, because UI design is still largely an afterthought, and building software from the user down instead of from the hardware up is looked at as a ridiculous idea by a lot of programmers.

I'll agree though that he should put up or shut up.

Re:GUI design

[jdreed1024]

Also, Raskin's complaints about Windows and OS X being similar could come down to other explanations: 1) convergent evolution or 2) Microsoft blatantly ripped off Apple in look and feel and continues to do so. I am inclined to believe both options as there are simply efficient ways of interfacing with computers in a GUI paradigm.

Seriously. The fact is, user interfaces are rapidly standardizing on all platforms, simply because people are gravitating towards what consumers like.

And really, wanking about the user interface is pointless. The average consumer doesn't give a rat's ass, they just want to know whether it can run "The Internet" and maybe the latest first person shooter game.

The power users also don't give a rat's ass about the interface, because they can probably customize it to look how they want it to look.

The biggest thing OS X has going for it that no other OS has is Xcode. How many other operating systems come with a full-featured extensible IDE with a built-in API reference for a bunch of languages (no more firing up Google, or digging out an O'Reilly book), auto-completition/"CodeSense", object modeling, seamless GUI debugging, and much much more? Certainly not XP - VisualStudio is still insanely expensive. And none of the GUI IDEs I've seen on Linux come even close to what Xcode can do. And it's free.

I have started doing all my C/C++/ObjC/Java development in Xcode, now that CodeSense works in Java. I can develop Java apps with two targets - one that creates a JAR to run anywhere, the other that creates a native OS X application bundle that uses the Aqua PLAF for Swing. The learning curve is a little steep, but it's well worth it. And it's flexible - if I can't find a way to do something in the IDE, I can write a "Shell Script" build phase that does anything I can do in a shell script (it uses a shebang to execute the shell, so you can use shells other than bash if you want). And while it has a shiny GUI debugger, which can be very helpful, if you're one of those "real men don't use IDEs" types, you just open up the log window, and you're right there at a GDB (or JDB, if you're using Java) prompt.

For the first time since 1984, MacOS is the easiest platform in the world to develop for. By making all their customizations as layers on top of standard APIs, they make it trivial to transition code. Any project using gcc/ld/make or autoconf will "just work" on OS X (assuming the code is portable to begin with, but that's a different problem). But with a little effort, you can import it into Xcode if you want a better development environment. Any Java Swing/AWT application will look and feel just like it does on other platforms, however by passing a few directives to the JRE, you can give it an Aqua look and feel, and with a bit of effort, you can add MacOS specific things like Spell Checking and Speech in such a way as to keep your code portable. (Those featuers just won't be available elsewhere). And by giving away the developer tools for free, they've removed the entry barriers for that market (CodeWarrior was non-cheap). I'm sure some people will say it's bait-and-switch, and Apple will start charging for Xcode soon while giving gcc away for free. I sincerely hope that won't be the case, but the .mac precedent was not encouraging. OTOH, developing Xcode can be looked at as a one-time cost each year/each new version, whereas .mac was actually costing bandwidth everytime someone used it.

Re:GUI design

[Beautyon]

Jef Raskin Title Image
Download THE
Download an Alpha Version of The Humane Environment

This is a very alpha release of THE. It runs on Mac OS 9 and on OS X under Classic (you may have to uninstall the CarbonLib extension).

Uh oh. Ease of use begins with ease of installation. Also, while in nitpicking mode, the writing on this page is apalling. For example, the editors name is shortened to THE, which reads as the word "the" when it should be written as T.H.E. or just typed out in its entirety. Had to read it more than once; very poor.

What is for sure is this; great ideas explode onto the software scene and are adopted very quickly. Ask the guy who created Konfabulator. Its pointless to talk about how something is wrong; especially something as good as OSX. Its much more useful and positive to create the alternative that you desire.

This editor sounds interesting; I wonder 1) why it only runs in classic mode, and 2) why everyone hasnt leapt on its concepts the way that they leap onto other great software metaphors.

Re:GUI design

[shrykk]

"although I do find myself applying the "standard" Windows scheme on my XP machines."

Yeah, me too. Windows XP seems stable and very usable to me (c.f. Win95 etc) but there are strange backward steps.
1. The Windows XP start menu is just stupid, especially if you use the keyboard a lot.
2. I just started using XP Pro at work, and Alt-Tab task switching is practically broken. When you hit Alt-Tab to switch programs, the task switcher comes up and starts drawing a little thumbnail of the active application (instead of just the icon). This means just switching back to the last active window takes about half a second on my machine. (Anyone know if it can be set back to the old grey box with the icon in it?)

BTW, my colleagues are trying to persuade me to get a Mac. I don't know much about 'em, but they do seem to inspire loyalty.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

> You're saying that his opinions on user interface theory are
> not valid because of his practice as a software developer is not
> top-notch?

Did you even read the OPs comment?

Re:GUI design

[pavon]

Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers.

Having read his book, I don't think that that is the case at all. The main thrust of his dream OS is to get rid of a certain class of errors (modal errors) which cause problems, regardless of your skill level. Infact the more you become familiar with the system the worse they get. A perfect example of this is shortcut keys. I have to use a half dozen text editors in windows, (for various IDEs etc), each of which has keyboard shortcuts. After using an interface for a while you get used to it and the actions become reflexive. So I find myself constantly hitting the wrong shortcut key in the wrong program. Is find Ctrl-F, Ctrl-S, or Ctrl-E, F3, or Shift-F3? I reflexively hit Ctrl-F, to find myself with a forwarded email or error message. The Mac is better because more of the shortcuts are standardized and more applications actually follow them, but I still run into the error. These errors decrease my productivity slightly, but more importantly they make using the computer frustrating. It is impossible not to develop a reflex when you use an interface often, and when that reflex betrays me, and the computer does not do what I expected because someone swapped the gas and brake pedals out from under me, it makes me agrivated. So that is his primary vision - not necisarrily to make computers easier or more efficient but more pleasant. Concidering how much stress there is concerning computers even among people who know how to use them, I think that this is a laudable goal.

But in addition to that I also get the impression that he is overly obsessed with perfection in interface efficiency and elegence. Think of the kind of person who will spend days hand coding assembly, even when the same program written in python still has tons of CPU cycles to spare. His current prototype project to implement his OS seems bogged down in optimizing the low level atomic user interactions. Theortically, some of these changes will let me work faster, but in reality, my limiting factor when typeing is not how fast my fingers move, but how fast my brain words and rewords what I want to say. The same for 2D and 3D graphics.

His arguments in this article are also primarily esthetic - OS X is very complicated and no-one will every understand it all. It is the age old argument between an elegant, small well-designed system, and an amalgemation of existing parts which does the same tasks, but is 10 times more complex because it carries the baggage of compatibility.

I sympathize with his desires, but I don't know that complete elegance will ever win out over ugly practibility. Elegant systems are a joy to use for tasks that mesh with the flexibility built into the system, but once one needs to do something that doesn't quite fit the system, the grand design becomes an obsticle instead of a help, and those loosely bound, ugly amalgamations begin to look more appealing for the absolute freedom that they provide.

Re:GUI design

[porter235]

If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.

He is! Well, not an OS yet but check out The Humane Environment project.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is so, Raskin should go out and create his OS of choice.

He has.

Re:GUI design

[geg81]

Also, Raskin's complaints about Windows and OS X being similar could come down to other explanations: 1) convergent evolution or 2) Microsoft blatantly ripped off Apple in look and feel and continues to do so

There's a third explanation: neither of them is original and they are both slightly different commercial implementations of systems that have been around since the 1970's. If you go back and read the original ideas by people like Kay, you'll see that there is very little new on either the Mac or Windows.

Re:GUI design

[rikkards]

The thumbnail means you have one of the Power toys installed. Normally all you get is the icon from a default install.

Re:GUI design

[nlper]

A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.

Are you freakin' nuts? What Raskin wanted to create in the original Macintosh project was, essentially, the Canon Cat. No mouse, no GUI, no 32-bit CPU. In short, an information appliance rather than a computer, and something no one would ever recognize as a Macintosh. He lost a power struggle with Jobs early on, when his Mac team was a half-dozen people, and left Apple.

Viz, www.folklore.org

I think history has pretty much spoken on the viability of his design choices, especially the relative success of the Cat vs the Mac's GUI. Ask yourself this, if those leap keys were such a breakthrough in the UI, why hasn't something analogous caught on in the last two decades?

Tyler

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to move away from a mass-accepted design. The QWERTY keyboard (originally designed to slow down the typing) is still the 99.9999999% choice, over the "faster more efficient DVORAK"

Re:GUI design

[R.Caley]

A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least [that you read his opinions].

You mean adapted the Xerox interface for the Mac?

A guy who promotes design ing software optimized for [human] restrictions is worthy of some respect,

True, but I'm not sure I agree with his reading of what those restrictions are. For instance, the assumption that people can not efficiantly deal with multiple things at once (the main assumption which makes using a Mac painful, with click-to-type-and-raise and the use-one-application-then-swap arangement) is clearly bogus as anyone who has seen a parent looking after two children while cooking and talking on the phone knows. Perhaps narrow concentration is just a common feature of technical people and psychologists resulting in over-generalisation.

On the other hand, his model of operations and dislike of modes at least puts him on the side of the angels in the vi vs. emacs wars.:-)

Re:GUI design

[schemanista]

How about the Xwindows "select-copy" feature.

I miss that more than anything when I'm working in Windows.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have pointed out, Jef is creating a system based on the principles documented in his book and the sourceforge site. Part of the point is that there shouldn't be a learning curve consisting of figuring out what the most efficient worflow is to accomplish a task.

A certain homogeneity lends itself to both ease of use and ease of learning. What's the point of having incredibly powerful machined and sophisted applications if I have to learn the quirks of each one? We're used to this because we've been doing it for so long. It's amazing that after all this time text editing requires different user actions in all the applications in which we edit text.

Both the Apple and Microsoft platforms suffer from this, which I think was his point in comparing them.

Re:GUI design

[dijjnn]

While i don't agree that Raskin should spend his time creating his own OS (i think it's a mistake to think that he needs to start an OS project from scratch), i do agree that he might put his money where his mouth is, so to speak, and maybe do some work with a freedesktop.org project, or something along those lines (i don't know how F&OSS savvy he is).

It's frustrating to read about usability because heretofore most of what i've seen done is criticism without proactive guidelines other than those formed thus: "Don't do X."

Re:GUI design

[ViolentGreen]

I doubt it. I think he wants some simple principles to be acknowledged. Like having a self-documenting interface (which doesn't mean context-sensitive help, but an interface which makes it obvious how to do what you want to do), or like designing an application for the user,

I believe that that is the goal of all operating system UIs. The problem is that it is a gradual processes that takes a lot of time. Windows XP is much better at this than DOS was and the same goes for Gnome/KDE and the bash prompt. It's not something that you can research and then develop. You have to build on what's already out there and working while innovating.

instead of for the computer (by starting with the interface, and building a backend to serve it, instead of the other way around), or like actually teaching UI design principles in CS courses, which way too often isn't done at all

The CS program that I was a part of actually tought a course on UI design. It was always stressed to do the opposite of what you are suggesting. There are definite benifits to both. Doing the UI first provides clear direction along with a user-centric approach. It would cause the backend to focus only on the needed functions and make it harder to expand on the next release. Doing the backend first means that you aren't constrained to any preexisting UI ideas on how things should work. The downside of course is that you have to "fit" a UI to your application.

This is just observation from my personal (though somewhat limited) experience. I believe that you have to weigh the tradeoffs. The best way to ensure a great UI and backend is to ensure great internal and external communication though thats a little off topic.

Re:GUI design

[jmontana66]

The QWERTY keyboard (originally designed to slow down the typing)

That's not true. It was designed to stop the typewriter from jamming at high speeds, which actually ended up speeding up the typists.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

Ask yourself this, if those leap keys were such a breakthrough in the UI, why hasn't something analogous caught on in the last two decades?

You mean, something like incremental search in Firefox?

Re:GUI design

[ViolentGreen]

Yeah. Try disabling the "taskswitch.exe" (or something like that) service. I believe you can kill it from the process manage too. It was kind of cool (before expose) but the time it takes to draw the thumbs is inexcusable.

Re:GUI design

[dema]

These errors decrease my productivity slightly, but more importantly they make using the computer frustrating. It is impossible not to develop a reflex when you use an interface often, and when that reflex betrays me, and the computer does not do what I expected because someone swapped the gas and brake pedals out from under me, it makes me agrivated.

I really have trouble following that argument. I frequently work on both Windows and OS X and on occasion find myself typing control+key on OS X or alt+key on Windows. But doing that on accident has never "frustrated" me. And from what I have seen from averages users, most of them use the mouse and menus as opposed to keyboard shortcuts. So one could assume that frequently using keyboard shortcuts is more of a "power user" thing anyway. I just can't grasp how a simple accident like that can frustrate someone enough to say the GUI is lacking in some way.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Dvorak has never been proven to be faster or more efficient.

Re:GUI design

[William Tanksley]

Uh oh. Ease of use begins with ease of installation.

Well... I'm in a "defending Jef" mode, but I'll cut out of it a second to say that you're right; if their product doesn't improve a LOT I'll be very disappointed. For a while they only ran on Mac; then they added a Windows version that didn't run for me, then I got a Mac, and immediately they took down all the downloads and I've never seen them since.

But with that said, I don't expect as much from a development project as I do from a completed product.

-Billy

Re:GUI design

[aichpvee]

A guy who invented the Mac interface deserves at least that.

Yeah, and we deserve an apology from him for all the whining lusers he unleashed on the world!

Re:GUI design

[schvenk]

You are both right and wrong. "Ease of use" is a deceptively simple term that encompasses a number of important things including how easy a product is to learn; how efficiently an experienced user can use it; and how quickly an inexperienced user can become an experienced user. The new users who will have the hardest time are often those who are used to a similar product. Sometimes designers have to trade off these various factors against one another. But they're all worth considering and certainly a product can be better or worse in any category. You may get used to one OS or another over time, but that doesn't mean you'll be equally efficient using each, or that each will take the same amount of time to adapt to.

Re:GUI design

[Edie O'Teditor]

and the original Apple user interfaces

No such thing. Perhaps you mean the original Xerox ones?

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Raskin DID create his own UI after he left Apple and it flopped ....

Re:GUI design

[Edie O'Teditor]

The QWERTY keyboard [...] is still the 99.9999999% choice

If more than 0.0000001% of the world's computer users live in France or Germany or Russia or $WHEREVER then you're probably wrong.

Re:GUI design

[Edie O'Teditor]

I'll raise you the "whole word select" feature.

Re:GUI design

[schvenk]

I've also read his book, and found it alternately worthwhile and very frustrating. A lot of the basic principles he talks about -- such as the issues of modality mentioned by the previous poster -- are important, well-supported, and can in some cases be implemented within the current GUI framework.

However, he goes on to design what he calls the Humane Interface, and suddenly many of his arguments are based on sweeping statements that I have trouble taking at face value and that aren't well-supported. For example, he proposes doing away with folders, filenames, and indeed separate files altogether and allowing users to find whatever they need via an incremental search of their disks. Incremental search is useful, but I have trouble believing that most users would be able to remember the content, let alone the exact wording, of every document they wrote. I certainly find things myself according to where I put them (i.e. what folder, sub-folder, etc.).

For users who like hierarchies (who he feels are few), he proposes a system of pages, documents, and folders based on various numbers of page breaks. (Two for a document boundary, 3 for a folder boundary, etc.) To me this seems like shifting the burden of maintaining a filesystem onto the user to create the technical simplicity of a single document, and without empirical evidence I have trouble believing it's a good idea.

He goes on to add a zooming user interface to his system. I like ZUIs and think they're a neat way to browse hierarchies. But in the preceding chapters he has done away with hierarchical structure, and thus in adding a ZUI he is effectively adding a dual structure to his filesystem. Again, this seems to be increasing the burden on users' minds by asking them to track two parallel structures to their data.

As has already been pointed out by others, it also seems a bit odd that, in the end, so much of his book is devoted to scrapping the GUI in favor of something similar to the Canon Cat.

I agree with most of what Mr. Raskin has to say in this interview. Computers are inefficient and bloated. (I think the 1000-page manual example is a bad one, since the existence of numerous features is not in itself a problem for users uninterested in them.) User interfaces can be easier to learn and more efficient. Modern operating systems are converging on a GUI standard, which is great for cross-platform use but isn't pushing user interface innovation forward. In all these things he's dead on, and certainly not alone. But he seems to think he's found the answer, and I question whether he really has.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know what "leap keys" are? Apparently not.

Re:GUI design

[Fred_A]

[ ... ] but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.

Sounds like he belongs on slashdot.

Re:GUI design

[IAmTheDave]

Touche.

Re:GUI design

[CAIMLAS]

Reguardless of his irrelevance, it's good that he's making these statements. It provides an exchange of ideas and criticism, and allows others to create creative solutions to any potential flaws in the current mechanisms.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Canon cat anyone? And I think he was a forth fan at one stage....so is the world better now that forth has fallen below the radar of the average /.er ?

Re:GUI design

[tbone1]

Sometimes subtle things make a big difference. On my WinXP box at work, I've had to install various 3rd party apps to try and duplicate common Linux desktop behaviors (virtual desktops, rolling windows, sloppy focus, etc.). I was kind of suprised at how annoyed I was when I didn't have those features.

Now you know how I feel about OS X and especially Expose. I don't know how many times I go to hit F9, F10, or F11 at work ... which is a pity when I'm in our Oracle forms.

Re:GUI design

[mslinux]

"This is an interesting point - we have had, in essence, the same UI experience since Windows 3.x, GeoWindows, and the original Apple user interfaces - it's all, at this point - increased productivity features and eye candy."

This is true in the western world... Americans tend to forget that there are billions of people in the world who aren't familiar with western culture, business, capitalism and modern business ideas (all of which make sense to western computer users). Go to Africa and show them a modern OS desktop. They won't understand the concept of folders and files regardles of how pretty they look... how does a GUI designer make a general purpose UI that all cultures can use and comprehend? I think that's what Jef is getting at.

Re:GUI design

[timster]

is that the same incremental search that's been in emacs since days of yore?

Obviously that is nice for searching, but that's hardly a fundamental UI feature.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

I do. Thats what I post. If you dont understand my point, its your problem.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

But the difference is that in The Humane Environment it IS fundamental, since it replaces the mouse in cursor movement. T.H.E. is an interface designed around this feature to take full advantage of it, thats why you havent seen it been being successful in other systems. (Except in a limited way inside Firefox, where the similar search-in-links allows for easily browsing the web without a mouse, and people see this as a revolutionary and very marketable feature).

Re:GUI design

[thejoelpatrol]

The Humane Interface is fine as a thought provoking word processor, but not much else. The GUI we know and love may not be the most efficient, but it works pretty well for most people. After trying THI, I did indeed find the leap functions useful, but I really don't think it's for everyone. MS Word is not very hard to use for basic things; you just click where you want to type. My grandmother, who I imagine Raskin would like to help, had enough trouble figuring this out, so imagine her trying to correct a mistake or scroll down a page by using strange keyboard commands that she might mistype. The GUI is perhaps not the most efficient way to word process, but it is an understandable way for most people to do the things they need. Leaping around iTunes? What's the point? Trying to select a playlist and then a song using Raskin's "efficient" ideas would probably results in so many incorrect choices that just clicking on the damn thing would end up being faster over time. The modern computer does what we need with generally a low level of hassle.

Re:GUI design

[Chief Typist]

Your point is?

My point is that instead of looking at different input and control mechanisms, they should be focusing on managing the huge amounts of data that we are generating.

THE does nothing for me. It's like telling me that a Dvorak keyboard is more efficient -- I'd agree with you wholeheartedly, but would never find myself using it. I've already got too much ingrained knowledge.

And there's a whole generation that has learned the current mechanisms. Good luck getting them to change.

If you gave me something "additive" that respected my preferred working environment, then I'd be much more open to the change. Give me something that makes it easy to work with the long term storage (given my propensity for working with short term memory.)

Work with reality -- don't assume that you have a blank slate on which to develop. Anything that's going to be successful will be evolutionary, not revolutionary.

-ch

Re:GUI design

[jmontana66]

No. It was designed to stop *jamming*. It was not designed to slow down typing. I'm not arguing that a QWERTY keyboard is good current design; I'm just trying to stop that "QWERTY was designed to slow down typing" myth from propogating any further.

Re:GUI design

[jp10558]

Incremental search is useful, but I have trouble believing that most users would be able to remember the content, let alone the exact wording, of every document they wrote. I certainly find things myself according to where I put them (i.e. what folder, sub-folder, etc.).

Well, I used to feel the same way, until I started using the quick find for bookmarks in Opera. I used to try and remember, ok that coding page - did I put that in my top level list, or my computer info folder, maybe my class work folder...

You could say I'm disorganized, but also - some things fit into different folders depending on how you are looking at it today. With quickfind I just start typing something that would be in the bookmark name like C++ for instance, and there it is, likely along with other bookmarks related to the topic (and some that don't fit but nothing's perfect).

More and more I'm also abandoning folders on my hard drives for organization. I just cannot remember if I have that document in my work - word pro folder, or if it's in my FTP server, or maybe in whoevers directory I want to read it, or it might be on the desktop or whatever... Now I run a search. It often takes less time than me looking through all my folders myself.

Re:GUI design

[pavon]

My reaction to the book was simular to yours. The idea that captured my imagination the most was the concept of getting rid of applications all together and creating a system architecture based on documents and tools that operate on those documents. There are so many aspects of this idea that would cause it to be a very powerfull and flexible system.

For example, he proposes doing away with folders, filenames, and indeed separate files altogether and allowing users to find whatever they need via an incremental search of their disks

I understood the reasoning for this. One of his axioms was that you should never have to manually save a file, that it continuously trickles the changes you made to disk, as you make them. I whole heartedly agree with this principle, and have ideas about how to simplify this task for developers. Given that, you need to have someplace to save documents before they are given a name, or any other sort of label, so the idea of saving them in situ in the ZUI world solves that problem nicely.

For users who like hierarchies (who he feels are few), he proposes a system of pages, documents, and folders based on various numbers of page breaks ... But in the preceding chapters he has done away with hierarchical structure, and thus in adding a ZUI he is effectively adding a dual structure to his filesystem.

The first system he was explaining is what the Cannon Cat used, and was effectively just a big scroll with new documents treated more like subsections of a bigger document. I share your disdain for this system. However, the way I read it, the ZUI he suggested later was presented as a seperate idea in place of, not dual to, the first one. In that case, the hierarchical ZUI would be the only file system organization.

I am skeptical of the ZUI. I have never had a chance to use one - perhaps if I did it might chage my mind. But it seems to me that if users have difficulty organizing files now, that having what is essentually a hierachical file system, with the added burden of sizing and laying out files graphicly, would not make things easier. It seems like a nice interface for tasks like the hospital example, where someone took the time to layout the file system once, and then it stayed that way for years, but does not look practical for users that would be constantly adding documents on a day to day basis.

Furthermore, you will always have the case where you need to work with multiple documents that are not stored in the same directory (not near each other in the ZUI) and I haven't seen any way of doing that that is as fast or easy as the current overlaping window managers that are used in traditional WIMP interfaces.

It is interesting that so many UI experts are of the opinion that filenames and directories are a complete failure for the average user. All the people that I know organize their files just fine this way. I need to get around to reading the studies that cause them to feel this way.

Anyway it seems to me that a good comprimise to the autosave/filename problem would be to maintain the traditional overlapping windows interface and automatically save documents to the current workspace (as Linux WM's define workspace), and have these workspaces maintained across logouts and power cycles. Then as a workspace became cluttered the user could file documents at his leisure in either nested directories, or a more advanced database store (interface would be like email or mp3 jukebox, except the users supplied the metadata) depending on his needs. You can get all the benifits of the non-modal application-free architecture without radically changing the basic way we store and access documents.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry ChiefTypist, you're wrong.

Raskin isn't shooting for ease of use; he's shooting for PRODUCTIVITY.

As in uninterrupted workflow. No having to reach for the mouse when you are, ahem, typing. Not having to invoke a separate search tool. Not having to dive into a filesystem to find a document you need right at the moment. Just working and producing, uninterrupted by the tool you use for that (the computer).

That's what the Macintosh, Canon Cat, and THE have (progressively) been all about.

Re:GUI design

[swdunlop]

That would be the one that only builds and runs on pre-X MacOS, and hasn't shown any appreciable change in two years?

The Cat was a great device, and there's no argument that Raskin was a great contributor, back in the 80's.. But, since then, he's been little more than a pundit.

Re:GUI design

[schvenk]

Interesting. Ultimately though, the question is not, "Do I use hierarchies?" or "Do you use search?" but:
- Do people naturally use one or the other, a combination of both, or something else?
- What combination of structures and information-finding mechanisms will best serve users?
- What is the best balance between variety and simplicity?

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares about proof? I type faster and more efficiently in Dvorak than in qwerty. I also find it more comfortable. That's enough for me.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Africa and show them a modern OS desktop. They won't understand the concept of folders and files regardles of how pretty they look...

They will if you explain it to them. It's really not all that complex.

Re:GUI design

[schvenk]

My reaction to the book was simular to yours. The idea that captured my imagination the most was the concept of getting rid of applications all together and creating a system architecture based on documents and tools that operate on those documents. There are so many aspects of this idea that would cause it to be a very powerfull and flexible system.

It does seem like a good idea. And actually, Apple tried it with OpenDoc. OpenDoc's failure may not mean the idea is bad, though. But I do question it a little. Seems like we do work in the physical world based on concepts of documents and of tools, i.e. "that note I'm writing" and "the pencil I'm writing it with." Which is more important? What's an appropriate way of relating the two? I don't know. I'd like to see some good research on it.

One of his axioms was that you should never have to manually save a file, that it continuously trickles the changes you made to disk, as you make them.

I agree with his axiom, but I don't think it requires a different way of doing things. There are multiple ways it could be implemented without eliminating filenames (a rather simple one might be a "New Documents" folder on your desktop, but I'm sure one could do better). Not to say we shouldn't investigate, but without further evidence I don't think we should simply discard the possibility that names for things are useful.

I agree with your concerns about ZUIs. I've used and even designed for ZUIs and I think they can be very compelling, and are useful in a number of situations because of how well they represent a hierarchy and provide feedback for its relationships. However, the issues you cite seem reasonable and aren't something I recall Raskin addressing. I'd like to see this use of the ZUI addressed by thorough empirical testing.

It is interesting that so many UI experts are of the opinion that filenames and directories are a complete failure for the average user. All the people that I know organize their files just fine this way. I need to get around to reading the studies that cause them to feel this way.

I won't be so arrogant as to claim to be a UI expert, but I do do UI design for a living, and I'm not at all convinced that files and directories are a complete failure. I can think of some issues in their representation, but that doesn't mean we should toss them out. I, too, would like to see some research evaluating their effectiveness.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Jeff, but you appear to be concerned with designing interfaces for folks that do not know how to use computers.

Isn't that the point?

Is there any other device in your house that's so complex you have to learn how to use it, before you can do anything with it? ("Hey mom, can you come show me how to watch the 5 o'clock news on your TV?") Your car, perhaps, but even those aren't very difficult to use. And there's more risk: if you screw up, people die.

The current way of doing business with GUI's is somewhat efficient for noobies, quite efficient for intermediate users, and the GUI combined with the CLI is very efficient for advanced users.

But you don't have any other data points to compare it with. All you're saying is "computers get easier to use when you know more about them" -- duh. Is the current system "very efficient for advanced users" when compared with a zooming user interface? (I don't know, but it doesn't seem to have any meaning to say something is "very efficient" when none of the alternatives have been tried.)

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

> Dvorak has never been proven to be faster or more efficient.

Speeds are comparable, but Dvorak is in fact more efficient. Your fingers move about 3 times the distance when typing with QWERTY.

See: http://members.networld.com/dvorak/Dvorak_vs_qwert y_keyboard_tests.htm

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

> Anyway, my point is the GUI's out there may be different, but all this crap about ease of use is exactly that... crap.

It's not *all* crap, some of it is stuff I struggle with every day. Windows, for example, lets programs steal the focus from the user-- I can't count the number of times I've been typing something into a dialog box, and some background app takes the focus without even opening a window, and interrupts my typing.

On the classic Mac OS, this *never* happened!

Re:GUI design

[natd]

Computers track eye movements, "read" thoughts, anticipate needs,

I hope that day never comes. Our HR dept has very strict anti-pr0n policies.

Re:GUI design

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, thank you MythMaster, but if what you are saying is true:
a) Typing too quickly resulted in the typewriter jamming
b) QWERTY was designed to stop typists hitting keys so quickly in succession that the typewriter jammed
c) "hitting the keys" is known as "typing".

Capiche?

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

The word-processor capabilities of THE are not the whole picture. You have to combine it with Zoomworld, the graphical paradigm intended to replace the desktop metaphor.

This interface is described in The Humane Interface book. It is basically a spatial, non-windowing interface: an infinite plane expanding in all directions and zoomable to infinite detail. Extra information is provided by "flying" closer to the inspected object. It has been tested in real world applications with remarkable success (people being able to use efficiently a radically new interface for a complex application -a multiple hospital timetable- in 10 minutes). Raskin's "efficient ideas" have been thoroughly tested after each iteration of design, so they're not as problematic as they seem.

As far as I can recall, browsing in this Zoomworld can be done with a mouse; leap functions would be used as a search facility. Also you have to remember that commands are entered in-point, just like with a CLI; so there's no need to "leap to" a menu entry in order to activate it. It's true that good typing skills for this are needed, though. But the overall point'n'click is still available, only without the annoying windows and without the inconsistencies between applications.

The only point that remains untested and which I doubt is the viability of this system as a multi-application environment; but given that the whole purpose of THE is to deprecate the "separate applications" view of the operating system, integrating functionalities from different providers should be a non traumatic process. And Mac OS X is testing this with its NeXT style application services, so the feasibility of the whole paradigm is being tested in an actual interface.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

The Zoomworld in The Humane Environment is the "additive" tool that you ask for for managing great volumes of intformation (see my reply to the other guy). Windows, modefullness and inconsistencies between applications are the nasties eliminated by this interface design, everything else which makes things easy for novice and advanced users in current GUIs is kept.

THE is built on the accumulated knowledge of 30 years of windowing lore. Since navigating the Zoomworld is somewhat similar to browsing the web, I don't foresee having unavoidable difficulties in adopting a this kind of interaction.

Re:GUI design

[TuringTest]

Just in case... There's a Flash demo of the Zoomworld available.

Re:GUI design

[jmontana66]

Okay, whatever. There are numerous articles debunking this myth, but since you can't be bothered to actually read any of them, I clearly can't change your mind. Plus, you know Italian, so you're clearly out of my league.

Accretion?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to look that word up

Re:Accretion?

[nano2nd]

..and you would have been modded "informative" if you'd only gone and pasted the definition into your comment!

Um, Yeah, but...

[BlkPanther]

Yeah, sure there are differences between OSX and WinXP, when you really pick it apart. But basically they have the same components, perform the same functions, and even look somewhat similar. The biggest difference I see is the underlying engine OSX uses *nix, where as XP uses an NT core, but this is mostly invisible to the users.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[green pizza]

where as XP uses an NT core

XP *is* NT.

Well, OK, XP is NT 5.1.

Windows 2000 (NT 5.0) is NT 4 with minor kernel updates and modern DirectX support. (I think NT 4 was limited to DX4!) There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.

Windows XP is NT 5.0 with minor kernel updates and a new appearance manager. There are also some minor control panel and admin application updates.

Interestingly, XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[TAGmclaren]

well, if you're talking about computer human interface (which we are, because this is about Jef Raskin), what you've said is not true. that's not what a review by Anand said when he reviewed his new PowerMac G5.

p.3 and p. 4 are particularly pertinent:

The fundamental difference between OS X and Windows is how applications and windows are handled. What OS X has going for it is uniformity between applications and windows; for example, the keyboard shortcut for the preferences dialog in any OS X application is Command and the "," key. So, regardless of what application you're in, the same keystroke combination will have the same expected effect - pretty useful.

Check the whole article out. There are some things he's got wrong, but not surprising for anyone whose just switched to a totally new platform.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[qodfathr]

Interestingly, XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop.

I'd use mod points, but there is no "uninformative" choice.

XP SP2 has no such feature! Granted, early betas of SP2 did have this feature, but it disappeared at least 6 month ago. This feature may live on in XP Media Center Edition 2004, as I hear it may be used to handle some multi-room a/v features, but it is certainly not a feature of XP Home SP2 or XP Professional SP2.

Now, if you really want this feature, you can mix and match an early beta version of one of the terminal server dll's with some registry and group policy changes, and get this to work, but you'd be violating the EULA if you did so. [Instructions are just a google away...]

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

XP SP2 has a very significant update: out-of-the-box support for multiple simultaneous users, via the local console and/or remote desktop

Substantiate this false claim, please.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget that NT started their numbering with 3.5...

So, if NT 3.5 really equals NT 1.0, then NT 4 = NT 2, 2000 = NT 3, and XP = NT 3.1

Why is 3.1 such a magic number for Microsoft?

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so one OS has more uniform key shortcuts - that makes the UIs totally different. OS X and XP are the same basic interface design with small, occasionally noticeable, differences. Shortcuts, colors and things most users never directly deal with - e.g., registry vs. packages - are refinements in the UI, not fundamental differences.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that the system for shortcuts in Mac is so much more efficient, that it constitutes a class difference rather than a quality difference.

On Windows, what button do you push to do a shortcut? Control? Alt? Windows-key?

The answer is "yes."

On the Mac, the command key does shortcuts, along with other keys only if they letter they want to use has already been taken. Control is used for right clicking. Option is used for inputting extended characters. This means that the registered r is an easier to remember option + r = ®, instead of some impossible combination of Alt and numbers. Similarly, the mere idea of alt+f4 & control+f4 instead of the easy to remember cmd+q & cmd+w makes me laugh.

Re:Um, Yeah, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ack! Cmd+W has to be one of the worst ideas ever. For one thing, it is rare enough that somebody wants to close a window without closing the app, that people should not have to make the distinction. If I hit Cmd+Q, it should close a window, or quit the app if there's only one window left. In Windows, I rarely ever need to know about Ctrl+F4 because that's only for MDI child windows which Macs don't even have. Fortunately Alt+F4 pretty much always does the right thing by closing a top level window, and causing the process to exit when it has no more top level windows left. There's nothing more frustrating that frantically double-clicking on a Mac app with nothing happening, only to realize that the app is already running but has no windows open -- and the only way to tell is to closely inspect the menu bar.

Seriously, the computer isn't about the OS or the application, it's about the function. When I first learned PageMaker, Cmd+W performed the extremely useful function of zooming out to show the Whole page. This was so useful, I probably used it a hundred or more times per day. Then one day they decided that Cmd+W should work like every other app and close the window. So now an operation that I do perhaps once or twice per day is taking up a useful keystroke, and the zoom to the whole page function was relegated to something harder to reach and harder to remember.

My point is that keyboard shortcuts should help you do things faster. That means they should be used for the most commonly performed operations, not the most commonly seen menu items. It's far more important that the application where I spend most of my time has the keys optimized to the functions I perform rather than having half the alphabet be unusable because somebody decided that they should be reserved.

What nobody at Apple thought of is that shortcut keys should be domain-specific, not global.
My PDF viewer doesn't allow editing, so it has no use for Undo, yet Cmd+Z is reserved for it, thus Zoom is relegated to Cmd+M.

My video editing software has little use for a Print function, but Cmd+P is already taken, so Preview (which is used every couple minutes) is stuck in some multi-shift wasteland.

In my text editor I frequently would like to Goto a certain line, but since Cmd+G is used for Find Again, Goto doesn't get a shortcut. This means the feature is a lot less useful to me because it's something I want to do quickly, not something where I want to waste time using a mouse.

aQazaQa

Boinc has a diffrent view

[stecoop]

The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.

That is quite odd of him to say. I just checked on seti@home, climate prediction and predictor@home via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists. Well maybe the distributed computings teams should hire Jef Raskin and his Amazing Basic programming abilities - right?

I think sometimes, you wake up for an interview and haven't had coffee yet and say things that are not quite what you intended - it happens to me all the time ya know...

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Anonymous Coward]

and you missed his point. Jeff is talking about BLOATED software, not seti, and not CPU performance. Jeff is talking about a simple program that now takes much longer to open files because they are filled with all sorts of information the user does not care about, etc. What he is saying is that a similar program that used to run on his Apple II executed it's much simpler tasks faster than today's counterpart. For a guy who focuses on simplicity, it comes as no surprise that he doesn't feel he needs faster CPUs.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[benhocking]

Yeah, I'm not buying it either. Certainly we all know where he's coming from - the boot up time on an old Apple II was faster than the boot up time on a modern Mac or PC. However, I cannot imagine how a useful program can be faster on an Apple II than any modern language on any modern hardware. I suspect he's taken the boot-up analogy and way over extended it.

I remember having an old program that calculated bifurcation trees that used to take 24 hours to complete on my old Compucolor II (which as you all know, was made by that wildly successful company Intecolor). When we got an Apple II, I ported it over to Apple Basic (from Compucolor Basic, the graphic commands of which are horrifyingly delicious) and got about a 20-fold increase in speed. Now I only had to wait a couple hours. If I run that same program today on a modern computer (using a modern language and a modern compiler) it finishes too quickly to time without using a timing macro. (I haven't run it in 5 years or so, and even then it was too fast to accurately time - less than a couple seconds, as I recall.) Granted, I might be misremembering some details, and I might have improved the efficiency of the program myself. However, it was a fairly simple program, so I'm not sure how I could have written it that inefficiently.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Octagon Most]

Of course Jef means programs written in Apple Basic and run on an original Apple or Apple II computer (i.e., simple programs on a simple computer platform). I suppose this was true partly because there was so little overhead then in terms of loading graphics, libraries, and such, as well as maintaining background processes and preemptively multitasking other applications. And the programs did so much less. Running an app written in BASIC on a primitive computer to print "Hello, World" can be faster than launching an app written in C++ under XP or OS X that does the same thing. As the application gets more complicated the modern faster hardware will eventually overcome the burden of the initial launch and the increased overhead and beat the old platform on a program that does the exact same thing. But that's all academic anyway since modern applications on modern computers usually do so much more. I think Jef is pining more for simplicity than the actual computers and OS of yore.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[russellh]

Remember hotjava? Sun's first introductino to java? we all made fun of it because hey, tic-tac-toe on expensive 1996 Sun hardware, at 1979 speeds. And it still looks like crap. Yet another new interface. What the hell have we done in the meantime? That's what Jef is talking about. Not scientific number crunching and transistor count.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations. You missed his point entirely. He's talking about the relative speed of operating systems, applications and processors, vs. the absolute growth in processor speed. It's quite obvious to any of us who've been around for a while, that, for example, this web-based text entry box is much slower than typing on a vic-20's console.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[RealAlaskan]

>>Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.

>That is quite odd of him to say.

Sounds plausible to me. Wordstar ran way faster on a Kaypro2 than it did on an IBM PC, despite the IBM having a more modern CPU and a 2.4-times-faster clock than the kaypro.

Wordstar on the original IBM PC (8 bit bus, 4.77MHz) was just as fast as Word on a P4 (32 bit bus, 1.8GHz) today. Except that the graphics have gotten a little better in the last 20 years, computers really haven't changed much for most of MS's customers, despite the clock rate being nearly 1000 times faster.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Djinh]

Right on!

While the Apple II we had in school was a hot piece of hardware back in the days, I would hate to have to use it to run Photoshop and do Unsharp Mask on some of my 200 MB scans...

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[AndroidCat]

But your application was still a crunching problem. He's always been oriented towards human-centric tasks like writing a letter. Adding a complex OS, vastly more powerful processor, more memory, etc, hasn't made that any easier. (And the endlessly growing feature lists of apps have probably made it harder.)

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Daengbo]

Yeah. My TRS-80 Model I (which predated the Apple II by just a little) could do a for 1 to 500 loop in a second. I think that same loop would be faster on modern hardware...

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Anonymous Coward]

One day all the extra processing power we have will eliminate "this software only runs on this ISA and operating system." It is inevitable and it is a good thing (Bill is not happy about this). Is java the answer? Small "probably" big "not."

If this is Jeff's point, (outside of your assertion I see no evidence), then he needs to understand that multiple ISAs and operating systems are part of the whole quagmire that a new user must contend with. While attempts at platform agnostic software will always run slower, increased processor speeds and the overall decrease in complexity for users and developers alike will eventually outpace any concern for speed.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[poot_rootbeer]

I just checked on seti@home, climate prediction and predictor@home via boinc, I don't see any Apple IIs on top of any lists.

Why do you assume that distributed computing projects are ideal candidates for measuring programming efficiency?

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[kisrael]

Seriously, I can't think of a good example of a program that meets the criteria, with a BASIC implementation that runs faster than on a modern system. And the BASIC version probably has a much worse, likely well-nigh-non-existent, UI.

Now, if he thought home computers no longer having an easy accessible powerful language available RIGHT THERE our of the box, I'd grant his point. But I don't see what he's on about with that quote.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[ElGuapoGolf]

I've been thinking something similar myself, and I think I've said it before, but what the hell, I'll say it again...

What's happened to computer software? In the end days of the C64/128 era there was GEOS. You had a full GUI environment, full WYSIWYG word processing, bitmapped printing, everything. Dropdown menus, icons, mice, desk accessories... The graphics were somewhat crude (how do you like your menus? Grey. Great, you're in luck), but they did the job. And considering the hardware limitations (320x200 I think, 64K of memory, a 1.06mhz 6502 processor) they were really damn good.

Now I look at XP and Word. Sure, I've got lots and lots of icons. And pretty colors. But do I really need a P4 at 1.5ghz with 512MB of ram to make the thing run usefully? Where did all this extra bloat come from? Sure, multitasking is great, and I wouldn't give it up. But later versions of the mac could do cooperative multitasking, and do it sort of okayish, in much less memory. My ancient powerbook can run Word, IE(Ironic that the most useful apps on that are from Microsoft), and AIM in 48MB of ram!

I could go on, but I don't know what the point would be. I've got my theories, library bloat, etc... but in the end, we're stuck with what we have.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[shotfeel]

I understand your point, but consider this. How long would it take you to "fill in a form" using the vic-20 console vs. a web form?

My memory from those days is of line-by-line prompts with no way to correct errors other than going back to the beginning. My worst memories of the time are of inputting rows of data into a statistics program. If you made a mistake, you'd better catch it before you hit Enter, or you had to start over from row 1. Add to that no way to review the data until you're completely done entering it....

I'll take the relatively slow OS with the much better human interface (which I thought was what Raskin wanted).

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Moofie]

You mean computers are still bad at solving problems that humans are good at solving?

Wow. Stop the presses, or something.

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[Doctor O]

the boot up time on an old Apple II was faster than the boot up time on a modern Mac or PC

That's something that really bothers me nowadays, using and programming computers since 1981. The old machines were ready to use much quicker than today. I know, there's more complexity in today's systems, but wtf? My 386DX/25 DOS 6.22 box was ready to use nine seconds after switching it on, around 20 seconds when autostarting Windows 3.11. That seemed like a long wait, but you don't want to know how damn long my box takes today until I can actually use it, it's minutes from power-on on my Athlon 1133, and I have stripped many things like scanning for new hardware and only running what I really need, disabling daemons/services...

Suspend to disk comes close, but still feels slow. Aren't there any efforts made on getting quicker again?

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[J. Random Luser]

I'll buy it ;-) I've got a 512k Mac here, last time I booted it (~5 yrs ago) MacOS 3.2 and MSWorks 1.1 on a single sided 400k floppy, had a working spreadsheet open 11 seconds from cold power on. Any way you look, 72dpi 1 bit graphics has gotta be faster on any processor than 32bit 1200dpi plus ray tracing 3D eye candy...

Seems a bit anomalous, Slashdotters discussing whether a GUI is any good for noobies. I'll also buy the claims that a) the existing 20pp book in the box is prob'ly good enough to get Granma going, and b) kids are coming thru that have never known life before 'puters. What about us in the middle? Does this mean it will always take a human generation for technological innovation to be accepted?

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[jbolden]

Pretty is remarkably expensive. Run an older OS on modern hardware and you won't believe how fast comparatively it it.

Also I think people tend to forget how slow various things were. Downloading on a 2400 baud modem, .jpg was compessed .gif but the time it took to create a .jpg was measured in hours (not seconds like today), copy files from machine to machine took me several days with lots of interaction to move 300megs of data...

Re:Boinc has a diffrent view

[angel'o'sphere]

Thats a bit unfair of you isnt it?

He is right in that: The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.

Just opening a window and displaying hello world, might be slower on modern haredware than typing run hell [return] on a Apple ][. Probably he is exagerating if he says dual G4, but on an Mac SE, accelerated even (33MHz 68030), it was certainly true that certain program (AppleWorks for Apple ][ and AppleWorks for Mac 68k) where in certain operations faster on the old Apple ][, e.g. displaying an about box and similar.

I think the original author just wanted to say: to day machines have OS overheads in situations (or programming language or library loading overheads) which are unbelieveable if you are used to work with computers for 30 years.

angel'o'sphere

Re:The difference is

[crackshoe]

i'm using 5 mouse buttons on my mac - does that mean that mac is better?

He sounds like me

[HBI]

Old, cynical, unhappy with what the world has become, or more specifically the Macintosh.

It makes me wonder how much of my negative view on computing is perception.

Re:He sounds like me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all perception. The world has always been the same, it's just as you get older, you pick up on things that didn't bother you before, you see the realities behind apparently benign happenings, etc...
It's never going to change. So get a beer and enjoy. You could have been born in Iraq...

Re:He sounds like me

[kahei]

Why, sir, I should say that all of your view is perception! Positively what views are all about, d'ye see? Jolly good!

*walks off twirling cane*

Re:He sounds like me

[Angostura]

If you want to get a good quick overview of his thoughts on interfaces and how they can be redesigned, there is a review of his book here:

http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/h ol lands_review.html

conventions...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the win/mac comparison is a generalzation of conventions. Look, things that work well for a UI just get adopted and adapted for a diff system. Once it's found that something works (icons, double click, max window) why rock the boat? There are still plenty of differences, but the similarites will always be there, it's part of progress.

My slacks don't looked like the ones back in the 1800s, but they're still made of cloth, they still have a zipper, and beltloops.

Cab$@*#(

Is This Personal?

[cyngus]

People on other websites have pointed out that Jef may be a bit off the mark and is still taking things personally from back when he was on the original Macintosh design team. Reportedly he was against the mouse driven interface and other things we've grown quite used to. It seems to me that Jef is very much an interface purest, promoting the most highly efficient and cleanest interface possible. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily translate to the most user friendly experience. I've tried his humane computing environment and while I'm certain that my productivity would jump once I got into the proper thinking mode, I don't really have time to learn the mental model for proper interaction with it. At the end of the day his opinions on interface design tend to me far more academic and far less pragmatic. What he says may be *right*, but impractical for mainstream computing.

Re:Is This Personal?

[lysander]

Reportedly he was against the mouse driven interface and other things we've grown quite used to.

If you take a look at The Humane Interface book, you'll see that this is wrong. He spends one section talking about how the Mac's application pulldowns at the very top of the screen are superior to pulldowns at the tops of each window.

It seems to me that Jef is very much an interface purest, promoting the most highly efficient and cleanest interface possible. Unfortunately, this doesn't necessarily translate to the most user friendly experience.

He is more concered about consistency and having the interface be easy to learn. He doesn't believe in "intuitive" interfaces, but instead interfaces that once learned should be applied everywere the user thinks would be appropriate.

Re:Is This Personal?

[cyngus]

Thank you for the correction. On the topic of menu systems I just have to rant a bit on Microsoft's new whiz-bang idea for menus...only displaying the most recently used menu items. This drives me insane and I pray it doesn't find its way into Office for Mac. It also breaks just about every UI rule of thumb you can find. Now menu items appear in variable positions in the screen. Additionally you don't see options that you haven't used recently which makes it harder for you to learn what options are available. You may not use Format Page very often, but seeing it there a hundred times on the way to Format Paragraph lets you know its available. While LRU elimination may work for some caching systems it should not be applied to program menus! In short ARGGGG.

Re:Is This Personal?

[lysander]

If I remember this correctly, Raskin believes no interface is really intuitive, and what we think of as "intuitive" really means "easy to learn". Once learned, it should apply across the whole desktop.

This is different than user customization. In fact, user customization is probably one of the more interesting (and thus difficult) aspects when designing a user interface. For example, "if the user can drag this to a toolbar, it should make sense that the user can drag anything here and that it makes sense when the user selects it". Contrast this with "only Documents can be dragged to this toolbar", which leads to user confusion if they try to drag something else and it doesn't work, or it converts the thing into a Document, or does something the user didn't want.

Re:Is This Personal?

[henryhbk]

I agree. Of course, that is the big drawback of appliances, that you can't customize the interface (like the BMW iDrive for instance). Also, interfaces that work for one application (toaster ovens) would not work well for others (driving)...

Re:Is This Personal?

[CyNRG]

Yes. It's personal. Steve Jobs still verbally abuses people, and "way back when", Raskin received his share of the tirads. Steve has a vision, and he will do anything to achieve it. I agree with the end results and they are impressive.

To bad Steve can't manage like John Lasseter, the heart and soul of Pixar. Lasseter is also a man with a vision, and he doesn't have to destroy people to achieve it.

Re:Is This Personal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. In fact, that "feature" is the first thing I turn off when I do a fresh Office install.

Productivity comes from always knowing where to find things, without really having to look for them. For example, the Windows "Start" menu. For most of the applications that I use frequently, I know where they're located in the menu. I don't actually read the names, or even look at the icons. I just know where they are. If the system constantly moves them around and hides the ones it thinks I'm not interested in, I have to stop what I'm doing, stop thinking about whatever I'm thinking about, and look for something that should be exactly where it was last time (but isn't). That's not good.

Re:Is This Personal?

[Dixie_Flatline]

Actually, his argument is more along the lines of 'intuitive' meaning 'familiar'. That's generally what I see in most HCI documentation. The only intuitive interface is the nipple - everything else is learned, right? :) (I didn't make that up, someone much more clever than I did.)

Anyway, something that's familiar also has the benefit of being easy to learn. Real-world interfaces that look like knobs are familiar - you turn them. After you figure out what the knob controls, you've learned the interface. I think that's what he's gunning for, in a way. UIs that are possible to learn because the way they function is familiar and consistent. (Unfortunately, because his ideas haven't caught on, whatever he starts with now will be UNfamiliar, which will lead to a greater learning curve than I think he would like.)

Re:Is This Personal?

[lrucker]

Agreed. In fact, that "feature" is the first thing I turn off when I do a fresh Office install.

How do I do that? And can I do it throughout Windows? It's amazing how Outlook Express, a program I have never used (I read mail on Unix) comes up in the short version of the "Programs" menu, while Hummingbird, something I use often, does not. You don't suppose it's biased towards MS products?

Re:Is This Personal?

[Anonymous Coward]

The default web browser and mail program always come up. The setting is in "Add/Remove Programs".

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[HeghmoH]

what about the overwhelming majority of users who have no trouble at all using more than one button?

We tend to have lots of cheap USB mice with multiple buttons lying around the house, so not including one in the box is not a big deal.

That _is_ a nice sharpener

[laird]

That is a nice blade sharpener.

I think that he's right that MacOS X is too complex to be a simple appliance. But I think that general purpose computers are by definition complex, because they can be used for *anything*, and his vision holds more true for specialized devices. For example, the iPod is elegant and transparent to use.

That being said, I'm sure that usability could always be improved. But I don't agree that there's not much difference between XP and MacOS X -- while they're similar at a very high level (mouse/windows/icons over multi-tasking OS, etc.), MacOS X is better in almost every detail. But it's best not to get into a religious war here. I can only guess that Jeff has such a radical vision for how computers could be that from his perspective XP and MacOS X aren't too different.

Hmm, kinda like Nader! :-)

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[Anonymous Coward]

while they're similar at a very high level (mouse/windows/icons over multi-tasking OS, etc.), MacOS X is better in almost every detail.

Aren't we talking about the high level here? We aren't talking about which one has a better core but the user experience.

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[OmniVector]

MacOS X is better in almost every detail

and that's the kicker really. the devil is in the details. many user environments have made a desktop that resembles a mac, but no one has created an environment that has fixed all the minor details yet. whether by virtue of it's longer existance, or maybe just better designers and developers, apple's user environment is always one step ahead of most the others.

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[laird]

"Aren't we talking about the high level here? We aren't talking about which one has a better core but the user experience."

User experience is all about getting the details right. In terms of high level architecture you could argue that there's no difference between XP or MacOS X (or KDE or Gnome), because they're all a WIMP (windows, icons, mouse) GUI over a multi-tasking OS. But the details are very different between them, and those details matter to users. For example, look at the OS install/registration process. Installing MacOS X requires few clicks, and setup and registration is optional. Installing XP is quite involved, and registration is not only required, it's enforced by a central server, and re-registration is required if you make any substantial system configuration changes.

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[mrfatmann]

The differences are more like a sociological difference between American English and British English. It's still english. Raskin approach is like Esperanto.

Call it academic or fodder for a software industry that is lagging bahind hardware. The point is unlike our own englsih language, computer UI have only evolved over the past 25 years (10 years if you start count at Win95). His opinions are anathema for project developers-detail mongers.

It's sneaky attitude to take towards loyal users of either Win or Mac, sure. It won't change the Mac or Win today. I'm reading THE now. I'd make half of it as trying to fix something he's still on from c.1981. The other half does what it should, and call attention to the reality of how both OS's are old crap. If it wasn't for mobile computers, we wouldn't really have any other comparrision.

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[orasio]

Better implies comparability.
What he means is that the whole metaphor is broken.
If XP is broken from design, and OSX is better, then it's just less broken.

Of course, you can differ on whether they are broken, but the argument is that.

Re:That _is_ a nice sharpener

[orasio]

Well, the world is complex, and for many tasks, we have very easy ways to do them. Maybe the computer could emulate the world, and serve as a facilitator to let us accomplish a huge set of simple tasks, without adding to their complexity.
Jef Raskin proposes many ways, in his book, in which that "simplicity" can be acomplished. Although his views are not final, and all-inclusive, he provides insights on simplyfing tasks that seem complex at first sight, and shows the complexity of some solutions that seemed simple, but end up being in fact very difficult.

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[jmays]

Are you new here?

Re:The difference is

[bigman2003]

Actually, the Mac will let you use two buttons too. I bought my wife a wireless mouse, with two buttons, and she now enjoys the thrills of 'right-clicking'. And it really does work too! Just about every time I use her computer, I right-click (because that is what I would normally do) and the menu I would expect to come up...comes up.

On the other hand- as a person who used Macintoshes from 1985, until about 1999, when I switched to Windows...I find the Mac OS X to be completely confusing, and more difficult to use than either OS 9, or Windows XP.

I don't think is is a bad OS- but it suffers from the same problem that people complain about in Windows. There are just so damn many features now, that it is difficult to figure out where stuff is.

I'm sure that if I had been using the Mac for the last 5 years, everything would be fine. But right now, I would guess that the barrier to entry for a new user is very similar for either Mac OS X, or Windows XP.

Can you say bitter, angry, rejected, scorned?

[Power Everywhere]

Jef Raskin has been at this for years. Every 18 months or so we see an interview with him in which he poo-poos the current Mac talking about how it diverged from its original tenets of usability. Well no shit, Apple has learned a lot since 1980. They're realizing that now is a time to experiment and change the interface even if it means chaos for a while.

If he's so damn pissed that he got fired and the Mac UI is in the toilet, maybe he should go and work on some Open Sores desktop project and get it right for Apple. Perhaps he'd like to modify the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (yeah, guidelines, not commandments) and then share his changes with the Mac community to point out what it is that Apple needs to change so desperately.

Otherwise, Raskin is just being a whiny bitch.

Re:Can you say bitter, angry, rejected, scorned?

[Anonymous Coward]

Angry and bitter maybe, but flamebait? Raskin does have a pattern of speaking out against the current Mac team which doesn't do much for his image. Mod back up!

...but Windows copied Mac, right?

[balaam's ass]

Regarding Raskin's comment that "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine.:

Is he accounting for the fact that a fair amount of the similarity is due to Microsoft incorporating elements of the innovative Mac interface(s) into Windows?

Re:...but Windows copied Mac, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he accounting for the fact that a fair amount of the similarity is due to Microsoft incorporating elements of the innovative Mac interface(s) into Windows?


Naaah. He's talking about the features they both stole* from Xerox.

*OK, so no one stole anything from Xerox. You would have to be a total idiot to steal from Xerox. All you have to do is be at the right place at the right time and Xerox will give you stuff. No theft there.

Re:...but Windows copied Mac, right?

[presearch]

Actually, the "inspiration" for Window's new look, starting with
Win95, was lifted directly from NeXT. Sure, some things
were moved around, but the look of the windows widgets like the
scroll bars and close boxes, all of the dialogs and the now
familiar grey beveled buttons with sans serif text...

At the time, NeXT was well under the radar, Microsoft needed a
new look up from Win3.1, so hey, let's steal from those guys.

Re:...but Windows copied Mac, right?

[mrseigen]

Hey... you're right! Too bad they didn't rip off the UNIX core, intelligent software development system, dock and other gadgets though.

Ripping off goes both ways

[59Bassman]

Remember, Windows has had the command line from the beginning. Apple only ripped it off recently!

/end feeble attempt at humor on a Monday morning

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[AKAImBatman]

You mean right after Microsoft ripped off the Apple II by creating a text based Disk Operating System? The shock. The horror.

*whatever*

Let's not even get into Xenix (Microsoft) and A-UX (Apple Unix).

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[hb253]

Um, PC/MS-DOS was an evolution/ripoff of CP/M, not Apple DOS. CP/M was around at the same time as the first Apple II's, and you could get a Z80 card for the Apple that let you run CP/M.

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[AKAImBatman]

Thank you for completely missing the point.

*sigh*

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[AndroidCat]

A Microsoft Z80 card.

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[marcello_dl]

Meet my good friend applesoft basic CLI prompt: ] (he is over twenty, BTW)

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[hb253]

Hehe, I kinda skimmed the message you were replying to so I didn't get it.

Apologies.

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[AKAImBatman]

S'Okay. I probably should have realized that the original poster was going for a "Funny" mod rather than trying to be serious. :-)

Re:Ripping off goes both ways

[pbjones]

very feeble.
Winows was a graphic environment for DOS, not an OS. So it need a command line, MacOS has no text-based layer in it's OS, so there is no value in having a command-line, a point that seems lost on most windows and mac people. MacOSX is built on NeXTSTEP and so inherits BSD, with W95 licencing parts of the NeXTSTEP interface, before Apple bought it, it's no wonder the two OS look and feel similar.

Apple today is NeXT

[green pizza]

When Apple bought NeXT (and Steve Jobs) in 1997, the joke was "NeXT was paid to take over Apple". Indeed, Apple today is just a consumer/prosumer version of NeXT.

The original Macintosh and the original Macintosh OS had input from Raskin, but also from a whole score of designers working to make a GUI-based computer for "the rest of us". (http://www.folklore.org). Over time, Apple added more and more features to Mac OS until it became the Mac OS 9 horrible mess.

Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD). If you run across something about Mac OS X that seems un-mac-like or just plain weird (and isn't a true bug), it's probably an intentional NeXTism.

Raskin didn't like the NeXT in 1988, there's no reason why he'd like Mac OS X in 2004.

Re:Apple today is NeXT

[TheInternet]

Mac OS X **IS NOT** the "Classic" Mac OS by any stretch of the imgination, the GUI and system design are 90% NeXT. Even most of the codebase is derrived from OpenStep 4.x. (And updated, obviously, also borrowing from newer versions of Mach and BSD).

While the general principle applies, I think you're somewhat underestimating the role classic Mac OS concepts play in Mac OS X (90%). At the highest levels, you have things like the menu bar at the top of the screen, Mac keyboard shortcuts, aliases, QuickTime, AppleScript, ColorSync, and such. You can't tear off menus and there's no shelf.

At the API level, you have Carbon which is responsible for quite a lot of stuff. For that matter, SearchKit (which is used in a number of places) is based on AIAT/VTwin (?).

And then are plenty of things that are brand new to Mac OS X that were not in OpenStep, such as CoreFoundation and CoreGraphics/Quartz. But I do agree that Mac OS X is worlds away from the design of classic Mac OS.

- Scott

Kinda lame "interview"...

[Anonymous Coward]

....yes, lame and it sounds slapped together from a 5 minute Q&A...with no follow-ups to side-stepped questions.

How do you rate today's Mac user interface?

My original vision is outdated and irrelevant. The principles of putting people first, and designing from the interface to the software and hardware, are as vital today as they were then.

Way to sidestep the question. Sounds like someone is a little pissy that OSX is viciously easy to use and pleasing to the eye. Lame interview...little content...bleh, happy Monday.

I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant

[Dragonfly]

I admire his work on the original Macintosh and recognize that he was instrumental in creating the modern GUI as we know it.

However, by failing to recognize the changes in HCI introducted by the pervasive, multi-modal, non-linear interface known as the world wide web, along with the slow but steady increase in users' basic knowledge, his comments have become more and more out of touch with reality.

It is worth noting as a postscript that his theory for a Humane Interface was strikingly similar to vi: interact with the computer by memorizing an array of keystroke commands.

Re:I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant

[allanc]

No he wasn't. He fought tooth and nail against Steve Jobs decision to take Raskin's Macintosh project (which he was planning to make into, basically, a brain-damaged Apple II that couldn't be upgraded and which couldn't run any third-party software) and turn it into a mini-Lisa. He wanted the machine to be text-based and cheap, and so Jobs pretty much forced him off the project and took over.

Raskin's only lasting contribution to the Macintosh is the name.

Re:I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant

[Ohreally_factor]

What are you talking about? Raskin invented the web in 1979!

Re:I fear that Raskin has made himself irrelevant

[loquacious d]

Nah, vi is modal, Raskin hates that (THE is pseudo-modal). In addition, THE commands are English words, not (generally) esoteric control-sequences.

I believe Raskin's approach also differs in that once the command pseudo-mode is entered, a list of available operations is presented, a feature I can't say vi would be worse off to implement. (I might be wrong about this, I don't have Classic installed right now to run THE and apparently he isn't offering it for download anymore...?)

I admit that I wish someone like Raskin could get funding from some entity like Apple (or Google?) to develop a truly revolutionary, next-generation operating system. But I've used THE, and it really doesn't seem like that is it. I couldn't get any real work done with it; I found its behavior very esoteric and unpredictable at times (the dual cursors were tricky, as was the behavior of selections).

It also doesn't seem to me that THE would be very amenable to extension to more common modern computer tasks than text-editing and running snippets of Python. Imagine trying to cut a home video or organize 30 gigs of music or build sophisticated bitmap and vector art with shift-space and a small library of universal commands.

Monotonous and limited interfaces like THE, it seems, are good for monotnous, mostly single-purpose devices (the Canon Cat, the iPod, to some extent the original Mac). But it seems impossible, to me, to build a system that has the power to do everything that a modern computer does without getting a little unwelcome complexity and inconsistency. Of course, I disagree with Raskin that OSX is just as bad as Windows in this respect--why he would say something like that really is beyond me.

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Wyatt Earp]

How the hell is that a jab?

When I fire up my PC with Win XP and compare it to my G5 with 10.3.5, there's a fair bit of difference between them.

It's not a jab if it's the truth.

not an issue

[bobalu]

I bought a PowerBook about a year ago (my first Mac) and have found that this really isn't much of an issue. Every once in awhile I have to hit the Control key to bring up a pop-up menu but not much. It took about 40 seconds to get over it the first time, since then I haven't been pining for a 2nd button.

You can always use it with a two-button mouse if you want.

Not worth it.

[jonathanduty]

I can't believe we are giving this much press to a six question interview. It really sounds to me like he is more interested in expressing his grudge torwards the direction Apple has gone (much the same way /.ers do towards Microsoft posts).

Apple is making money again selling their new products. They must be doing something the public wants.

Re:Not worth it.

[jayayeem]

The best part of the interview was Raskin answering questions that weren't asked. Where did the Hypercard thing come from? Why did he talk about web surfing when asked about gadgets?

Re:Not worth it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is making money again selling their new products. They must be doing something the public wants.

Yeah! Just like MS!

Hey, we don't mind a little cognitive dissonance around here, do we?

The difference

[Hatta]

While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.

Agreed, OS X has a usable shell.

Re:The difference

[kuzb]

Windows can too so I fail to see the relevance of your point.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[lou2ser]

Want a new mouse? I highly recommend http://www.macmice.com/themouse.html. Keeps with the good lucks of your Apple and had 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I know you want a solution out of the box, but since Apple is not going to do it, find your solution in this box.

This post is not a paid advertisment.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[over_exposed]

When purchasing a mac (at least from the online store) you have the option of buying a mulitple-button mouse. I have no idea, but I'd be surprised if it weren't the same way at one of their retail stores.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[matthew.thompson]

MacOS does cater for this oput of the box.

It's the Apple Macintosh that doesn't. There is a difference between the operating system and the hardware - the combination provides an easy to use solution but does not restrict the user.

If you find a two or more button mouse that you like you are more than welcome to plug it into your Mac - and the buttons, scroll wheels and the like will work. Out of the box. Without extra software. In most applications.

All this because hte OS has been designed to cater for both modes of operation.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

We in Mac-land would prefer that idiots who insist on whining about the mouse just stay away from our platform, thank-you-very-much.

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Anonymous Coward]

"While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP. "
Are the stupid anti-MS jabs ALWAYS required?

Perhaps it was an anti-OSX jab.

Seems like people want a mess...

[Anonymous Coward]

With the success of OSX and XP, it really seems like people want a mess. So KDE and Gnome are doing the right thing ;-)

Re:The difference is

[moonbender]

No, it means that you're using a mouse where 4 out of 5 buttons are not used to their fullest extend.
The primary application of the second mouse button on both platforms seems to be the activation of a context menu. However, from my experience it seems that the context menu of Windows applications is a lot better than that of Mac OS apps. Probably due to the fact that MS has embraces more than one mouse button from the start and has pushed for context menus, while Apple decided to stick with single mouse button mice and a fairly hidden context menu. My GF has an Apple laptop, I'm sure she doesn't even know there is such a thing as a context menu.

Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[allanc]

Jef Raskin is always introduced as "one of the creators of the Macintosh" when in fact the only lasting contribution he made was the name. He wanted to make a machine that was basically a brain-damaged Apple II--something that would only be able to run the applications built into its ROM, couldn't be expanded, and basically limited the hell out of its own usefulness.

He was strongly against giving it a GUI at all, that was Steve Jobs' influence.

The closest widely-marketed computer to Jef Raskin's vision of How Computing Should Be was the Commodore Plus/4.

--AC

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[allanc]

(Source, Insanely Great by Steven Levy)

--AC

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[squiggleslash]

The closest widely-marketed computer to Jef Raskin's vision of How Computing Should Be was the Commodore Plus/4.

From what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.

Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical:

Jef did not want to incorporate what became the two most definitive aspects of Macintosh technology - the Motorola 68000 microprocessor and the mouse pointing device. Jef preferred the 6809, a cheaper but weaker processor which only had 16 bits of address space and would have been obsolete in just a year or two, since it couldn't address more than 64Kbytes. He was dead set against the mouse as well, preferring dedicated meta-keys called "leap keys" to do the pointing. He became increasingly alienated from the team, eventually leaving entirely in the summer of 1981, when we were still just getting started, and the final product utilitized very few of the ideas in the Book of Macintosh. In fact, if the name of the project had changed after Steve took over in January 1981, and it almost did (see Bicycle) , there wouldn't be much reason to correlate it with his ideas at all.

Remember, at the time of development, mice were unheard of. A graphic user interface wouldn't have implied a mouse, and many people - presumably including Raskin himself - would have considered it a complication, an extra device that would have required user learning.

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[allanc]

Re: Not wanting a gui,

The argument could be made that you can have a GUI without a mouse. But that argument is along the lines of saying that Vi is a GUI editor because it's full-screen. Raskin didn't want a mouse, Raskin didn't want a 68000, both of those were pretty much required for the Lisa-esque GUI that the Macintosh eventually ended up with.

(And mice weren't unheard of. The Alto/Star, obviously, had them, as did Apple's own Lisa)

--AC

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[squiggleslash]

You're defining a GUI as a WIMP interface; actually a WIMP interface is a subset of GUI interfaces. At its rawest, a GUI is just that - a graphical user interface, an interface that uses imagery rather than just text to be used. The only other characteristic, other than being graphical, that seems to be common to all GUIs is a desire to make them as non-modal as possible.

My Nokia Communicator phones (9000, 9290) have GUIs, but they do not have mice or other pointing devices. They use "ATM buttons" on the sides to make menu choices, and have other dedicated keys. But just look at them and you can see that they're graphical.

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[allanc]

I'll grant that.

So, amend my previous statement to be that Raskin was against the Windowed, mouse-driven GUI that the Mac eventually had.

(None of this really affects my central point that Raskin's a putz who desperately wants everyone to believe that everything good about the Macintosh was because of him)

--AC

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[Watts Martin]

While you're probably right with the "widely-marketed" proviso, the computer that was probably the purest expression of his approach is the Canon Cat.

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[nlper]

From what I've read, the closest would probably be those Royale PDAs. He was proposing a simple to use machine that run a small, fixed, set of applications.

Perhaps, but the Canon Cat was the closest product to his vision -- it was his baby.

Where did you read he was against a GUI? He was against a mouse, but everything I've read has implied the interface would, nonetheless, be graphical

Well, if by GUI you mean bit-mapped graphics, then the Canon Cat had a GUI. But I think most people would look askance at calling it a GUI when only one quarter of the WIMP set was used. And character-based menus for applications had been around for a while by then.

Here's how a Cat evangelist describes the interface Raskin thought was optimal:

"The Cat's user interface made this computer unique when compared to other computers. The user interface was based on a simple text editor in which all data was seen as a long stream of text broken into pages. Special keyboard keys allowed the user to invoke various functions. An extra key titled "Use Front" acted as a control key...."

"When you powered on the Cat you were presented with a display that looked like a typewriter with a sheet of paper. Black characters appeared on a white background. A ruler bar appeared at the bottom of the screen...."

"The Leap keys also controlled text selection (indicated by hilighting), deletion, copying, and moving. If the selected text was a mathematical formula one keystroke with a special key calculated the mathematical result and the answer appeared on the screen with a dotted underline overlaying the original formula. If the selected text was a computer program written in either FORTH or 68000 assembly language, then a special key let you execute the program (I don't think many Cat users did any Cat programming). You performed mail merges by selecting columnar text data and pressing another special key. Repetitive command sequences could be automated by assigning commands and text strings to the Cat's numeric keys. One special key let you dial a selected telephone number either for voice or modem communications. Data received from the built-in modem flowed into your text as if you had typed it...."

As has been pointed out elsewhere, Raskin's idea of the ideal user interface boiled down to a souped-up typewriter. Calling it a GUI seems overly charitable.

And don't get me started on the lunacy -- still popular with some Forth programmers -- that you don't really need a file system or file format compatiblity with other computers. Arghh!

Tyler

Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh

[allanc]

I know. Which is exactly why I added the 'widely-marketed' qualifier. :)

(Although it's stretching it a bit to call the Plus/4 'widely-marketed', there was at least a chance of people having heard of it who didn't already know all about Raskin)

--AC

Die, mice, die!

[nonmaskable]

Um before anyone follows Jef's vision of the future of human-computing interfaces, you might want to consider that he was opposed to the use of a mouse on the Macintosh.

If he hadn't been replaced by Jobs as the team lead, the Macintosh would have no mouse, using keyboard function keys instead.

Re:Die, mice, die!

[fuck_this_shit]

And still it only has a single button.

Re:Die, mice, die!

[Anonymous Coward]

So did they compromise and put just one button on it to appease Jef?

Re:Die, mice, die!

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing is that after reading his book, I use the mouse less now than I used to. His remarks on the inefficiency of switching between two different input devices is very much spot on. If only more applications were designed to be either completely keyboard or completely mouse oriented.

Re:Die, mice, die!

[allanc]

Actually... turns out yes.

Raskin was apparently instrumental, by his own admission, in getting the higher-ups at Apple to use a 1-button mouse instead of the 3-button mice they used at PARC.

--AC

Mac OS X "Manual"

[green pizza]

It's easy to write a concise Mac OS "Classic" manual when there's no command-line interface, nor are there any Unix underpinnings.

A default install of Mac OS X contains a full Unix environment. (You can opt to not install the "BSD Subsystem", which just doesn't install terminal.app and several Unix userland applications).

I've seen emacs books that are 400+ pages and I've seen a 700 page sendmail manual. There are entire volumes of perl manuals. One could easily write a 10,000 page Mac OS X "Manual".

Maybe Apple should team up with ORA to write a 100 page getting started / user manual, like NeXT did in 1988. The Mac OS X interface is actually pretty simple, and an average user can only initially see about 20 control panels, about 15 applications, and about 15 utility applications. As long as you ignore the command-line world and don't write chapters on file sharing fundamentals or netbooting, I'll bet a 100 page manual would be quite sufficent.

Re:Mac OS X "Manual"

[CODiNE]

Actually Macs DO come with a Manual... there's at least two of them... maybe 20 pages or so, I don't have one around here. The Mac OS X manual was enough to get grandma more comfortable with using iPhoto and Mail. They are printed on nice paper in full color with huge screenshots on every page. Very nice noobie-talk guiding a user through basic stuff. The other manual is specific to the model you bought... shows how to add memory and an airport card, things like that.

Re:Mac OS X "Manual"

[phaxda]

Coming soon to a bookstore near you...

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/powerbkfb/
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ibkfanbk/

Re:Mac OS X "Manual"

[jsin]

You guys sure seem to spend alot of time with "grandma"...

Lack of Content

[R.Caley]

I wonder if he didn't actually say anything, or if the journalist/editor just cut out all the content.

The result is pretty much nothing but `Jef Raskin is a grumpy old man'.

Re:Hooray for the Grauniad

[Anonymous Coward]

You are pure bullshitting sir. Just because its a 'leftie' paper doesnt mean it doesnt tell the truth.

Unlike Bush and the US media who lied the US into a phony war thats killed more civilians than all terrorist attacks in the last 50 years!

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[WIAKywbfatw]

We in Mac-land would prefer that idiots who insist on whining about the mouse just stay away from our platform, thank-you-very-much.

Is that why every Mac user who uses his/her machine professionally that I've ever met has ditched their one-button mouse in favour of something that has two, three or even more buttons? Because Apple's approach to the issue is beyond criticism?

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[l4m3z0r]

Insightful? Who moderated this moron as Insightful? Want a two-button mouse on a Mac plug one in, there you go it works. In fact you can buy 2 button mice from the Apple store here notice that they have many different options, including track balls, wireless mice, and also mice with more than 2 buttons with/without scroll wheels. Mod down parent as troll because that what this is, uninformed troll garbage.

And for the record, as far as laptops go, the necessity for the second mouse button just isn't there, especially when the keyboard shortcuts are designed so well. I have a 2 button mouse plugged into my mac, and dont use the second button(unless gaming). It simply is a waste for me to move my hand to the mouse to do something with the second mouse button that would be better served as a keyboard shortcut.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[EuropeanSwallow]

I don't see Apple's choice of single buttoned mice to be worth the flamewars. I use both a PC and a Mac (iBook) and adapted quickly to the ctrl-button thing. I don't miss the second button much.

Where I think Apple is being stubborn and partisan is in not accepting that scroll-wheel mice are a better paradigm. This I do miss.I don't think I will be buying an Apple branded mouse until they start providing scroll-wheel enabled ones.

Re:The difference is

[green pizza]

What, you mean you don't like emacs and perl? :)

I personally find Mac OS X to be rather simple (unless you dig into the NetInfo database or fire up terminal.app). There aren't that many applications or control panels in a default install. Adjusting settings are also much easier these days in 10.3 Panther than they were in the wild days of 10.0 Public Beta in 1999.

Mac OS X is only slightly more complex than NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP of 1988/1994. (Unless you're a developer... not just ObjC and NSAPI, now you have C++, Java, OpenGL, OpenAL, CoreThis and CoreThat, etc...)

Raskin's Bitterness

[bstarrfield]

Jef Raskin has good reason to have been bitter about the way the Macintosh has turned out. His description of the Mac's history ( http://mxmora.best.vwh.net/JefRaskin.html) provides a good introduction.

However, UI's have had to change as computing technologies have become more complicated. When the Mac was introduced, the Internet was still in its developmental stage; computer graphics were limited; and hardware devices were essentially permanently connected to the computer (no plug-and-play type technologies). The world changed, and the interface had to change with it.

It would be great to follow Raskin's advice and reevaluate the Mac GUI - however, it's apparent that Apple is constantly trying to do this. The X GUI has had changes (remember the purple window-shade type button in the X beta's?), and will no doubt continue to change. Right now we're looking at a (I'd say) fairly succesfuly merger of Mac OS 9 and NeXT UIs. But things can always get better.

I respect Raskin tremendously, but I would take his opinions with a grain of salt. His comments should be appreciated and considered, but I certainly don't believe that Apple has abandoned its quest for usability.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Jucius Maximus]

The argument about one button mice is a moot point. Just buy a multi-button mouse.

Have you ever tutored truly novice user? Someone with absolutely no clue about technology or computers in general? They constantly click the wrong button and get confused when a right click menu appears as opposed to opening the document or program. You have to keep reminding them that it's the left click unless otherwise indicated.

People like you and I are practically hardwired for dealing with computers, (heck I learned to type on a computer before I could write with a pencil.) But many many people out there do not instinctually click the appropriate mouse button, know how to react to different prompts, menus, windows, stimuli, depending on which window has focus, etc. It's hard to imagine what using a computer is like without these intuitive and deeply rooted understandings. Apple simplifies the number of possible responses to these things and reduces user confusion by reducing the number of possible responses.

And when the lusers graduate out of cluelessness, they can simply acquire a multi-button mouse. :)

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[lintux]

Ok, I can see why for novice users (especially those who can't count to ten) having only two mouse buttons might be of benefit, but what about the overwhelming majority of users who have no trouble at all using ten buttons?

The answer is simple. One button is usually enough. Mac OS and all the available programs can live perfectly with "just" one mouse button. So why bother?

Re:What i like about XP

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a fuck about your feelings about XP???

Re:What i like about XP

[tomcio.s]

i expected an appropriately configed G3 to do the same with OS X
Did you read the install notes on the box, or the website or during the installation process??? No.. Right that's your problem. All the info and minimum requirements are posted there.

I'm also burnt out on the brushed metal look, the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$
Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive? or $799 eMac? If you don't like the look of the hardware. Well, tough. I guess you can buy anything in the gray ai32 world.

I can buy an old PC and know it will be slow - but it will work - and with everything plugged in
I won't even begin to digest this erronous statement. I will say one thing tho - minimum requirements. I have been burned by this before on the ai32 platform. Or have you ever tried using a scanner that had a proprietary pci card? I didn't think so.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[balaam's ass]

You said it.

As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands, when a simple 3-button mouse would let me do all of these quickly and easily. How are these key-click combinations "more user-friendly" than single clicks on a multi-button mouse?

And I like your response to those who say "You can always buy a multi-button mouse". Yea. I have a Logitech USB scrollwheel mouse that I use, but why did I have to buy one??? Why didn't I just GET one that came with my Mac?

Waah waah

[burnin1965]

Considering Jef's vast knowledge and experience there is good reason to listen to his opinions, however, I must say he seems to be exagerating significantly.

Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster

This is just plain bull. I used the old Apple II and the various other "inexpensive" computers of its day, in fact I have an Atari 130xe setup behind me at my desk and it is fully operational. I've written programs in both BASIC and 6052 assembly on the box and I'm sorry but Jef is very wrong with that statement. The computers of the Apple II era are so mind numbingly slow at BASIC execution that his statement is simply laughable.

And just to pick on him a little more, how can he whine about the interface and then have a picture of himself with some techno gadget hanging in front of his face with only his glasses to protect his eye from almost certain lacerations. Yeah that has to be a really "Humane Interface".

He is correct about one thing, he is a footnote.

burnin

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Bricklets]

Why? Usability. It forces software developers to not dump anything and everything under the right-click contextual menu unless it is necessary. Seems smart, smart, smart to me. ... Oh yeah, and if you really want a multi-button mouse for a Mac, just get one. They are supported you know.

Re:The difference is

[Thrakkerzog]

I plugged in two mice once. It worked fine. Both mice would fight over the pointer. :-)

What does the program do ?

[iMaple]

Jef saysSome programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster.
which is BS unless he specifies what his program did. I mean a simple "Press any key to continue" is going to be so much more effeicient tha na dialog box with "Do you want to save your settings? --- Yes No OK Cancel SaveToDisk Abort "

Forget the novice users!

[green pizza]

I used to say that Apple should keep the one-button mouse to help the novice users, but times have changed. **VERY FEW** novice users even have access to Macs. Face it, Windows is the new Mac. Newbies buy $399 HP specials at WalMart, they don't buy Macs. Most new-to-Apple users are switchers / curious users who have experience with Windows (or are Unix greybeards).

The NeXT machines had two button mice, it's time for Apple to ship a modern scroll wheel mouse with their Macs. (And maybe try to invent a multi-button laptop trackpad that doesn't require the user to dislocate their thumb to hit the right button).

How much more 'good old days' can he spread?

[overmeer]

Jeff Raskin, Inventor of the click-and-brag interface.

Re:What i like about XP

[stubear]

"Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive? or $799 eMac? If you don't like the look of the hardware. Well, tough. I guess you can buy anything in the gray ai32 world."

What if you're a graphic designer like me? I work with large image files and an iBook, while ok for light work, really isn't well suited for this type of work. In Macland if I want a new G5, the old Mac becomes almost worthless. In PCland, I can purchase small hardware upgrades and get a whole new computer for the same $800, or even less in some cases, and spread the cost out over a far greater period of time. My older G4-like system in PCland can be upgraded to a G5-like system at a much cheaper cost without the need to sacrifice quality. I'm not going to go so far as to suggest Apple adopt the white box strategy that the PC world has but $799 iBooks are only great if you don't need the power of a workstation.

NPR interview

[cmodcmodcmod]

This NPR interview (audio) is much more interesting / in-depth:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?story Id=1606665

Different crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely right - there's quite a divide between the OS 9 and OS X crowds. For instance, before OS X, I'd rather have chopped off my hands than own a mac. I made fun of mac people as dimwitted idiots who didn't really want to use a computer, or artsy-touchy-feely types I'd rather not hang around with. Not too mature, but I did.

Now, I own a powerbook. ;)

Re:Different crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

there's quite a divide between the OS 9 and OS X crowds

And it's mostly because there's Unix underneath now. A good computer makes people feel comfortable using them. And with Mac OS X, even Unix geeks can feel comfortable, because there's a Terminal program, so you can pretend it's still 1985 and you're using SunOS.

I know a lot of people hate to admit it, but most of what Mac OS X is was there before. For example, look how many people absolutely hated hated hated the menubar on the top of the screen -- but now they seem to like it.

I suggested that somebody (using Mac OS 9) burn a CD to make a backup, by inserting a blank CD, dragging the files to it, and ejecting it. The "just bought a Mac for the first time in my life because of Mac OS X" guy was stunned: "What? No, that's gotta be OS X only."

It's all about perception.

Re:Different crowd

[zonker]

in a similar light, there was definitely a difference in the early days of the mac between apple II users and macintosh early adopters...

and if you read about the infighting inside apple, you can see it was fairly divisive...

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Muddles]

Other posters that posted comments like "Just plug a two button mouse in and go" are right, but they missed the point. The 2,3,4 or more button mouse is a crutch for poor interface design. (Like everything else this isn't always the case) Basically, most things that are on a right-click context sensitive menu really don't need to be there, and many developers pile things into a context sensitive menus that while sensitve to the context, are little used, and should be elsewhere. The fact of the matter is a Mac is nothing like a PC to use documents exist as floating windows outside of the application window, the file menu is always on the top, and most controls exist in floating windows alongside your document. Use a Mac without the second button for any lenght of time, and you'll realise that the crtl-click is a much cleaner way of doing things. You will also notice that on a mac the ctrl-click usually gives you far less options, again, it's by design (in safari I can view source, save the page or print it, that's it 3 options). On the otherhand, the scroll wheel is what I miss the mist when I don't have my mouse plugged into my Powerbook.. then again, the arrow keys are about 2 inches from my track-pad, so I use those.

Yep!

[green pizza]

I think that he's right that MacOS X is too complex to be a simple appliance.

And so were the NeXT machines. Corporations that bought NeXT systems for use with a single custom application (as was usually the case) plus maybe WordPerfect and/or NeXTmail often said the complete system was overkill. Come upgrade time, many opted for Windows systems (funny, but cheap).

Mac OS X is probably the simplist complex OS there is, and that's why I love it. And why I loved NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP as well.

Not buying it.

[macthulhu]

I'm too lazy to go digging for it, but I thought there was a longer version of this article floating around last week... In it, he mentions that he's currently working on a better interface. So, are we going to ignore the fact that he's getting a head start on trashing the product he's about to compete with?

As to the interfaces that we're trapped in... I use OSX, OS9, NT, and XP pretty much every day. I'm the kind of Mac user that will break a bottle on the bar and cut you for trashing my preferred OS. Even so, I will say that I am perfectly functional in Windows, and don't mind using it. I prefer OSX. I have fewer problems with it and I find it to be organized in a way that works better for me.

They are similar enough now, that if a Windows user sits down at a Mac, and their IQ is above room temperature, they should be able to navigate it just fine. Same goes for Mac users sitting down at an XP box.

What I don't get, is how the UI is supposedly so oppressive... The desktop metaphor was a good one because it related to real-world environments that we were familiar with... files go in folders, things go on your desktop... pretty simple. Behind the scenes, there are improvements that could be made, like using metadata to help you relate files to one another, etc. Other than things like that, I'm just not seeing how there needs to be such a huge revolutionary change in user interfaces. Maybe I lack 'vision', but I just don't see what the big hassle is. If the work you're doing is held up by the fact that you have to open two folders to get at it, maybe you're in the wrong line of work.

As to the never ending 1 button vs. 2 button debate... give it a rest. Macs can use just as many buttons on their mice as Windows. If you need more buttons, as many of us do, GO BUY A 3RD PARTY MOUSE. It just isn't an issue anymore.

Re:Not buying it.

[Anonymous Coward]

GO BUY A 3RD PARTY MOUSE. It just isn't an issue anymore.

You'd think the price Apple charge for their machines that they would supply one. After all, are they interested in supplying a better product to the consumer or not? Maybe they fear Apple users aren't quite ready for the heady heights of two button mice?

Re:Not buying it.

[kisrael]

I had an ibook briefly, but I could tell that I was going to have problems adapting to the UI (though the kicker was I bought an older model that couldn't run garageband...) I just don't like the dock...I don't like the way it mixes what I think of shortcuts and running apps, and when I'm working, I think of each window as a seperate task I might want to return to, so the dock's app-centric outlooks bugs the hell out of me. I'm not really trashing it, I guess some people find it delightful, but it really runs against the way I view the world (which admittedly might've been shaped by Win95...)

"revolutionary" UIs always seem like such a crock. So often they're all "hey, it's TASK BASED" or whatever, but the trouble is that you tend to be limited to doing what the handholding software wants you to do. Roughly speaking, WIMP is very "noun based", the revolutionary systems tend to be "verb based", and I think it's easier to roll your own verbs in a noun based system then in a verb based system...

Re:Not buying it.

[macthulhu]

I agree. For the price, it should at least be an option. Hell, for the price they should give you one of each, and a fat discount on a decent tablet. To be honest, I think Apple got used to supplying computers that were often people's first contact with a computer, so they kept it simple... And advanced users would rather choose their mouse based on their particular needs.

Now I wonder if they stick to one button just because they would never hear the end of it from anti mac "four buttons good, one button bad" types...

Personally, I love Apple's mouse. Nothing, and I've tried many, tracks like that Apple mouse. Granted, my biased opinion is based on my extensive use of Photoshop, but for me that's what counts. Your needs might be different. If Apple were to release a four button, scroll wheel mouse... it would be bad as hell.

Re:Not buying it.

[mt v2.7]

"Behind the scenes, there are improvements that could be made, like using metadata to help you relate files to one another, etc."

Sounds like WinFS :|

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is a fair bit and a far cry the same measurement? And how much of the difference is just cosmetic? I'm sorry but the two systems have really started to look like twins separated at birth.

If the world were so simple

[Snorklefish]

Raskin sounds like a techno-Luddite; longing for an era when "networking", for most, meant plugging in a printer.

What personal computers are expected to do today-and what they were expected to do in 1984, is extrordinary. Setting up a computer to communicate through internal networks, external networks, firewalls, adminstering multiple users, root accounts, etc... is pretty damn complicated for anyone w/a day job outside IT.

If setting up a program requires understanding and entering a dozen different parameters, the interface is probably the least of your worries. In this area, Apple, at least, has shown it's aware of the problem by implementing technologies like Rendezvous- a far superior solution than Wizards and Setup Assistants.

All I wish for in a UI are consistent rules that I can learn and generalize from regardless of the program I'm working with. Apple and Mac developers- traditionally- have been better at "sticking to the script." The aglomeration of Mac and NeXT screwed that up, but each version of 10.x.x has improved consistency.

HyperCard

[ahg]

"[Bill Atkinson's] Hypercard did not have the properties to make its use unconscious. It was wonderful in many ways, however, and it would have been wise to keep it working on Apple's newer systems."

HyperCard was wonderful. I did a lot of programming in HyperCard, embedded sounds and movies, and controlled an externel Laser Video Disc (the 12" variety) with XCMD "plugins".

However, the basic functions of HyperCard can be simulated with web technologies and are available to any platform, not just a HyperCard playing Mac. In a Net connected World (and most Macs users have Internet access) the old HyperCard stacks lose their appeal. This probably was a large factor in Apple's decision to give up HyperCard.

There are still two downsides to HyperCard's demise. (1) You can't distribute Apache/Mysql/PHP environment on a floppy/CD/thumb drive and just have a user double click on your creation, without an internet connection, and run your "stack"/Application. (2) The ease of development and debugging offered by HyperCard is till unparalled by any app/web development environment today, IMHO.

Re:HyperCard

[Anonymous Coward]

I too loved HyperCard and did some of my earliest programming work on it. HyperCard was a great technology and could have had a future on the web. I think the closest modern equivalent to HyperCard is Macromedia's Flash. Flash was also once an easy to learn authoring environment. Flash has unfortunately become bloated and complex.

Re:HyperCard

[burns210]

I think hypercard, if given away similar to Applescript's authoring tools, still could have a chance at success.

Have an auto-supported program(anything written in cocoa or carbon, for instance, and a well-designed GUI, the power of hypercard would seep through.

If they made it more standard-like, and allowed for cross-platform development the way openstep and (carbon? I get cocoa/carbon mixed up) promised then you really have a chance at something.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"While I think Raskin has some good points, I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP. "

Are the stupid anti-MS jabs ALWAYS required?

Jesus, you don't even have to RTFA for this one, just the story posting itself: Raskin specifically says that "there is only a little difference between using a Mac and a Windows machine." Agree or disagree, it's certainly not a "stupid anti-MS jab" to express one's own opinion on the subject.

Re:The difference is

[w3weasel]

Ugh... don't speak if you don't know

However, from my experience it seems that the context menu of Windows applications is a lot better than that of Mac OS apps

Both Mac and Win contextual menus are highly customizable as is... use a 3rd party "power-tool" to take it to extreme. This bit of your troll just opinion and is unfounded bunk.

the fact that MS has embraces more than one mouse button from the start

So does the Mac (Have you ever actually used one?). Plug in a 2 button mouse and it 'just works' plug in a 14 button mouse and use a nifty little tool called 'USB overdrive' and program each button to do anything you like. 2-buttons with a scrollwheel works exactly the same on both, including a right mouse button drag... so BUNK.

My GF has an Apple laptop, I'm sure she doesn't even know there is such a thing as a context menu

Exactly the point... your GF doesnt know there is a contextual menu... is she happy with her mac? does it do exactly what she wants it to? does she have to learn to do things in a way that is not immediately apparent?

The one button interface is a blessing for a lot of people who just want to write email and browse the 'net without bothering to understand the complexities of the OS.

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to give any concrete examples of what is wrong with the Mac UI.

Bloat

[Anonymous Coward]

RE:" The quest for CPU power has been largely defeated by bloated software in applications and operating systems. Some programs I wrote in Basic on an Apple II ran faster than when written in a modern language on a G4 Dual-processor Mac with hardware 1,000 times faster"

looks like Macintosh G4 & G5 are not immune to this either

this is exactly why i abandoned windows and switched to Linux using a custom install of Slackware-10.0 and am looking forward to a no-gnome slackware-10.1 (gnomeless?) yes Gnome is just a bloated kludge and has been since the 2.x series, the last good one was 1.4 (without nautilus) and only mc / gmc as a file manager...

The one string guitar...

[rmdyer]

Don't you understand that playing a one string guitar is easier that 6? The Apple mentality is that we as users .... have no mentality, or dexterity. We are the equivalent to Steven Hawking, using a one button click device for user input. Why would we need anything else?

Re:The one string guitar...

[Anonymous Coward]

Flawed Analogy. The guitar is simple in design yet lets you do many things. The computer has in the past been complex in design yet limited what you could do.

What Jef is saying is that he wants a simple device that allows great flexability. While his views are a bit extreme his voice is an important one.

If you took a guitar and made it so that every 3rd time you played you'd have to stop in the middle and wait 5 minutes for it to reset, or that once and a while deleted every song you could play, or that could be infected by other people's guitars, then you'd have a perfect analogy.

Meh

[t_allardyce]

I love OSXs interface the problem is its so lacking in basic utilities that you take for granted anywhere else. Just one absolutely stupid example is the QuickTime player that comes with it, it can't play in full screen! thats right, the fucking thing can't actually play in full screen, at first you think its just hidden somewhere and theres no way you could leave out something so basic (well maybe back in the days when video was postage stamp size and 5fps but certainly not in the last 5 years) but then you find out you have to actually upgrade and pay fro QuickTime Pro that has this functionality, totally insane! Another example, StuffIt expander, as far as i can tell, it can't compress (unless you upgrade?) it always bugs you about upgrading and the only way to do anything is to hit the shell and tar/gzip etc.. The last major problem is a usability issue. While i can fully understand the way the menu bar works its totally not obvious to new users, does it really need to be at the top? you can't even choose.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you EVEN BOTHER LOOKING?

Jeez. Yeah, score +2, informative.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't spend more than 10 min on OS X, did you?
Or you're a complete moron.

There's dozens of freewares playing QT movies full screen

In case you missed it, SutffIt Expander is a 3rd party app.
Zip compression/decompression is integrated in Panther.
And if you want, there's, again, dozens of freeware.

Re:Meh

[NardofDoom]

Learn to use the command line, write an applescript to interface with tar or gzip, or search versiontracker; there are four utilities that interface with the command line gzip utility.

Re:Meh

[Imazalil]

Ummm... the menu bar has been on the top since 1986, while your windoz/unix box still had only a comand line. it is for consistency, and it makes bloody sense, where else would you possibly want it?

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Another poster pointed out that AppleScript will make QuickTime player go into full screen mode without the need to upgrade. This may sound like a "power user" only trick, but really, how hard is it to type

tell application "QuickTime Player" to enter full screen display 1

into Script Editor and save it into the scripts folder? The script can also be saved as an application and provided to those who never want to touch anything but the menus with a mouse.

It's not insane. It's marketing.

As for Stuffit...you realise that's a 3rd party application, right? Mine keeps bugging me about registering, but continues to work without doing so - and for all the stuffing I need to do, which is practically none, it seems a small comprimise.

Again, it's not insane. It's marketing.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

right click(control click) on a file and hit create archive, or highlight a file, go to the file menu and click 'create archive' and the system will make a .zip for you. That wasn't so hard.. was it?

Re:Meh

[t_allardyce]

Thats absolutely rediculous, how would the average user have a hope in hell of doing that? Are you saying apples best solution for there not being built in compression and decompression support (via the gui) is to 'learn to use the command line'?

Re:Meh

[t_allardyce]

It makes no sense, its confusing as to what application the menu represents if you have more than one on the screen, attaching the menu to the application would make more sense to most people, giving people the option would be better

Re:Meh

[t_allardyce]

I have an OSX notebook, I'd expect something thats supposed to be easy to use (they still have one mouse button) and far more expensive than a PC to come with all this crap for free.

Re:Meh

[Peganthyrus]

ummm... movie->full screen. apple-f.

And no, Stuffit Expander can't compress stuff. Use the DropStuff program that's sitting right next to it.

I always found Windows's tendency to put the menu bar in program windows an obnoxious abberation. It was at the top on the early Macs, it was at the top on the Amiga.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

Why of course! Writing a script like that is so very obvious! No wonder Macs are so easy to use!

Re:Meh

[toddestan]

There's dozens of freewares playing QT movies full screen

That doesn't change the fact that Apple's official Quicktime player is a steaming pile of crap, on both the Mac and Windows. Even Windows Media Player isn't that bad.

Re:What i like about XP

[justMichael]

I'm also burnt out on the brushed metal look, the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$

like others have said.. until there is a "white box" or generic - i can't afford the upgrade game and after my experimenting around i won't bother until prices come down on more capable OSX systems.

I want a workstation to learn from, experiment with and have fun on - not necessarily just to look cool on my desk

I'll agree with you on the Brushed Metal look.

What upgrade cycle are you referring to, the OS upgrade every ~18 months? You don't have to do it, although eventually you will become unsupported. The up side is OS X generally gets more responsive with each new paid release.

You can get a dual 1.8 with 1G RAM for $2200, it's not cheap but that machine is going to last a very long time. Just don't buy the memory from Apple

I want a workstation to allow me to get work done, I don't want to spend time fighting with my machine. In 2 years on OS X I have never had a problem and I can do everything I need to do for work with the exception of printing UPS labels to the Thermal printer.

"I think there's a FAR CRY between the Mac & X

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that's right, you can get great games for Windows like Far Cry that aren't out for the Mac. For me this is the reason why I can't switch to another, I love games too much and the choice on Linux and OSX is sadly lacking.

Re:What i like about XP

[garcia]

Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive? or $799 eMac? If you don't like the look of the hardware. Well, tough. I guess you can buy anything in the gray ai32 world.

It's expensive compared to an old Pentium II/III sitting around your house in pieces or an older G3.

Just because the minimum requirements are on the side of the box doesn't mean that much of the OS is bloated. That's the problem when the OS company designs and sells the hardware too.

Wow, who gives a fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

So a guy - who once upon a time , was at Apple and designed the Mac OS - thinks OS X isn't very good. I don't see anything this guy has done of interest in, well, a geological age. Nor do I see him making any concrete suggestions about fixing OS X. So, like the subject says, who gives a fuck? Personally, I prefer Windows XP (though using an Apple 30" Cinema Display, which is pretty sweet) but Jef Raskin is just a wanker.

Re:Wow, who gives a fuck?

[Anonymous Coward]

elimate the middle man (Jobs) and just get either Linux or BSD

OSX runs fine on G3's

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an original iMac, a beige G3, and a G3 laptop that all run OSX fine with 128-256MB of RAM.

I agree the brushed metal sucks. As does the white plastic of the new iMacs.

Re:What i like about XP

[OmniVector]

in mac world, your mac's value stays high much longer than in the pc world. thus when you want to upgrade your mac, you just sell it and buy a new one with a big fat discount.

a lot of people think that's stupid, but what happens when new architectures come out? oh.. i want to upgrade my cpu. ok. i'll need a new mobo to go with it. crap. this mobo also needs new DDR ram. well i gotta replace that too. the cpu's more powerful, so it's also going to need a better cpu heatsink and fan. you're already replacing, at that point, +70% of the system (at least in terms of cost). so you save the trouble of replacing your case, PS, cd rom and hard disks.

not everyone even cares to manually upgrade things. many computer users (and by many i'd suggest most) are quite content with selling their old one and buying a new one. it's simpler in general to do.

Mac OS X hardware

[green pizza]

Mac OS X requires more horsepower than XP. There's more overhead with Mach, the Unix underpinnings, the Cocoa classes, and the Quartz PDF graphics engine. It's a tradeoff between the original (but old) NeXT code and modern clean design.

That said, I've found Mac OS X 10.3.x to run fine on a 500 MHz G3 with 384 MB of RAM and Rage 128 graphics. 10.3 will work "OK" on 350 MHz with 256 MB (basiclly the slowest slot-load iMac or slowest blue & white G3 tower). 10.2 and older are far slower, and performance on a first-generation tray-load iMac or a beige G3 is slower yet.

Rule of thumb:
With 256+ MB RAM,
OS X on Beige or Black hardware: SLOW
OS X on Colorful (slot-load) hardware: OK
OS X on Silver hardware: AWESOME

A default install of WinXP SP1a is quite sluggish on my Dell: PII/350, 192MB, RagePro. Disabling the appearance manager service (giving it the WinNT4/Win2K look) makes it quite a bit faster.

Re:Mac OS X hardware

[dickrichardv8]

the default install on my HP AMD64 3200+ is/was quite sluggish. The "Fedora Core2 x86_64 service pack" fixed it. *me: ducks under desktop.

Re:Mac OS X hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

I really don't get what the fuss is all about. OK, let me start with the documentation: TO document MacOS (whther be it 9 or X) is like trying explain why you fall back down after you jump. Its just obvious. Everyone knows why. Macs where designed with the point of view to BEGIN with which was tailored for those who may not be too sharp on computer knowledge.
That being said, there is the hardware issue. Although I cannot confirm with OS 9 or previous, but OS X was built on Unix (correct me if I am wrong). Unix/Linux both are very well knowsn for running better and faster on limited hardware capabilties than Microsoft Windows. TO compare Microsoft Windows to a Max is like comparing a pig to an ant. Pigs, by nature, are hogs that eat a lot yielding much less than they take in (in my opinion). Ants are the exact opposite: Yielding much more effort/work than they take in (think how many ants feed on a single peanut!).

Re:Mac OS X hardware

[green pizza]

That being said, there is the hardware issue. Although I cannot confirm with OS 9 or previous, but OS X was built on Unix (correct me if I am wrong).

"Classic" Mac OS was originally based on UCSD p-System, but has been overhauled numerous times since 1982. System 6 was a huge overhaul, as was 7. The last *massive* under-the-hood updates were Mac OS 7.6, 8.5, and 8.6. Updates leading up to 9.2.2 were mostly to the various support frameworks, hardware support/optimizations, GUI look-and-feel, and other features of the OS, not so much kernel work.

And yes, Mac OS X (10.x) are based on Unix. As with NeXT OPENSTEP, it's a Mach microkernel with a BSD userland and lots of custom frameworks and libraries. GUI is based on Quartz, which is heavily PDF based (but is not Display Postscript nor "Display PDF").

Re:Mac OS X hardware

[valenti]

You might try out your Dell with a copy of XP+sp2. I understand that the firewall feature (don't get on the Net without it) grabs about 48MB. Or is it 64MB?

I still run Win2000.

hand-waving criticism of the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it was amusing I suppose to see you flailing about trying to find criticisms without actually finding any specific faults or even things that you felt were done better elsewhere. Try being more specific in trolls in future, you'll draw more ire that way...

Re:hand-waving criticism of the Mac

[DougDew]

First of all, my initial post was not a troll. I sincerely meant what I said: it's nice to hear somebody criticizing the Mac. The Mac seems to get a free pass in the media and among the Slashdot crowd. The folks in the Slashdot crowd seem to be quick to criticize Windows and seem to be equally quick to praise OS X. Why?

As I write this I'm sitting in a laboratory where there are Windows boxes and Macs. Each is equipped with similar software, most significantly Mathematica, web browsers and MS Office. All of the users (engineers) are sitting (by choice) at the Windows boxes. Nobody is sitting at the Mac boxes. Occasionally I poll the users to find out why basically nobody *ever* uses the Macs, and the reply is pretty much always the same: Macs suck. The users strongly prefer to use Windows boxes.

When I claim that I don't like the Mac UI I have said enough. I don't have a burden to provide specific criticisms. I'm a customer, not a person being paid to give product feedback. If I don't like something, then all that I have to say is that I don't like it. Period. Likewise for all of the other engineers in this lab who choose on a daily basis to not like the Macs and to instead prefer the Windows boxes.

The Mac is the market weakling, not the market giant. The burden to prove that customers should use the market weakling product is clearly on the defenders of the Mac *faith*. The burden is not on those who are using the market giant. If you Mac folks truly believe that the Mac UI is better, than you have the burden to prove it.

Rather than reply to anybody's charge's of "flailing about" (a charge made without evidence by a person criticizing me for not producing evidence), I'd suggest that the Mac fans instead take a harder look at the way that they form opinions about the Mac and the way that they respond to criticisms of the Mac. Believe it or not, folks who criticize the Mac can do so sincerely and with validity.

Perhaps the defenders of the Mac *faith* should take a look at UI design documents that discussion such ideas as task-driven, inductive UI. The Mac UI does not employ such modern conventions, at least not to a significant degree or in a consistent manner.

The Mac UI Emperor simply has no clothes, and I'm glad that Raskin and others are willing to say so.

Re:hand-waving criticism of the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

When I claim that I don't like the Mac UI I have said enough.

Indeed you have. You do not like the Mac UI, and there is no need to say more than that.

When you call the Mac UI poor and primitive on the other hand you do need to back it up, or you're just trying to pass opinion off as fact.

Re:hand-waving criticism of the Mac

[DougDew]

You don't seem to understand what I'm saying.

Potential customers don't have to justify their opinions. Potential sellers do. Sellers have the burden of proof -- not customers. That is an engineering and business attitude that Microsoft and the Linux community gets and that Apple and the Mac crowd don't seem to get.

In other words, as a potential customer, all that I have to say is that in my opinion OS X has a poor UI and is primitive. It's not my problem to justify my comments. I can post on Slashdot all day about how I don't like the Mac UI without justification. And I can spend my time and dollars on Windows and Linux stuff instead of Mac stuff simply because I think that the Mac UI is poor and primitive. It's Apple's problem to change OS X so that I don't hold those opinions and so that I spend my time and money on their products.. At least that is the attitude that Apple should have if they want to improve the sales of their product.

Think of it this way: do you provide a detailed justification of your vote when you fill in a Slashdot poll? How about when you vote for President? It's not a voter's job to justify to a candidate why the voter did not vote for the candidate. It's the candidate's job to convince the voter to vote for the candidate.

By the way, Steve Jobs is fond of characterizing Microsoft and Microsoft's products in broad terms, without providing detailed justification. For example, I once heard Steve summarize Microsoft and Microsoft's products as lacking "style." Steve never bothered to explain exactly what he meant by that. And certainly I've heard more than a few people of the Apple crowd proclaim the "coolness" and "beauty" of OS X without ever justifying either claim in a detailed fashion. In short, the Apple crowd shouldn't condemn unsupported general statements while at the same time making them.

Too often I find that the Apple crowd seems to believe that the superiority of Apple products is self-evident, and that those of us who don't believe in that superiority are just blind or something. Well, once again, I say to the Apple crowd "prove it." Make a case for how the OS X UI is better than the Windows UI or KDE or Gnome.

The Apple crowd never ceases to amaze me. I can always count on Apple people to assume that their OS is superior until proven otherwise. And I can always count on them to assume that a Slashdot comment about being glad for some criticism of Macs is a troll. And I can always count on them to level personal attacks on any person who dares to criticize an Apple product.

Re:The difference is

[crackshoe]

Umm... i use all 5 buttons with amazing regularity - i'm constantly using context menus with the right click, and navigating files and folders and well as my web browser using two others. the fifth is the scroll wheel, which i also use constantly, as both a scroll wheel and a middle mouse button.

Watching Spreadsheets recalculate

[acomj]

Having used an apple //e for physics lab data back in the day. If the appleworks spreadsheat got too big you could watch it recalculate when you changed certain values.

So while I agree computers software might not be as efficient as when everthing was written in assembly, software today is significantly faster.

Re:Watching Spreadsheets recalculate

[burnin1965]

Yeah, when I read that statement in the article I had to go back and read it again to see if I really did read "BASIC". I truly hope Jef is just being facetious when he claims that a BASIC program on an Apple II will run faster than the same program written in an advanced language on a dual G4.

But thinking back I can recall even how slow those computers were at running compiled assembly code. I was working on an assembly program that flipped through pages of memory for a graphical display and at first I calculated the LSB and MSB for the page offsets, but it was too damn slow so I ended up creating a lookup table instead of doing the math. You had to get creative back then even when using the fastest programming method available.

But I suspect you are correct that he is trying to make a statement about the efficiency of the code today. But I would argue that although the code may not be as efficient it doesn't always have to be. You don't need to go back and tweak your assembly code these days to create mathematic look up tables, you just do the math.

burnin

Re:Watching Spreadsheets recalculate

[ViolentGreen]

So while I agree computers software might not be as efficient as when everthing was written in assembly, software today is significantly faster.

I am going to have to disagree there. I do not think that is the case. Efficiently programming in assembly is not like C or whatever HLL you can use. I remember studying a MIPS architecture in college. If I remember correctly, doing the steps for A=A+B would take longer then A=B+A for various reasons. You have to worry about this in assembly but with HLLs, the compiler is smart enough to figure out these optimaztions by itself.

So you either have to rely on the programmer to know all the pelculiarities with every architecture he wants to program on or you rely on him to know one HLL well enough be algorithmicly efficient and let the compiler take care of the rest.

Programmers would be a lot less of a commodity though.

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Anonymous Coward]

"Are the stupid anti-MS jabs ALWAYS required?"

Seriously guys.... I don't know why EVERYONE always bashes Windows... It's the MOST compatible OS out there....

compatible with ALL of the latest trojans, viruses, worms, malware, spyware, and adware!!

What more could ANYONE ask for!!?

- C. K.

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[NotClever]

I didn't post the post in question, but I'll tell you one thing that sucks about the Mac UI: You cannot tab to controls other than textboxes.

If you are filling out a form that has anything other than textboxes, there is a constant switching between the keyboard and mouse, that a skilled user on Windows just doesn't have to do.

Re:What i like about XP

[Chanc_Gorkon]

I havea 1 GHz G4 PowerBook and it runs just fine. There are whole hordes of people running Panther on lesser G4's and even a few who run it on G3's. In fact I saw Mac OS X being used on a Pismo (G3 Powerbook). The G3 is very capable of running OS X, but it may not run on older G3's. A G3 now, is like a Pentium II now. A PIII is more like a G4. A PII is capable of running Windows XP, but PII's would be very slow. A G5 is more like a Pentium IV. How is that bad? You simply cannot compare the X86 to the RISC based G3, G4 and G5. My Windows computer is a Pentium IV running at 2.53GHz. My 1 GHz Powerbook runs rings around that desktop when editing video. With the proper memory setup, any G3 (with the right rom) will run Mac OS X. What does surprise me some is they still have 256 MB as a standard RAM setup and Mac OS X runs much better with 512 MB.

OSX

[Anonymous Coward]

True, there is a big difference betweel OSX and XP, and it doesn't seems that Apple is capable of closing it, even after several 199$ "updates" (=bug fixes).

Notoriously whiny

[MacGod]

Jef Raskin, who is often mis-labelled as "The Father of the Macintosh" (despite the fact that he left the Mac team three years before the Mac's unveiling) has been a notorious critic of Apple. He bashes the leadership, the GUI, and the hardware. The more he does this, the harder it gets to construe it as anything other than sour grapes. Especially since his only real attempt at designing "his" computer interface was the complete flop of the Canon Cat

Note to Jef: if your design is so awesome, make it happen! If it's that much better, I'm sure you'll get more than enough sales to rake in the bucks! I know that I, for one, would love to see what it is you consider to be the ideal interface!

Re:Notoriously whiny

[payndz]

Especially since his only real attempt at designing "his" computer interface was the complete flop of the Canon Cat [jagshouse.com]

After reading the article, the Canon Cat comes across as little more than a glorified word processor rather than a true multi-purpose computer. The nearest equivalent I can think of would be my Psion Series 5, which while it has its uses and is a much-loved bit of pocket-sized kit, is emphatically not my day-to-day computer. (Ironically for Raskin, I'm typing this on an 8.6-running Tangerine iMac.)

The Cat seems to be designed to do a small number of jobs, chosen by the designers, very well. The Mac (and by extension other GUI-based UIs) can do a large number of jobs, many of which were not even dreamed of by the designers, as well as the application programmers can manage. And if the programmers don't get it right the first time, they can keep writing new versions until they do. (Hell, everyone knows that you should never buy an x.0 piece of software!)

Re:Notoriously whiny

[fossa]

Re: your last paragraph. Usability is a hard sell. I remember an Apple commercial ("There's no step three") from a few years ago and it's really the only advertisement I really remember that mentioned usability. (Ok, I guess AOL is "so easy to use, no wonder it's number one"... And infomercials often discuss ease of use, but none of these ever mentions anything really concrete).

Anyway, when was the last time you shopped for a new stove / oven (yes, I know stove shopping isn't a weekly thing) and based your decision on whether or not the four stove control knobs were layed out in a square,thus having a direct mapping to the actual stove, or layed out in a single row, thus requiring some sort of symbol or instruction to map a knob to a stove burner (my grandmother started a fire because she turned the wrong burner on once). My guess is never, but this is a usability issue and, in my experience, a safety issue as well.

Re:What i like about XP

[rocketjam]

What I like about XP is I know how it works, and on what hardware. I can buy an old PC and know it will be slow - but it will work - and with everything plugged in. After experimenting with OS X i've found that there is a bunch of stuff you have to play the upgrade game on and you have to be smart about which "old" hardware is supported.

Serial printers and scsi devices are the only things I know of that fit into this category for OS X (on supported machines i.e. G3 or better). A scsi device won't work on that old PC if you don't have a card for it.

I'm also burnt out on... the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$

Not sure what you're referring to on the costly updates. OS X - 10.3 is $129 at the Apple store. If you're referring to upgrading old software to be OS X native, you don't have to if you really don't want to. Virtually all older classic applications will run fine in Classic mode.

As to dodgy performance without topline hardware, I'm using a 450MHz blue & white G3 at home (that's mid-1999 hardware) and have no "dodgy performance issues." Similar hardware can be found today for $200 - $300.

Your first sentence probably says more about why you like XP than any comparison between the two platforms.

Raskin's "perfect interface"

[Sunnan]

Actually, I think Raskin would be somewhat happy with something like Emacs, especially with it's incremental search (backwards and forwards) feature, available by default on C-r and C-s.

Jef Raskin has a very different view on what's "good UI" than most of his peers - maybe you could combine both schools and come up with something that's killer.

noobies

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when is 'newbies' spelled like 'boobies'?

those who can do, those who cannot...

[d0n quix0te]

Design a Canon Cat. Jef's time to make an impact with his interface ideas came and went. His idea for the original Mac was implemented whole sale with the Canon Cat. It had everything Jef wanted including his stupid "LEAP" keys and an invisible interface.

The result an utter failure, Canon dropped the product in 6 months. Jef claimed that he did not get the support he wanted and had to make compromises on his vision. Bullshit, this man had his time to impress us with his interface expertise and product design skills. It was an utter failure.

Remember, Jef was a professor by training... his ideas are at best academic. If Jef had his way, the Mac would have been a glorified typewriter. It took the the genius of Bill Atkinson, Bruce Horn, Steve Jobs among many others to give us the Macintosh. These guys are the true fathers of the Mac.

Jef has a case of sour grapes, being kicked out of the Mac team by Steve Jobs, and then having his beloved Cat being canned by Canon at Steve's insistence. Jobs, insisted the Canon drop the Cat, if they were to invest in NeXT. Canon invested close to $100M in NeXT!

What we are left with is an academic who time has passed by.

Re:those who can do, those who cannot...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm. I've had the pleasure to converse with the man in email, and I must've missed that part of the tale of the CAT.

It seems far more likely that the machine slipped into obscurity because Canon lumped it in with their other office equipment (dedicated word processors, bubblejet typewriters), and completely failed to market its ability to *run software,* and otherwise behave as a general-purpose office PC that wouldn't get in a desk jockey's way. (Meanwhile, since the UI was 'transparent,' there was nothing to clue innocent users to the fact, which was the whole point of the exercise...)

To put it in perspective: The thing basically had the features of today's Microsoft Word... and today's Word basically has the features of 'the web,' in its own weird way. "Everything in a document," and for computational tasks, like an office's monthly billing, the document could embed the appropriate script, giving the ostensible 'power' of a VT3270 and the sort of minicomputer that would back it... in the same way Office, with its talking paperclips and self-obfuscating interface is used on our GHz processors today.

Without the understanding that it could be used in this way, it came across as an exceptionally simple and overpriced glass typewriter... In contrast to the equally expensive IBM compatibles of the era, which might've involved a bit of training and disk-shuffling to use, but were known to offer a reasonable game of simulated golf.

Raskin is barking

[Anonymous Coward]

... he was always barking.

That's why the Mac turned out to be something very different from the original concept he brought to Apple. Whatever the relative merits of XP vs OS X, the only thing that becomes clear from reading this article is that Raskin doesn't actually understand the concepts behind either of them.

If you then go to the effort of trying out THE (his 'alternative' UI, which feels rather like the bastard child of emacs and WordStar for DOS), you'll begin to understand the level of this man's cluelessness.

Jef Raskin &The Humane Environment

[Anonymous Coward]

More Raskin 'wisdom'

"Part I: PROBLEMS WITH THE GUIs WE HAVE

When we set about learning any interface feature that is new to us, we proceed in two phases, the first of which gradually grades into the second. In the first, or learning, phase we are actively aware of the new feature, and seek to understand and master it. If that feature is well-designed, and if we use it repeatedly, we eventually enter the desirable second, or automatic, phase, in which we have formed a habit, and use the feature habitually, without thought or conscious effort."

bla.. bla.. bla...

http://humane.sourceforge.net/humane_interface/s um mary_of_thi.html

http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/download.html

Even this detail is wrong.

[beetle496]

Yes, it is a nice knife sharpener. It would have been nice for him to give credit to the manufacturer (Chantry) rather than some random vendor. The fact that he got this detail wrong doesn't give me much faith in the rest of his opinions.

MacOS X is unmanagable

[ElitistWhiner]

The constant influx of third party solutions is prima facia evidence of how bad the user base judges the existing configuration of the Mac OS. MacOS X files fail to interoperate between versions of its own OS releases. Files simply lockup. USB is a mess. Hardware from one version no longer works on another version.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[thatguywhoiam]

As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands, when a simple 3-button mouse would let me do all of these quickly and easily. How are these key-click combinations "more user-friendly" than single clicks on a multi-button mouse?

There are a few different reasons.

Ergonomically, it is easier to maintain a keypress while performing a dragging option, if you are using your left hand to activate the modifier (control, option) and the left hand to steer the mouse. This is a natural position for many people as one tends to keep a hand near/on the mouse while the other hovers over the keyboard for quick Undos, Cut/Copy/Pastes, etc. You can see this on the newer Logitech keyboards where they have even gone so far as to include an extra scroll wheel on the left edge of the keyboard.

Also, Macs have always used this system as it becomes instant shorthand for oft-used modified actions across many applications. I know with reasonable certainty that holding shift, option, apple-key or control will modify a mouse click in ways that are directly related to the tool I have selected. For instance holding option while closing a Finder window will close all finder windows. Or a better example, holding shift in photoshop (or any other application with a selection mode) will constrain the selection to a square aspect ratio. Further, holding option will cause the selection to grow centrally from the mouse click position. Option-shift-click will accomplish both at the same time. This is very useful.

Trying to perform any actions that require holding down buttons while click-dragging the mouse would quickly result in a weird cramped game of Twister with your fingers on the mouse.

The Truth About Apple Users

[Anonymous Coward]

Please see this important notice to learn the truth about Apple users.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[l4m3z0r]

The whole point is that Apple isn't telling you you can't have your multi button mouse, in fact they are saying you want one, add it to your cart and we will ship it with your computer. What you people want is very different you want Apple to sacrifice their image and package because your too cheap to buy another mouse.

When you buy an apple you are expecting an appliance like computer, it comes in a pretty box, with all matching peripherals(dell does this too but in an ugly fashion). Apple gives you what you need to use your computer as they intended. Now you want something special or want that to be different than the pretty package they provide you. Sure we will let you here you go, we will even sell it to you. The problem is that you people think everyone wants and needs a 2 button mouse because PC's have two buttons, its what I'm used too, I'm afraid of change, I don't understand things that are different. Get over it. An apple is what it is, you want the extras buy them, but to piss and moan because your 2 button mouse doesnt have an apple logo on it is stupid.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[fimbulvetr]

2,3,4 or more button mouse is a crutch for poor interface design...

There's only one crutch being used here, and that is that line. I use a 6 button mouse. Picture this:

I have a cup of coffee in my left hand, and I'm drinking it. At the same time, I've just finished RAFA, so I use one button to make the browser go "back". I don't want to put my coffee down so I can press a stupid Command button.

Or imagine this:
Two of these buttons have a hotkey for the better Q3 weapons, RL and GL. One button is used for jumping, while my left hand controls the keyboard. Every try playing Q3 with a one button mouse? It's hilarious to watch you handicaps play. See, some of us can do things at the same time.

There are more examples, but I'm afraid you wouldn't understand them.

I rest my case.

Re:The Future of Trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

ror YHBT

Laptops: You need two buttons for Linux-X Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

For a laptop external mice are not good. How do you use an external mouse when the comptuter is on your lap?.

On the other hand YOU NEED TWO BUTTONS under Linux. I HATE UNSING F keys (or any other keys) under Yellowdog for emulating the second and the third button.

Besides, compared to Linux on i386, there is something wrong with the trackpad drivers under PPC Linux, the mouse is harder to control.

I call bullshit on this one

[Mac Degger]

"Jeff Raskin, ... and /inventor of the click-and-drag interface/"

If anyone can be credited with that invention, it would have to be Vannevar Bush with his prescient thoughts on the memex (ie pc). And if not him, then the guys at Xerox-Parc most definitely preceed this Raskin guy.

Re:I call bullshit on this one

[falcon5768]

Thanks for calling bullshit, cause the truth is This asshat didnt even contribute to the mac to begin with.... he quit in 1981

Re:I call bullshit on this one

[Anonymous Coward]

"If anyone can be credited with that invention, it would have to be Vannevar Bush with his prescient thoughts on the memex (ie pc). And if not him, then the guys at Xerox-Parc most definitely preceed this Raskin guy."

Vannevar Bush? The Vannevar Bush of the Majestic-12 committee? The super-secret group that covered up the Roswell crash? Ah, so there indeed is an unearthly connnection to the Macintosh computer platform! :)

I would remind you

[Dogun]

Java is not a modern language, but a step backward in time.

That's flamebait, btw people.

Raskin.

[Raven42rac]

Raskin is a glory seeking attention whore. He will do anything and say anything, as contrary as it may sound, to get some limelight. Just ignore this.

Re:What i like about XP

[nordicfrost]

Obvious troll, but hey, let's feed it. I volunteer.

Is I know how it works, and on what hardware. I can buy an old PC and know it will be slow - but it will work - and with everything plugged in.

Classic start. "Everything" just works on XP and has a driver. I'll give you an example of something that didn't work on XP even with a driver. The microsoft bluetooth mouse. I got one, tried it on XP. Had to update the system to SP1. Tried to install the driver, it stopped halfway through and said that the system was in Norwegian. The driver only supported English, Spanish, Swedish, Japanese, Chinese, Chinese (Simplified), Arabic, etc. I gave up the attempt to install it on XP.
No go with the BT Mouse. Went to my mom's house, popped in the Microsoft bluetooth dongle, BT was activated automatically on the system without driver install. I paird the mouse with the iBook, worked like a charm without any drivers installed and of course without any official support.

This is just the most ironic story I remember. Daily I use a computer that refuse to recognize most things that is plugged into it, and it is not my powerbook.

After experimenting with OS X i've found that there is a bunch of stuff you have to play the upgrade game on and you have to be smart about which "old" hardware is supported.

Uh, newsflash: progress moves forward. Not that other way. Most old hardware is in fact supported. I have yet to install a single driver on a Mac, it all seems to work just fine out of the box. And for each update, more is supported. You mean that you really don't appreciate to have Rendevouz finding a printer nearby in the wifi-net, installing the driver automatically and then using it within 30 seconds? I guess my feeling when using XP at work is correct. I feel like a masochist.

IE a Pentium 2/3 CPU with enough memory runs XP just fine - i expected an appropriately configed G3 to do the same with OS X - and i was wrong.

Besides comparing apples to snowplowers, this is in stark contrast to what many users say. An G3 ibook works just fine with a lot of RAM, as I see when I use my mom's iBook. The designers at work don't seem to be unhappy about OSX on ther G3 PowerMacs, some have even pointed out that in stark contrast to the other system, this one feels fast er and faster with each upgrade.

I'm also burnt out on the brushed metal look,

A matter of different taste. Blue used to be my favourite colour, not anymore. Guess why. (And no, I can't switch it to something else because the XP machine at work resets all user profiles at login. That also mean: lost passwords, user settings. It's like starting up with a new machine every day. Imagine the fun I must be having. IS thinks I need a new machine. They are right in that, but very wrong in bringing me a new XP-box.)

the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$

Now I'm just confused. You must be talking about the people that paid extra to get their computer with Windows 98SE, then were told that Windows ME was teh schiznitz, forked out money and found themselves in a world of shit? And then were told that they aren't secure until they fork out even more for Windows 2000?

MacOS is cheap compared to Windows. The upgrades are usually not needed and the previous versions are in good support. If you are a Mac fanatic, there are cool solutions like family licensing etc. but we all know that Apple don't intend to make money on the OS

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

In the newer versions of OS X (10.2 and 10.3, I think), you can turn on tabbing to all items on screen. It's one of disabilities options. It works. I use it all the time.

Next troll?

The problem with OS X is that...

[slashdot_punk]

....drawing and resizing windows is so damned SLOW. WTF is up with that?

As has been pointed out EVERYWHERE

[falcon5768]

He is not the father, or one of the co-creators or anything... he left the project in 1981, before they even had begun major development BECAUSE his view of the Macintosh wasnt the rest of the teams view.

Likewise if HIS view of the macintosh had made it, it would be on our kitchen table, not run any of the mahor programs it does, not have a mouse, and in all honest probably not even exist today.

One thing wrong in OS X

[sjonke]

OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS <=9, so no joy for Jeff) difficult to tell when an application is running and which application is top most. The user may be looking at some window but it may not be a window of the currently topmost application and so the behavior is not what they expect. It all started way back when with the advent of "Multifinder". Oh to wish for the good ol' days of one-app-at-a-time Single Finder.... ;)

I can't count the number of times I have had to explain, for example, that first you have to click in the AppleWorks document window and then the so-and-so menu will appear, because they had closed the last window in some other application and they are looking at an AppleWorks document, but AppleWorks is not the top application. The slightly grayed out title bar isn't much of a hint. Maybe background applications' entire windows should be grayed out/dimmed and more so (the content not just the title bar) to distinguish them from the frontmost app. Or translucent, although I find translucency to be wildly busy looking so I prefer the idea of graying out the entire window.

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[HarveyBirdman]

and which application is top most.

Yeah, I know what you mean, dude!

It's so friggin' difficult to move my eyeballs and look at the name of the topmost application in the menu bar.

I break into a sweat every time!

So much worse than the Windows taskbar where the visibly depressed button is not necessarily the currently selected window.

Oh to wish for the good ol' days of one-app-at-a-time Single Finder.... ;)

Don't make me come over there!

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

Keeping the application active after all windows have been closed means you don't have to relaunch a bunch of programs. It also means that in the off chance that you do close all windows in one application that you can get back to work quickly by going to the application menu and choosing "New" or "Open Recent".

It may be harder to learn than Windows(which is rare for the Mac OS), but it's much easier once it's learned. Clicking once on an application you can already see is easier than searching for an application that has either quit or moved to the back of all others and doesn't have any windows open to click on.

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

This modification (as well as many others) is capable of being made by a third party preference pane "TinkerTool". You have the option of making the active application have a blue arrow, thus giving it distinction in the dock between the other running programs. So it is a common enough complaint to warrant a fix, find it on version tracker if anyone is interested.

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[Phroggy]

So much worse than the Windows taskbar where the visibly depressed button is not necessarily the currently selected window.

This has been what I consider a bug in Windows since 1995. Why the hell has Microsoft never addressed it? It's not exactly rocket science...

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[Blakey Rat]

Control Panels also have no button in the task bar for some reason. That's been a bug in Windows for at least as long.

I don't know, maybe it's some kind of bone-headed design decision, but I lose control panel windows more often than any other kind of window because of it.

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[GrahamCox]

It's probably a design decision, which is a compromise because of another boneheaded design decision, and that is the poor way that the task bar deals with stuff as it gets full. Basically, it doesn't. So adding control panels to the whole mess makes a bad situation get a lot worse. For all its well-publicised faults, the OS X dock at least scales pretty well, and deals with filling up far more elegantly.

Re:One thing wrong in OS X

[King Babar]

OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS

Actually, you don't want Single Finder. What you really want is Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher. That just replaced your whole screen with a new screen full of the second app. Basically, it was a hack that ran Mac OS n times in RAM and just jumped between sessions. But, Lord, was it great! No confusion, full-sceeen applicationj goodness...these days, you can *almost* run your Mac OS X system this way with cmd-Tab and maximized windows. Imagine if all apps ran in full screen mode (like Preview) except with the friendly menu bar and what you saw is where you were...and everything could be done from the keyboard.

It would be pure poetry.

GUI for aliens or mutants

[beetle496]

I think Jef is out in left field on this, but it is interesting that we have settled for an interface that is ideally suited for someone with three hands. Remember how your typing instructor taught you: Keep both hands above the home row. Now, for efficiencies sake, you will also want to keep your dominant hand on the mouse.

Re:GUI for aliens or mutants

[hunterx11]

In addition to using the computer efficiently, they will do quite well at playing Nintendo 64.

Re:GUI for aliens or mutants

[R.Caley]

it is interesting that we have settled for an interface that is ideally suited for someone with three hands.

What you need is a chord keyboard and a mouse.

Even better, a chord keyboard which is a mouse. That would finally mean that it would be posible to use a computer while holding a piece of paper, or flicking through a book or just while drinking coffee to keep you're brain in a fit state to supply something useful to type.

Re:GUI for aliens or mutants

[allanc]

Actually, fun fact, Engelbart planned for people to use a chording keyboard when he invented the mouse. Just that nobody did.

--AC

Re:The difference is

[moonbender]

Both Mac and Win contextual menus are highly customizable as is... use a 3rd party "power-tool" to take it to extreme. This bit of your troll just opinion and is unfounded bunk.

It's my experience. I've been using both platforms for about 10 years. Obviously there are Mac programs with really good and Windows apps with terrible context menus, but that does not seem to me to be the general trend.
I don't know why you think the existence of "power tools" to customize anything is relevant, I'm talking about out-of-the-box user interfaces here, and a difference in mentality in the two developer communities.
Furthmore, my post is not a troll, I think I made a fairly reasonable point in reply to another poster. You decided to flame me for, but that wasn't a reaction I hoped for, although in any discussion like this it's obviously to be expected.

So does the Mac (Have you ever actually used one?).

Yes, my first Mac was an LC II, and although I've personally settled for the PC for the time being, like I said, my GF uses an Apple and so do parts of my family. And as you pointed out in your friendly manner, my Microsoft 5-button + scroll wheel USB mouse works happily with her laptop. A mouse by Creative Labs didn't though, but I blame Creative Labs and not Apple for that.
But that is all beside the point. Supporting 3-button mice is not the same as embracing them, the admittedly vague word I used.

Exactly the point... your GF doesnt know there is a contextual menu... is she happy with her mac? does it do exactly what she wants it to? does she have to learn to do things in a way that is not immediately apparent?

Kind of/kind of/sometimes are the answers to your questions. She manages her way around in both Windows and Mac OS environments, but obviously the Apple looks a lot nicer.

Bah. I don't know why I bothered to reply point by point. You totally and probably deliberately misunderstood my original post. I have no grudge against Apple - I recommended the Apple laptop to my gf -, although whether or not that is the case is obviously totally irrelevant. I personally think that the context menu is an enormous boon to productivity - it has been, for me - and it has been my experience that the context menus in Windows applications are superior to those of Apple applications. I gave reasons why I think that is the case. But if you think that having two buttons instead of one is part of "the complexities of the OS" then be my guest.

Re:The difference is

[OrangeTide]

MacOS prefers 1-button
Windows prefers 2-buttons (not many things that use middle-click)
X11 prefers 3-buttons (You can't even use Xaw without a middle button, or some way of emulating it).

Does that mean X11/Xaw has a better user interface?

btw. ctrl-click on Mac is always a context menu. Macs have always had 1-button, but they usually required a keyboard combination to do anything interesting. Go figure. They would have been happier with just putting multiple buttons on the mouse, and just making the "main" button bigger or something. And those context menus work fine in Finder and Safari, what more do you want?

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[kanweg]

Scroll wheel? Just hit the space bar for the next page.

Bert

on the other hand...

[zogger]

... it was quite pleasant to day after day, year after year get on the computer and not care much about getting owned, or the latest windows bug du juor. Some folks never drank that MS kool aid to begin with, because they could see it was just lame. MS power users became that way from necessity a lot more than from desire, because their stuff was broken and prone to getting viruses and trojans all the time, let alone constant crashing. For every 100 times my friends had to deal with registry corruption, etc, I had 100 times of booting, getting to computing, and nothing much happening besides what I wanted to happen. It wasn't perfect, that's a gimmee, but you got to admit reality, it was way easier to use for joe average and a lot more secure. Why that would want to make someone cut of their hands is beyond me, unless you actually LIKED having broken and overly complex for no appaarent reason stuff just to give you some busywork to do with your spare time. Some folks like that for a hobby, obviously, others don't.

It's only relatively recently in the past few years, that a home consumer could get an offering from any OS vendor that was at least half assed stable and half assed secure and functional from raw noobs to advanced professional level users. Before that time, Macs had at least the security part correct, along with the GUI, and were 1/2 way to functionality across the board. that's a 2.5 rating out of 3. MS barely gets a 1.5 until recently, same with linux.. Now I would say that the top 3 OSes are tied at 2.5 still, but Mac got there a lot sooner. And if GUI isn't important, then why has it become an industry standard, across all vendors of the major OSes? Could it be because it's a good idea, that people appreciate the ease of use of GUI? I think so, so do all the folks who have developed and distributed such OSes. I'd say that's some fairly good proof.

There's a REASON that there is something beyond a CLI offered by EVERYONE now. And Apple knew this quite a long time ago and specialised in it, it wasn't an afterthought or a "me too" offering.

With that said, I switched fulltime to Linux once it hit a 2.5 rating on my personal home joe user scale, because it's freer, runs on cheaper hardware I can afford, and at least achieved parity with what I had before. I wouldn't have if it hadn't been developed to that point.

Re:on the other hand...

[AKAImBatman]

because their stuff was broken and prone to getting viruses and trojans all the time,

The 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall Virus. I didn't hear any Windows machines belting out that song through a voice synth.

For every 100 times my friends had to deal with registry corruption

For every 100 times my friends had to rebuild their desktop/extensions...

let alone constant crashing.

My favorite Mac user quote: "Don't go so fast! You'll lock it up!"

It wasn't perfect, that's a gimmee, but you got to admit reality

Indeed. The reality was that Microsoft beat Apple to building a modern OS for consumers. The real question is why did that happen? The answer is probably that Jobs forced innovation, while the Apple Corp. of the time simply tried to milk its existing investments. As a result, what was once a very beautiful design, became rusted and ugly. It desperately needed an overhaul to retrofit the proper tech for 500+ MHz machines, and multimedia programs that consumed memory like candy.

Now Jobs is back, NeXTSTEP lives on, and life is good. :-)

Re:on the other hand...

[Draconix]

Indeed. The reality was that Microsoft beat Apple to building a modern OS for consumers.

No.

Microsoft managed to make deals with the major players in the x86 world, and thusly got their operating systems pre-installed on most x86 machines. Microsoft Corp. did a damn good job selling their software, but it has little to do with the actual quality of the software.

This has been pointed out time and time again, but just in case you missed it: x86 machines are cheaper than macs. It's a fact of life. And what operating system comes pre-installed on most x86 machines? Windows.

Once more, just to be clear, the reason Windows is in such wide use has fuck-all to do with how 'good' the operating system is. It's because it comes pre-installed on cheap computers. And when the average consumer wants a new computer, which are they going to get? The $1000+ macintosh, or the $500 Windows PC?

Re:on the other hand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry you can't afford a Mac like the rest of us, man. Ever thought of going back to school and getting a degree?

Re:on the other hand...

[zogger]

once in a while I think about it, but nope, couldn't afford it at this time. As to just buying one, I got so many computers now getting yet again another one is not on the top of the must have pile right now.

I know you are razzing me but thought I'd answer truthfully.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[Anonymous Coward]

A question about mice modded offtopic in a Q+A dealing with usability?

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

I am confused - is this a complaint about web page behavior? If so, is it a Safari issue, or does similar behavior occur with IE for Mac?

If it's not web-related, what program(s) are you talking about (since I'm clueless here)?

My car only needs 3 wheels and 1 gear

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother with more than one gear in my car, and 4 wheels instead of 3? I'm sure it would run just fine on one gear. Sure it won't go fast enough , but apparently to people like you, that's ok.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[balaam's ass]

How is kepress-click-dragging with a one-button mouse any more "ergonomic" than click-dragging with a multi-button mouse? Seems to me that using one finger for either a left, middle or right mouse click, while dragging, is at least as easy as using one finger to click left and another finger on another hand to hold down a key.

In the first part of your post, you talk about operating keys with your left hand while steering the mouse with your left hand? THAT sounds like a tough game of twister.

As for the other functions you describe, maybe you missed my point. Almost all the "instant shorthand" functions you describe, except the multi-key combinations (shift-option click) could be implemented via different mouse buttons --- and in most cases already ARE on the Mac, if you buy yourself a multi-button mouse. (e.g. pressing the middle mouse button while closing a Finder window...) So the issue is just "Why won't Macs ship with a multi-button mouse?"

So, with the Mac, in some sense you already have a multi-button mouse, it's just that it requires TWO hands to operate it, instead of just one. Putting some of the functions on a multi-button mouse frees up your left hand to do other things. Now THAT'S ergonomic. In gaming situations, this can make a big difference -- e.g. I can keep my left hand centered over "A,W,S,D" without having to use my thumb or other fingers for Command, Option etc.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[teslar]

Have you ever tutored truly novice user? Someone with absolutely no clue about technology or computers in general? They constantly click the wrong button and get confused when a right click menu appears as opposed to opening the document or program. You have to keep reminding them that it's the left click unless otherwise indicated.

I can't speak for the users you've been tutoring, but in my experience, that is simply not true. Novice users will default to only using the left mouse button. They will simply ignore the right mouse button unless you tell them explicitly to use it - and it's hard to get them to use all the convient functions that come with the right-click. But they will not be confused over which button does what.

On the one-mouse button issue... I wouldn't mind a Powerbook just for the looks. However the first thing that'd go onto it would be debian and the second thing that would need to happen would be remapping the second and third mouse button to F10 and F11. Rather awkward. So I won't buy a Powerbook. End of story.

What's wrong with 2 mouse buttons and a scroll wheel when your own OS supports it?? It doesn't stop users from just using just one button if they feel nostalgic, does it??

Why run linux on a mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

In order to complain about missing buttons? MacOSX is so much better!

Re:The difference is

[moonbender]

Does that mean X11/Xaw has a better user interface?

No. Never in my original post did I make any kind of implication that more buttons are always better. What I said can be summarized with the first two lines of your post.
Now, I do think that the context menu is awesome, and that the second mouse button is a great way to reach it, but I really don't want to start a debate about the optimal number of mouse buttons. It seems that just stating the notion that the concept of a context menu is supported more broadly on Windows than on the Mac is revolting to many Slashdot users, I doubt that a reasonable discussion of an optimal button-count is possible. Such are the confines of this site.

dang!!

[green pizza]

XP SP2 has no such feature! Granted, early betas of SP2 did have this feature, but it disappeared at least 6 month ago.

Ack! You mean MS pulled that feature from the final release of XP SP2??

That was the only feature of XP Pro that I was looking forward to! (I personally use Win2K on my PC)

Re:dang!!

[qodfathr]

I agree -- it's most unfortunate that they pulled it, as I also thought it was the best new feature. But, like I said, if you want the feature, it can be 'put back in'...instructions abound.

Switched BACK

[mildness]

I used a Mac back in the days of II LC for a while before being forced to the Dark Side.

Six months ago I bought my first Mac in over five years. My beautiful memories shattered when I found the once simple, light and elegant Mac GUI to have grown ugly and cluttered and realized that XP was in fact, easier to use.

Sure, MacOS X is sweet-ass under the hood but as a Power USER I never spend time there.

As much as I may hate MS, XP is a damn fine end-user OS.

My Powerbook will be listed on ebay this week.

Cheers,

Bill

Re:Switched BACK

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, noone that has ever coded for )SX would say that it is "Sweet ass under the hood". You probably have not loked that far under the hood but I can tell you it is more fucked up underneith where most people don't look that it is on the surface!

Apple force wedged and welded two OSes on top of each other and they STILL don't really get along. It's a nightmare for developers.

Re:Switched BACK

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, MacOS X is sweet-ass under the hood but as a Power USER I never spend time there.

And this makes you a power user exactly how?

Re:Switched BACK

[canoeberry]

XP's only advantage is with keyboard shortcuts and keyboard activation of the menu bar. I hate the mouse and XP makes it possible to do almost everything without using the mouse at all. Very well done. In XP you don't need to memorize keyboard shortcuts because you can activate the menu and find the command that way. Then the shortcut becomes the Menu bar key sequence.

I do not know of a way to activate the menu bar in OS X, so you just plain old have to memorize keyboard shortcuts. If you want to avoid the mouse you have to pick your own keyboard shortcut and hope that you are not over-writing some other keyboard shortcut.

Meanwhile, to give up on the Mac and go back to XP, where the wrong install can mean a complete re-install of the OS - that's boggling. It's not worth it. I somehow trashed /etc/machinit or something like that and my machine was trashed. After I re-installed the OS I was done. No apps to re-install, no registry to refill, no preferences to reset. I was done. I will never go back.

Re:Switched BACK

[Anonymous Coward]

Under System Preferences,, choose Keyboard and Mouse, under Keyboard shortcuts, choose 'Turn on full keyboard access."

Maybe it should be on by default, but it's not hard to find.

Re:Switched BACK

[man_ls]

If you trash an existing Windows install, to the point where it won't boot, but don't want to reformat, you can perform several different ways of recovering it:

System Restore rolls back all system files and system configurations to the previous time a System Restore was performed. Generally, service packs, MSKB patches, some other minor situations. Driver installs of unsigned drivers seem to prompt this, also.

"Last Known Good" configuration. Every time you start your PC and log on successfully, it marks that configuration as the "good" one to use in the future. If you can't log in, use Last Known Good to roll-back configuration changes. This doesn't always work if you were doing things with GPOs and other things that have system-wide effects, but for hardware configuration changes, it's fairly useful.

Recovery Console, is a simple CLI for repairing single damaged system files, and also for repairing a damaged MBR or boot loader (XP damaged by another installed OS overwriting its partition table)

Finally, you can performa a Repair Reinstall, where all system files and drivers are reset to their defaults (but the registry and installed programs are left intact.) This resets your system's OS state to whatever is on the disk, and leaves its ap state okay.

The only times you need to totally reinstall the OS are, after a major hardware upgrade (and even then, as long as you don't need a new HAL, it can survive, although it will be more unstable) or if you trash your registry, which is not easy to do.

Re:Switched BACK

[bedouin]

My Powerbook will be listed on ebay this week.

You will regret it in a month or so, when you realize there was nothing inherently easier about XP. The only easy thing was expecting things to work identically across platforms, instead of growing accustomed to the OS X way of doing things, which for me turns out to be a thousand-times easier. Of course, if all you want to do is hold onto memorized patterns of clicking here and there to get what you want, despite its questionable logic, then maybe you deserve the wife-beating, psychological torment, mental colonization that is known as a Microsoft product.

Windows isn't easier, you've just been assimilated by its ways, and suffer from a digital battered women's syndrome.

My beautiful memories shattered when I found the once simple, light and elegant Mac GUI to have grown ugly and cluttered and realized that XP was in fact, easier to use.

That's laughable. The OS X GUI is one of the cleanest, least intrusive ones I've ever seen. Though, maybe you enjoy 50 items in your task bar, constant pop-up wizards, requests to download new updates, take 'tours,' and a slew of other annoyances. Every time I boot a Windows machine I'm amazed at the things you people put up with. Even joining an open wireless network in Windows is a chore compared to OS X. Constant reminders and wizards, complicating steps that would take one keystroke in OS X.

Here is the difference between OS X and Windows: OS X is for the individual with a bit of common sense; a person who thinks logically without having his hand held -- it is intuitive for a person with a brain. XP is built for the lowest common dominator, so far that it takes into consideration those that ask "where is the any key?" You ever wonder who needs a warning on a cup of McDonald's coffee that "it may be hot?" The same person who finds Windows network configuration wizards, clippy, and the Windows UI intuitive -- i.e. the masses of people indoctrinated by consumer-based assembly line schooling with an inability to make any decision without their hand being held.

Re:Switched BACK

[fingusernames]

... or if you trash your registry, which is not easy to do.

Huh? I built a brand new machine, installed W2000 on it. Installed a bunch of applications. Started using it. Two days after building it, the machine refused to boot. Some bullshit about a damaged hive. Talk about user friendly.

I tried the recovery console. The only registry I could find was pre-app install. There was nothing I could do to save the registry data (the hive) because it is some binary format. I googled for programs that might be able to examine a hive file and fix it. I tried the MS knowledge base. No luck.

So I wiped the drive and started over. Now I backup the registry on a regular basis, and after every application installation... good policy that. But regardless, it was insanely easy to trash my registry. I am of the opinion that it was caused by a bad block being discovered by the brand-new hard drive, and the internal block reallocation caused the registry to die. The registry is an evil, stupid, opaque sore. A giant binary file that contains all the family jewels for every last application and the operating system, just waiting there to be corrupted. What a brilliant and innovative concept.

Larry

Re:Switched BACK

[grkvlt]

OK - I hate how many times people have said this about OSX... to turn on full keyboard access (to the menu-bar, tab between buttons and UI widgets, everything) as follows:

1. open "System Preferences.app"
2. start the "Keyboard & Mouse" control panel
3. goto the "Keyboard Shortcuts" pane
4. click "Turn on full keyboard access" checkbox at the bottom
5. also scroll down to select the "Keyboard Navigation" checkbox in the main pane

now, ^F2 gives apple menu access, with cursor key access to all menu items, tabs between UI elements work etc etc.

it's all there (if u look for it...) -- hope that helped

Re:Switched BACK

[Anonymous Coward]

The registry is just a meta filesystem. Any filesystem is just a giant binary file. How would your Mac like it if the /etc directory had a bad block in it? There's little you can do about physical corruption on any machine without redundant hardware.

BTW, I've been an NT user for 9 years and have never seen a trashed registry, let alone had it happen to me.

aQazaQa

Re:Switched BACK

[canoeberry]

Wow - I had turned on all that stuff but didn't quite understand how it all worked. That's better but still not as good as the Windows UI.

I want to invoke the View menu, not the menu bar, press RIGHT ARROW 4 times, etc.

It's still a start. Perhaps it's still more configurable than I realize. I'll spend some time with it.

The other thing I'd like to be able to do is turn off Command-H, which means hide windows. I had that as an all-important emacs binding. I can't figure out how to turn that off.

Re:Switched BACK

[grkvlt]

well, i know that in the "Keybopard Shortcuts" pane of the dialog (see grandparent) you can add shortcuts for any application's menus - just give the application name and the text of the menu item you want a shortcut for, and it can be assigned to any key combination. forinstance, i assigned option-command-F to "Full Screen" and option-command-C to "Continuous Scrolling" menu items in Preview.app, which now show up on the menu items as accelerators/mnemonics.

un-assigning, though, is a different matter - have you tried assigning a different key-combination to the "Hide Terminal" menu item in Terminal.app? i've not tried it yet, but it might help?

cheerz...

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't your computer come with a surge protector, lots of blank CD-Rs, a copy holder clip, a keyboard tray, a scanner...

If they included a multibutton mouse the new complaint would be why it doesn't have a fourth button, why isn't it 800dpi, why why why.

Re:What i like about XP

[kilfarsnar]

"IE a Pentium 2/3 CPU with enough memory runs XP just fine - i expected an appropriately configed G3 to do the same with OS X - and i was wrong."

I'm not sure what your experience was with OSX on old hardware. I set up OSX.3 on a Rev C iMac (purple, 333MHz G3) with 256MB RAM and it runs fine, if a bit slowly.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[thatguywhoiam]

How is kepress-click-dragging with a one-button mouse any more "ergonomic" than click-dragging with a multi-button mouse? Seems to me that using one finger for either a left, middle or right mouse click, while dragging, is at least as easy as using one finger to click left and another finger on another hand to hold down a key....

All I can say is, try it. For single-click actions I agree with you, but for held-down modifier actions there is no contest. You really don't think its any harder to hold down 3 mouse buttons simultaneously while dragging, instead of holding down two keys with one hand and the mouse in the other?

Also, using the keyboard for modifiers also gives you many more options than you could ever cram on a mouse.

Don't get me wrong - I love my Logitech mouse that I use with my Mac, its got something like 7 or 8 buttons. I have mapped them all to Expose, or page up/down, or close window (wheel press). I still use (left-handed) shift/option/control-type modifiers for all those situations that call for it.

In the first part of your post, you talk about operating keys with your left hand while steering the mouse with your left hand? THAT sounds like a tough game of twister.

Yeah that was a mistake, sorry. Meant to say right hand.

As for the other functions you describe, maybe you missed my point. Almost all the "instant shorthand" functions you describe, except the multi-key combinations (shift-option click) could be implemented via different mouse buttons --- and in most cases already ARE on the Mac, if you buy yourself a multi-button mouse. (e.g. pressing the middle mouse button while closing a Finder window...) So the issue is just "Why won't Macs ship with a multi-button mouse?"

Well to my knowledge the right button and mouse wheel are natevely supported. I think you have to define anything beyond that.

The answer for your last question, I believe is an answer to the coding practices of developers. When you do not know for sure if your entire Mac audience has multibutton mice, you must make sure that your application does not rely on a right-click for any specific action. This enforces the notion that right-clicking should not be required for any action - it should only offer shortcuts to actions or functions already available in more obvious or logical places.

You can of course buy a Mac shipped with a multibutton mouse, you just have to tell them that you want one. The fact that there is no multibutton mouse with the Apple logo on it is a bit irrelevant - they sell Logitech and other mice at the Apple Store (or any retail location).

*snore*

[HarveyBirdman]

Q: And the iMac G5? Was the original iMac a step on the correct path?

A: The unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk? It is a practical and space-saving design. But the interface needs fixing.

Well, it's been 23 years since you left Apple, Jeff. Where's *your* fix?

One only cares about getting something done.

And a simple to use, no muss, no fuss, all in one computer fails on that front... how, exactly?

Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run.

Insignificant to Jeff Raskin, that is.

You know, there's a reason people hide their gray boxen PCs under their desks, and a reason there exists an aftermarket case mod industry.

Raskin has always been a HUI snob

[csoto]

Never mind that there is much to love about OSX's framework architecture and underlying modularity. Raskin, as anyone else, has strong opinions about user interfaces. I have my own. I don't love everything about the OSX interfaces, but I've owned Macs since the 80s and could say the same about any version of the Mac OS.

The real test of an interface is its adoption in the public. This being said, OSX is a hit.

Re:Raskin has always been a HUI snob

[Anonymous Coward]

The real test of an interface is its adoption in the public.

By your standard, Windows has an order of magnitude superior user interface than OS X.

Re:Raskin has always been a HUI snob

[Anonymous Coward]

The real test of an interface is its adoption in the public. This being said, OSX is a hit.

According to your test, Microsoft's interface must be many times better.

Re:Raskin has always been a HUI snob

[csoto]

I meant adoption relative to that of "Classic Mac." Classic is dead. Mac OS X is a suitable alternative.

Windows is more prevalent because Microsoft best abused its monopoly at a time when Classic Mac OS and Apple hardware sucked most.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[RetiredMidn]

And I like your response to those who say "You can always buy a multi-button mouse". Yea. I have a Logitech USB scrollwheel mouse that I use, but why did I have to buy one??? Why didn't I just GET one that came with my Mac?

Maybe because once you start caring about what you get for a mouse, you're better off choosing the one you really like. Presumably you chose your Logitech mouse because it had a balance of features and price that suited you.

In my experience, people with a strong preference in mice have some bias about what they want to see in a mouse: right- or left-hand contoured, extra buttons, etc. Rarely do those people use the mouse that their machine shipped with.

Apple could undoubtedly build a two button mouse (or scroll wheel mouse, or a trackball, or...) that would win design awards, but it would almost certainly still be rejected by a large percentage of those who have a strong preference, as well as by those (such as my wife) who perceive the second mouse button as superfluous for their simple needs. I doubt that a product line of mouse options would generate much in the way of gross margin, and that market is very nicely served by third parties.

As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands...

This observation always slays me. Back in 1984, MS-DOS users derided the mouse because it required them to take one hand off the keyboard. Now the rap against the one button mouse is that it requires you to leave one hand on the keyboard.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Ohreally_factor]

Want a new mouse? I highly recommend http://www.macmice.com/themouse.html. Keeps with the good lucks of your Apple and had 2 buttons and a scroll wheel. I know you want a solution out of the box, but since Apple is not going to do it, find your solution in this box.

This post is not a paid advertisment.

Sorry, I try to avoid doing business with well known con men. Which, by the way, brings your disclaimer into question. If you're not really getting paid, what is your connection to MacMice and/or Jack Cambell? Or do you mean that MacMice didn't pay slashdot for advertising?

I paid for the computer, I run whaterver I want

[Anonymous Coward]

Is my laptop, Steve Jobs HAS NO RIGHT to tell me what to do with it!

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Ohreally_factor]

No, it's because it's a non-issue, and it gets really tiresome hearing it again and again and again. Please just stop it.

"In the Good Old Days..."

[mcdtracy]

In the good old days, we booted from system disks and we couldn't even copy them... and we LIKED it."

The world changes and raskin won't... Jobs gets it.
Out perform the competition and delight the user.

Raskin hasn't made a contribution in over 20 years.

Rage on old fart... It was better before... sure.
A friggin' free cellphone has better software than those "good ol days".

McD

Re:"In the Good Old Days..."

[burns210]

I have to admit I have a soft spot for a system 6 classic mac all-in-one computer. I am 18, and barely actually 'remember' using them when they were being sold as new, if at all.

The idea that you can drop in a new finder file, or upgrade your sytem by swapping out a couple old system extenstions with the ones that came in a magazine freewar section is amazing. I think there is a lot of very powerful stuff that was designed into the mac.

File extensions and such, while not perfect, are a really easy way to upgrade and maintain your system. You can do so much with just moving/replacing files that would break a Windows or Mac or linux box with DLL hell and what not.

I think serious multi-tasking, obviously, was the core problem for the mac. It was too easy to jump ship to windows(who, at the time, was worse off in most respects) and point at the weak(but just as reliable in all honesty) multi-tasking ability of system 7 and such.

Macs, more so then than now, had a simple directory structure too. System, Documents, Applications. Takes about 2 seconds(the time it took to read those three words) to figure out where a given file is gonna be, really.

I have great love for the old macs. It had a clean and elegant system.

P.S: I say this while listening to iTunes on my 12" Powerbook, I still love the mac. :)

Re:Anti-MS jabs

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how you consider being very different from Mac OS X an insult to Windows

Code bloat = !same(code)

[benhocking]

Fair enough. But the problem in the human-centric tasks such as writing a letter (besides being harder to time with a person in the loop) is code bloat, IMHO. One cannot blame modern languages or cpus on code bloat. Surely if you took the "same code" that was behind MS Word 1.0, compiled it on a modern compiler, and ran it on a modern computer it would run noticeably faster, even if it were running on a modern OS. (Granted, the modern OS might negatively impact the speed of MS Word 1.0.)

An excellent book, that addresses similar problems in a much more general manner is Why Things Bite Back by Edward Tenner. To (over) summarize, things "bite back" because humans have certain thresholds (such as safety thresholds) and will usually push new technology to ride those thresholds, explaing various things such as why air bags don't save as many lives as they could (if it weren't for human nature), etc. That doesn't mean air bags are bad, just that our nature mitigates some of their usefulness. Of course, I'm quickly digressing.

Re:Code bloat = !same(code)

[shotfeel]

Fair enough. But the problem in the human-centric tasks such as writing a letter (besides being harder to time with a person in the loop) is code bloat,

To a certain (OK large) extent that's true.

OTOH I wonder how much of the "simpler" interface was because we were willing to settle for what the application could do, not necessarily what we wanted to do.

The "simple" interface when used for writing a letter meant you used the font the printer had "installed", used plain text, used tabs to indent everything, blank lines for centering vertically and did the same complictated calculations for centering horizontally that were used on a typewriter (that's simple). Forget about spell checking!

Most people won't settle for that today.

People want to do complex things with their computers. While it makes it more difficult to create an interface that makes that complexity simple, it also makes it more important that it be done to the greatest degree possibnle.

Ugh.

[solios]

More importantly, how many times have we seen Windows features show up in MacOS?

1. Meta-Tab : a Windows first. Swiped by Apple for OS 8.5.
2. Windows that minimize to a dock/taskbar, rather than windowshade in place : a Windows first, and the Windows-like behaviour I hate the most about OS X. 9 Windowshades, goddammit. It's a third party hack on Windows and OS X.*
3. Preview-in-filebrowser : A feature that had been standard with Explorer and missing on the Mac until OS X.

There's others, but it's been awhile since I've been a regular Windows user, so I'd be hard pressed to recall others.

Raskin had almost nothing to do with the Mac as it's known now, or as it's been known for years- his own computer design concepts called for a command line interface, not a GUI. He gets a lot of credit for the Mac but the fact is that he left Apple long before it was ever released. MacOS System 1 was shaped much more by Andy Hertzfeld, Steve Jobs and Burell Smith than it was by Raskin.

As for Windows useability.... ugh. Apple's ripped some features, but they're mostly good ones. Minus that whole "losing the windowshading" thing, which I'm still pissed about. If you want Windowshading without third party hacks, your only option these days is an X11 window manager. :|

Of course, that could lead me to ranting about the state of X11 "desktops" and how much of a letdown it is to see the big DMs turning into shit Win32 clones with bad implementations of all of the worst features of OS X jammed on top- and I've already strayed too far into troll territory, so I'll just stfu. :P

* You would think that with the zero-pixel borders around sides and bottom of non-Brushed Metal windows in OS X that they would have included windowshading or at least allowed applications to implement it on a per-app basis... but since ALL windows minimize to the dock, it's easy to make one hell of a mess out of it really, really fast in the process of working with Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Photoshop and Fireworks... not the cleanest solution in the world, thank you.

Re:Ugh.

[GileadGreene]

Not sure about the others, but I'm pretty sure that Windows swiped the dock concept from NeXT. Since NeXT is the predecessor to the modern Mac OS I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple lifted the minimized idea from Windows.

Re:Ugh.

[solios]

Right, but if memory serves (this being strictly from screen shots and my limited experience with OS X Server 1.0), you could "dock" more or less anywhere you wanted- move things around and sort them however- Windowmaker style. AND you could windowshade, so you really had the best of both worlds.

Re:Ugh.

[killjoe]

The preview in explorer first showed up in lotus magellan for DOS. It was amazing, you could see inside zip files, it would show you the gif files and if it was a text file you could edit it right there.

It also had other neat features like find as you type!.

Lotus magellan was the most well thought file explorer ever created. Nobody has ever duplicated it or matched it's feature set. Xtree for dos was pretty damned good, the new apple finder has adapted the multiple horizantal panes interface but completely missed the point. Then again they wrapped it in finder which is an abomination in and of itself.

Re:Ugh.

[Anonymous Coward]

Raskin had almost nothing to do with the Mac as it's known now, or as it's been known for years- his own computer design concepts called for a command line interface, not a GUI.

Hey Solios, put down the crack pipe. *Lisa* was planned as a CLI machine, until it inherited the GUI from Raskin's Macintosh project (after he finally managed to convince Jobs that GUI really is the way to go -- this took a trip to PARC, among other things).

Sure he didn't write any software for the Mac, but he *designed* the OS as well as the physical form of the computer (having a mouse, etc.). He was the visionary of the Mac project (heck, he started the project), Jobs just crashed the party.

Re:Ugh.

[swisswuff]

Mac OS X saves a lot of time through it's user interface once you are used to it. Far more time than OS 9 - through all of it's logic - or Windows offer.

The option of having many Finder windows - to the same location or different locations - and the option of navigating entirely within 1 window instead of having to navigate using the "whole Finder desktop" allows for time to be saved. I can focus on one window, use the keyboard extensively, and get to where I want fast.

The dock allows for fast navigation. I can get an idea of the identity of any minimized window without clicking - which can not be said for Windows, and definitely not for OS 9.

The Aqua windows theme is one of the most ergonomical themes I have encountered in a long while and despite ShapeShifter, I go back to it all the time. Sure, some aspects of CDE would be cool to have - front window with unique color, for example - but still: Close, minimize, resize, scroll: I can click on the correct window button on OS X within a much smaller amount of blink in the eyes than OS 9 or Windows; I always mix up the middle windows button because I forget whether a window is minimized or maximized. If you time how fast you get to the scrollbar - you'll see it first in Aqua. If you have to search for your buttons anyway because you just happen to take your time, you will not notice the difference that much.

Unix commands save a lot of time - and they are for the computer user, not for the newbie. If you use a command to deal with a lot of files, if you do networking - any of these "picture" computers, OS 9 or Windows - are not as sleek as Mac OS X technically is. You are done faster on OS X setting yourself up as client for a Solaris or AIX workstation than you are using Windows or OS 9.

Being able to run Unix software under X11 is also a time saver - no need to use another machine saves a lot of time sometimes.

Typical Unix features such as the renice command (set process priorities) allows the user to have full speed happening while operating a user interface, and background calculations to run at a full speed while the user reads, thinks, or just does not fully interact with the computer. This combination turns out to be a very important time saver: I do not have to wait for the machine, but the machine can resume full speed at the second I stop using the CPU.

Memory management lets you forget fiddling with manual settings of applications such as OS 9. You save time because OS X lets you set all that.

Web applications are somewhat faster than anything else. Instead of having to run special software for server solutions, OS X allows you to easily set up Apache, PHP and MySQL under the hood of a fully graphical desktop OS so you can run your groupware reliably and fast. That was not at all the case with OS 9.

Some dedicated applications simply remove clutter. The Mail application, the Adress Book application, iCal, and others are so simple to use that this feature alone saves a lot of time.

Ever hooked up a Powerbook to a beamer or external display? With the pull-down-monitor menu, this is an easy - and therefore, fast - task. All that is needed is to use that menu - and the external display or beamer will be recognised within seconds. An extremely important time saver for presentations.

I'd wish for more: User and File System management as AIX has - fully 64-bit address space - simple add-on-control panel for processor sharing just as in AIX or VMS. Such features may follow.

All in all, OS X is much more of an elegant time saver than many people can admit, as many features are sleek and not intrusive.

But already, many OS X features are raw time savers for experienced computer users.

Re:Ugh.

[solios]

Apparently it's still available!

Figured MS had to have ripped it from somewhere. :D

About the only thing the Apple browser lets you diddle is A/V media- you can play the stuff in the window, but have fun scrubbing it (this actually causes problems with certain very shitty video capture hardware, whereby having a file of that codec selected in the browser flags the hardware as "in use" and preempts the editing appllication from accessing it.).

Re:Ugh.

[killjoe]

You know I think I'll install it and see what happens. Maybe a great new open source project or a way to learn cocoa and objective C.

Re:Ugh.

[angel'o'sphere]

I do not really agree :D

1. Meta-Tab : a Windows first. Swiped by Apple for OS 8.5.
2. Windows that minimize to a dock/taskbar, rather than windowshade in place : a Windows first, and the Windows-like behaviour I hate the most about OS X. 9 Windowshades, goddammit. It's a third party hack on Windows and OS X.*
3. Preview-in-filebrowser : A feature that had been standard with Explorer and missing on the Mac until OS X.

1) on older Macs (Around System 7) you had a drop down menu to access any running appplication ... you could assign a meta key with third party tools
2) While power users might find that cool (I did not even know that there is a term "windowshade" created for thsi behaviour, as I only saw that once) it might be disturbing for computer newbies.
3) IIRC thats not right, those ideas and prototypes where published by Apple around System 7 again to be implemented in System 8, but never got doen. So actuall Windows ripped it from Apple before Apple even implemented it themselves.

You are right about Raskin not being the Father of the Mac GUI: Most of the Mac GUI is done at XEROX PARC and got ripped of by Steve Jobs from there. However Apple did a lot of research their own, and they had that exellent graphic designer Susan Kar.

You are even more right about DMs in linux. When Gnome Enlightment came out I said: woah! Complete new user experiances should be possible, especially when people start using zooming interfaces and more graphical ways to interact with a computer. Imho, something like a CASE tool look and feel as replacement for simple file browsers should emerge.

But alas ... KDE copying Windows (and to a smaler extend Mac OS X) how disapointing.

Regarding Raskin, in his book he writes about a lot of "user interface" studies he has done. Especially with novice users, not knowing anything about computers.

One big surprising result is: greying out unaccessible commands in menues is BAD! Same for icons on a toolbar.

This contradicts any experiance of experianced users ... I don't want "paste" to be active when there is nothing to paste. It would/should give an error according to Raskin if there is nothing to paste instead of being grey.

OTOH, most unexperianced users want text instead of icons on a tool bar, that basicly means text buttons. (Just like the NeXT did with his combined menu/toolbar metaphor).
I second that. Applications on the original Mac had usualy only a few commands per tool bar, more than 16 was rare. So it was easy to remember them. Further more, in older days people payed attention on how an icon should look like to be easy to memorize. Also only the 16 most often used commands where on a tool bars, but not copy/cut/paste, because those had short cuts.

Open an application like Office today ... 10 tool bars, several hundred icons and it starts to become like that on Mac OS X as well (at least in Office).

angel'o'sphere

lazy!

[Y!]

look it up yourself!

I was very disappointed that it was not recognized as a word by google. Imagine, letting our language grow by acretion!

Linux: Dont use X

[Anonymous Coward]

If linux is so great, why do you need a GUI environment, stick with the command line, you wont need any mouse.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[WIAKywbfatw]

How is it a non-issue? Because you would like it to be?

Every Mac user I know has ditched the mouse that came in the box for another one. Does throwing away brand-new hardware because it's worthless sound like a non-issue to you?

Re:The difference is

[Anonymous Coward]

Macs are very receptive to mice with more than one button. I use a logitech MX700 on mine, which has a total of 8 buttons on it. Without putting the logitech utility on the computer it was able to use most of them already for a number of things like switching applications and controlling playback speed and direction in Quicktime and final cut (and the scroll wheel defaulted to a frame-by-frame advance/rewind function...very handy).

After putting on the logitech utility though, I was able to really customize the function of each and every button on the mouse, and the experience just got better.

Of course, install

Wannn......

[wtoconnor]

Raskin has complained about Apple ever since they poo poo'd his DynaBook ideas back in the early 80's. If the Mac really had as many people creating it that seem to get credit for designing it then it truly would look like a government project. Let's give some real credit to Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld just to name two.

Re:Wannn......

[Meowing]

Dynabook was an Alan Kay thing, Raskin is the leap guy. Kay gets into rants like this too, but usually about C++ and Java and their inferiority to Smalltalk.

Re:Wannn......

[wtoconnor]

Must of got my ranters confused but there are so many of them. Thanks for the clarification.

Re:Wannn......

[HawkingMattress]

And unlike raskin, he's generally right ;)
Smalltalk feels so superior to java that it makes me laugh. The beauty of its simple concepts have never been matched, and we all know that the real powerfull ideas in cs are often shockingly simple. Only the implications of what you can do with them get quite complicated, just like a chess game.

Re:Switched BACK I'll buy it no problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

How much to you want for it? I'll pick up a sweet machine cheap any time I can get it.

Re:What i like about XP

[TClevenger]

I dunno about that. I would say that 10.3.5 running on my Pismo G3/500 with 640MB of RAM is pretty equivalent to XP Pro on my Toshiba Tecra PIII/650... though the G3 boots up far more quickly and recovers from sleep mode perfectly every time, whereas the Tecra is quite hit-or-miss and sometimes I have to manually reestablish my WiFi connection. My G3 also hasn't had a hard-crash since 10.1.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

"...you'll realise that the crtl-click is a much cleaner way of doing things"

Are you stoned?

The one button mouse it the only thing that infuriates me about the mac. I do contract sysadmin for many mac businesses and I am essentially forced to use a one button mouse regularly.

The context menu on windows could be the one thing that makes using windows easy. If the user doesn't know the command key sequence for what they want to do, the context menu provides access to the things they can do in this context. They do not have to move the mouse to the top of the screen and hunt through the menu's to find what they were after, nor are they limited to what some "cleverer than you" interface designer deemed to be "cleaner".

The one thing that dissapoints me about mac users is their willingness to appologise for limitations and extoll them as features. Critisism does not mean you dislike something, usually it means you would like to see it better.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[faust2097]

1-button mousing is perfectly fine for many tasks. On the other hand, in content creation applications like Photoshop, InDesign, etc. the contextual menus are incredibly big time-savers. Also, being able to use the side buttons on my mouse for undo/redo in design applications is worth its weight in gold.

The entire concept that there is a "right" number of mouse buttons is ridiculous. Different tasks require different interfaces. There's a right way and a wrong way to do contextual menus just like every other part of the UI. If you can save your user time by including a limited set of actions contextually appropriate to the click location they cause no harm. Of course there are bad contextual menus as well but that's up to the individual application team;s discretion.

While I seriously respect Raskin's contributions to the world of HCI and agree with his general philosophy, his current commentary is woefully out of date. Nowadays he's the equivalent of one of those natural philosophers in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle who is trying to come up with a universal solution for everything. And even if THE is the greatest text editor of all time, the content created by even common users is far beyond ASCII in its complexity.

Re:What i like about XP

[alienw]

OS X - 10.3 is $129 at the Apple store.

OS X came out roughly when Win2K came out. It was a buggy POS, and Apple has expected people to shell out $129 2 or 3 times already for what basically amounts to service packs. So, if you started with the first release, you would have paid over $400 by now. Win2K is still a rock-solid system, and all the updates for it have been free. So I definitely wouldn't diss Microsoft on that front.

As to dodgy performance without topline hardware, I'm using a 450MHz blue & white G3 at home (that's mid-1999 hardware) and have no "dodgy performance issues."

Some people don't have performance issues when running XP on a 300MHz Celeron. That doesn't mean it runs well, it's just that they don't mind waiting 5 minutes for a web browser to start. I've used OS X on G3s, and it runs much slower than XP on a $300 PC.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the complete newbie doesn't know the difference between a "right" and "left" click. The people who want or need more buttons can get them, most applications can be used fairly well my Grandma with only one button.

So so-so

[stoneaxe coming]

I was an Apple fan back in the late 80s, in fact I recommended it to most people I knew. Although most undergraduates used it just for word-processing, it was still quite an enlightening and dazzling experience (especially considering the fact that Suns were for postgraduates only and PCs a little more user-friendly than the mainframe computer in the department). I once thought of spending more than 1000 pounds on one of those tiny all-in-ones called SE , but I didn't because that's going to be a very expensive word-processor and I had my Toshiba T1000 already.

But my view has dimmed quite significantly (even during their financial troubles, their Newton still interested me but was quite expensive) after my purchase of iBook G4 early this year.

1 of all, the firewall is not configurable like ZoneAlarm or Norton's Personal Firewall. I had to download a third-party application from the net to get the job done. It was, in my opinion, a truly horrendous job done by Jobs. Absolutely disappointing.

2. It is no stabler than Windows. I occasionally get grey screens that prompt me to turn the computer off while the system was running. Not to mention the automatic quitting of applications from time to time. Also the overheating of CPU and GPU is definitely a problem for heavy users.

3. The only thing that really distinguishes Mac from Windows is that Apple controls the hardware side as well. Thus they can make full use of their uniformity (of mostly the same colour, no contrast, shades or harmony) design to attract buyers. The form factor does not work such a magic on me as to other people. The latest iMac is, I deem, a failure in terms of appearance and features. Sony's Vaio W series has AV functions and looks way better than that LCD monitor look of iMac.

4. In terms of the Mac OS, I don't think there is anything they can be really proud of. It is no different from Windows when it comes to user experience. It was my favourable expectation that they could have surprised me again after so many years through a just-as-simple but powerful GUI and high automation. No, I didn't get those, Mac is instead (the less favourable side of my expectations) a reference system to me.

In general, Mac users are getting the same or less when compared with Windows'. It is no longer the computer for elites (I hate to use this word, because different people tend to have very different definitions), it is a computer for minorities.

There is nothing truly special about Apple, so stop the thoughtless hyping. I myself can come up with similar or better products.

Re:So so-so

[Anonymous Coward]

1 of all, the firewall is not configurable like ZoneAlarm or Norton's Personal Firewall. I had to download a third-party application from the net to get the job done. It was, in my opinion, a truly horrendous job done by Jobs. Absolutely disappointing.

And what is ZoneAlarm to Windows? I didn't know it was a Microsoft product. When did MS acquire Norton's Personal Firewall?

2. It is no stabler than Windows. I occasionally get grey screens that prompt me to turn the computer off while the system was running. Not to mention the automatic quitting of applications from time to time. Also the overheating of CPU and GPU is definitely a problem for heavy users.

On my XP system, Photoshop would cause the computer to seize, whereby only unplugging the computer would turn it off. I haven't had that on any processor speed for the Mac. At all.
As for software crashes, that happens on all systems, not just Mac, not just Windows. I must say, I don't miss the Blue Screen of Death. I only use XP for one program, and I never use it for the Internet.

A friend of mine, a long time Windows user, switched to the Mac recently because she'd had enough of the insecurities of Windows 2000. She found it to be so much more intuitive.

Re:What i like about XP

[Graff]

After experimenting with OS X i've found that there is a bunch of stuff you have to play the upgrade game on and you have to be smart about which "old" hardware is supported.

IE a Pentium 2/3 CPU with enough memory runs XP just fine - i expected an appropriately configed G3 to do the same with OS X - and i was wrong.

Oh I don't know, I have quite a few iMac G3 350 mHz with 320 MB of RAM (I run several computer labs) and they run quite fine under Mac OS X 10.2.8 and Mac OS X 10.3.5. Yeah, they're not going to be great at running extremely processor-intensive tasks but they have no problems with surfing the web, running Word, Excel, etc.

My sister also has an iBook G3 366 mHz with 320 MB of RAM running Mac OS X 10.3.5 and it also has no problems at all with everyday tasks.

I'm betting that your "Pentium 2/3" systems will run similarly to these Mac G3 models. If you have had problems with one system or another it was probably due to some other factor (such as bad RAM or a flaky hard drive) rather than the CPU/OS combination.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[loquacious d]

As far as the scrollwheel goes, an indispensible piece of Mac software is SideTrack, which lets you use the sides of your trackpad as scroll areas, as well as assign keystrokes/multiple mouse buttons to the trackpad's corners. I have the top corners of my PB set for Exposé, the bottom-right for right-click and the bottom-left for third click (opens links in new tabs in safari, shows paths when clicking a document/finder window's title bar). And of course, scrolling along the right edge. It's a fabulous little utility. Combined with trackpad tap-drag-lock, I don't think I ever need to use the actual trackpad button--a zero-button mouse!

The man who would be Steve Jobs

[splatterboy]

This is a little like the Gary Kildall (the man who could have been Bill Gates) story a few days back. A pioneer from the early days isn't happy about the current state of affairs... "I could have/should have/would have done it better but THEY...". Interesting man, bad article.

Re:The man who would be Steve Jobs

[ran-o-matic]

Unfortunately, Gary isnt happy about the current state of affairs because he died in 1994. At least Jef is still around and working on new ideas. Check out: http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/ Kind of cool if you can overlook his fascination with LEAPing...

My Litmus Test...

[feloneous cat]

When my wife doesn't yell in this long, loud, and rather strangulated way (one cannot adequately do it justice), then I know that the human interface works.

She is not a programmer. She is a user. Worse a user who sez "why can't it just do this". She is brilliant in that her view has nothing to do with programming and everything to do with human interface.

She is quite happy with her Mac. Oh, sure, there are things she would prefer to be different (and she NEVER touches the command line interface). But, for the most part, she is happy.

She uses Peecees at works and find them utterly baffling (not that she doesn't use them, but finds them to be an affront to the user).

Raskin may find XP to be the same as OS 10. Fine, he is entitled to his opinion. But real users know the difference.

Raskin's creds

[ulfhednar]

Wait . . . wait . . . wait. This guy's claim to fame is that he wanted to make the original Mac without a mouse, and he was adamant about it. So . . . if Raskin had gotten his way . . . and the Mac was released without a mouse . . . we'd all be working on Dells now, right? If Raskin had a brain in his head, he'd be illustrating his grand ideas of a better GUI rather than saying: Duh, geee, I think it needs to be better than it is.

Re:What i like about XP

[Anonymous Coward]

parent says ...the costly updates and dodgy performance unless your willing to fork out big $$$

and you say Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive? or $799 eMac?

I dunno how to make it more clear than you made it but you didn't see it so I'll spell it out for you. Hello, if you think you are contradicting him you aren't. If you want to update an iBook or eMac (with their dodgy performance) you have to spend big bucks, generally you have to throw it away and buy something with slots. And if you buy something with slots, guess what? Expensive. Big $$$.

WTF is ai32, anyway? Your own little acronym? How sweet.

yes there is a difference

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, there is.

-xp is fast, Os X is slow unless you have a top of line machine with lots of ram

-xp runs more software

-you don't need a a $6000 computer to run XP

-you can tweak and modify the XP gui, with apple, you are stuck the gay aqua

Re:yes there is a difference

[Anonymous Coward]

you can tweak and modify the XP gui, with apple, you are stuck the gay aqua

You are gay, so what's your problem?

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[oscarmv]

You can if you activate Universal Access (the stuff they have for improving access for disabled people).

Apple figured only disabled people would really need that. For the most part they're right, although it would be neat if those (non-disabled people) that like it that way found the option easier to find.

Re:The difference is

[Edie O'Teditor]

but I really don't want to start a debate about the optimal number of mouse buttons.

Quite. Everybody knows it's 6.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, people should also remember the one of the major users of the Mac... creative professionals. Many of the high end programs such as Photoshop, Quarkxpress, etc. use a large number of key commands. When using these programs their hands are always on the Option, Command/Apple, and Shift keys. I find my interaction with a one button mouse, faster than a two, and have switched back to a one button mouse.

Using key commands reduces the time it requires me to accomplish something, option clicking does too since i'm already using it. I can understand the need for more than one button, but it shouldn't be dismissed as useless.

Developers! Developers! Developers!

[shotfeel]

And coming soon,,, ...JavaScript and html.

i think people missed the importance of Dashboard (coming in Tiger). They seem to think its all about "widgets". IMO its all aout writing small apps for the Mac using Javascript and HTML. So now, if you can design a web page, you can develop apps for the Mac.

"More and more ubiquitous"

[Malapterurus]

"so 64-bit processing is poised to become more and more ubiquitous over the next few years." Uh, I do not think that "ubiquitous" means what you think it does.

The Mac is better than it was a few years ago

[DulcetTone]

MacOS was ugly and poorly organized before OS X, what with extensions and many tack-on technologies on an OS built for yesterday. In 1984, it really could not do much (as I recall my original 128K Mac... though my use was soon marred by a bad motherboard as soon as the warranty expired), and it sure did it simply. Flexibility is what makes a computer useful to the clever person, but it always comes with a concomitant need for the users to understand how to express their desires to the machine. Making the computer just "do what I mean" is nice, and can take your surprisingly far, but it overlooks that "the right thing" is often ambiguous to those designers who are not constraining the users from "thinking different'. I use XP and OS X in even doses these days, and find that both platforms have come a long way in the past several years. But most of the things I wish were done better on the Mac are longstanding deficiencies.... not new ones. To put the short list together, I'd cite these usability blunders: 1. The flower or cloverleaf key. It has an Apple on it too. Why don't they LOSE the cloverleaf, so people can clearly and succinctly name it in verbal dialog without having to EXPLAIN which key they mean? It might also help to toss even the Apple and just call this what it is: the command key (of course, that word would have to be painted on it). 2. Similarly... the control key. The iconic label for indicating its use in shortcuts is some weird diagonalized hatch which does not appear on the key itself and is used nowhere else in the world. What rocket scientist thought up THAT one, and decided that this was the right choice for 'the rest of us'? That icon should be what is printed on the damn key, too: 'ctrl'. Failing that, at least go to ^ !! And, sadly, one must wonder who at Apple thinks the users can't understand a second mousebutton after all these years. It must be by extrapolation that they withold scroll wheels. Before you ask, YES I have a mouse I use that has these, but why is the basics of simple computing kept from the basic experience Apple presents to the user? tone

Re:The Mac is better than it was a few years ago

[Eminence]

And, sadly, one must wonder who at Apple thinks the users can't understand a second mousebutton after all these years.

Clearly you never coached non-technical females into using computers. I did that with my girlfriend and recently with one of her friends who just bought herself a PC. Before those experiences (and similar from the past) I also didn't get it and used to laugh at Apple's ads where they underlined that as feature.

But now I understand that to most users computers are hard to master, because they don't know how and why they work (and why should they know that?). The whole idea that you can click with the right button and then you can do something special is not something as intuitive as it is for you or me - computer users for many years.

The problem with Windows is that in many cases you have to use the right button. Therefore I really like Apple's approach of today - you can use a two-button mouse if you wish and it's useful, but the default remains a single button one and you can still do everything with it.

Simpler, less confusing for new, non-tech users.

Re:The Mac is better than it was a few years ago

[Raptor CK]

I agree on the shift keys on the Mac. There needs to be more consistency in the symbols used.

On the other hand, my sole experience on the Mac has been on a Powerbook. I've used a mouse, but more often than not, I use the touchpad. It's simply easier to have only one button in this setup, as I rarely have to leave the home row. To right-click, I just hold control while my other hand clicks away. To scroll, I have an extension so that I can hold Fn and use the trackpad.

I'm sure that a desktop would benefit from a scroll mouse, but I'll have to admit that many times, I haven't even missed the additional button, and I use the functions inherent to that button all the time.

Press Ctrl F2.

[Anonymous Coward]

Control F2 brings up the menu. Control F3 does the dock. I believe these are on by DEFAULT.
They are listed in the Keyboard and Mouse control panel, and so are many many other shortcuts.
There is also a check box which makes the mac handle keyboard input pretty much like XP.

Re:What i like about XP

[Shaft0rama]

Woah, calm down there Sparky.

Did you read the install notes on the box, or the website or during the installation process??? No.. Right that's your problem
The issue here isn't entirely reading requirements. It's the fact that a G3 isn't that out of date, but is still unable to run something.

Explain to me how $999 iBook is expensive?
Ok, I will. $999 for a 12" screen, 256mb ram, 32mb video ram, and a 30gb hard drive IS expensive. You can get a 15" screen for nearly the same price with a PC. And for the price of a 14" model, you can get a much more capable machine. Whether it's worth the extra or not is arguable (I think it is, I'm a fan myself), but I don't think there's much question that Apple hardware is expensive. And let's face it, part of that DOES come from the brushed aluminum look (which I happen to love).

Or have you ever tried using a scanner that had a proprietary pci card? I didn't think so.
Anyone who buys a scanner with a proprietary PCI card without researching it first isn't too bright, imo...

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

I rest my case.

The only thing that you have "proven" with that rant is that you will likely never get laid.

If Apple had only listened to Raskin...

[jcr]

Then the Mac would have been the same roaring success as the Canon Cat.

Sorry Jef, but "leap keys" aren't as good as the mouse.

-jcr

Re:What i like about XP

[Anonymous Coward]

I have XP on a 550 MHz PIII, with 768MB of RAM and the damn thing takes forever to start up, and to run anything. I use Mandrake Linux 10.0 on the same machine and it is much faster than XP.

I also used (until I gave it to my brother) a B&W G3 300MHz, running OS X (10.2.8) and it ran much faster. My brother plans on upgrading the processor in the B&W as soon as he can to a G4. I have OS X on a iMac G3 600 MHz, and have had no problems.

My guess is people can argue night and day about what runs slower or faster on what hardware. In the end, it's all individual experiences.

THE demo is cool

[hey!]

It makes much better use of the spatial capabilities people have than current interfaces. I can see interesting applicaitons, such as a wiki-like collaborative enviornment.

Personaly, I'd like to have this with strong encryption. Then I'd spend the next several decades building a huge THE document with the clues to my hidden fortune scattered in the dots over the i's and in the pixels of pictures.

Change is not a one-way road

[TimmyDee]

I think what Raskin has painted himself into a bit of a corner. He insists that interfaces need to further adapt to people, but he has failed to realize that people can adapt to interfaces. Your comment about the WWW brought this to mind. The web may not have the best interface (often it's downright terrible), but people have adapted to this new method of navigation and are quite comfortable with it.

Jef is seeking to create an interface that works the way his brain works. It's like a UNIX guy I know. His desktop is highly customized and very efficient -- for him. The more I read about Raskin, the more I think he's looking to make things more efficient for himself, not necessarily everyone else.

Re:Change is not a one-way road

[fossa]

people have adapted to this new method of navigation and are quite comfortable with it.

People? Not my people. (or, not my parents.) They have been using the Web for about three or four years now, though on a highly irregular basis, and they find it extremely confusing at best. Most of the time they have trouble remembering how to get "here" or "there" (they don't quite get bookmarks, and bookmarks don't always work on highly dynamic websites anyway). I'd say much of this is due to poorly designed web sites with no clear cues hinting at the overall layout of the site, or worse, many conflicting cues (links across the top in several rows, side bar at the left, links in the body, etc.) combined with much glitz and glitter.

Jef is seeking to create an interface that works the way his brain works.

I must respectfully disagree here. I have not read the article, however I suspect you have not read Raskin's book The Humane Interface which makes it clear that he uses the limits of the [majority of] human minds to direct his designs. For example, the human short term memory makes it impossible to concentrate on two things at once. A human can do many things at once, but all but one of those things must be automatic (i.e performed without thinking). I can't really prove this, and some people surely can switch between concentrations more quickly than others, but imagine trying to solve a calculus problem while at the same time looking for an error in your checkbook...

An interface with a mouse and menus typically requires fairly precise mousing maneuvers to activate a menu item. It is impossible to [completely] automate these maneuvers, due to variations in the mouse cursor starting position, and the position of the window containing the menu (or button, etc.). So, when typing a document, any use of a menu item requires a context switch of the mind, interrupting the typing (which may not be a huge deal depending on what you are doing exactly.. it may have required a context switch anyway). This serves to create a cumbersome interaction experience (another unproven conjecture, but one I doubt most would disagree with).

Notice how many "experts", or those who need to use an interface for extensive periods, take the time to learn "keyboard shortcuts", which have the advantage that they may be automated once learned (unlike many mousing maneuvers)*. This is all fine and good, BUT, when beginning to learn an interface, one must make the choice to either use the easy to discover menus or the efficient keyboard shortcuts (which are not efficient until they become automatic). I'm not sure it is possible, but I believe it is a *very* worthy endevor to create an interface that combines the ease of learnability or occasional use of a graphical menu system with the ability of keyboard commands to be automated.

I'm sorry this turned out to be quite long... and perhaps not a strict response to the parent post. Reading the posts here I get the feeling that there is rampant misunderstanding of Raskin's goals, possibly due to Raskin's personality or whatever.

* I am aware of Bruce Toggnazini's tests that show that those using keyboard shortcuts believe they are faster than when using the mouse only to discover the stopwatch tells a different story. This only applies to certain cases, and these tests were performed on programs designed for mouse use with keyboard shortcuts added afterwards. You know as well as I do that "rm *.jpg" is faster than selecting all jpgs with the mouse and dragging to the trash (for an example of an interface designed for keyboard use vs. one designed for mouse use).

Limitations for a professional turnkey

[Media Girl]

I like Mac OSX. I am typing this on my PowerBook. I hated the prior Apple OS systems for being narrow, overly simplistic and more unstable than anything Microsoft came out with. They crashed like a cuckoo clock! OSX is much much better. But I have to say I do not see Apple much in my future, except in peripheral ways.

The system is fairly stable. I've had some pretty scary disintegration moments, but running the hardware check disc has brought it back every time so far (knock wood).

But Macs have two big limitations:

1) Hardware. Having basically one source of hardware makes system maintenance a nightmare. In my 29-month-old PowerBook, so far I have had to replace the hard drive, DVD drive and keyboard. My firewire port also failed, which means at least $400 in repairs with an Apple certified repair center. I have had to resort to a PCMCIA firewire card. Obviously they are using inferior parts in order to shave off costs and maximize profits. -Which is fine, they're a business. But in the Mac world, they are a monopoly, and having no alternatives is a darned shame.

2) Software selection. With only minor indie apps out there, you're stuck with Apple programs and (unstable) Microsoft and (unstable) Adobe programs.

I am planning on building a turnkey HD post-production editing/compositing platform, and while Apple is somewhat competitive overall, you're stuck with the clunky klugy Final Cut Pro and an unreliable, hard-to-maintain hardware platform. I cannot go with Apple for this -- not when my business depends upon it. There are many competitive systems in the XP and Linux realm, many with much much better software and superior hardware performance, for the same or less money.

My old system is on NT4, is six years old and still is solid as a rock. If something goes wrong, I go on the market and find the best affordable component and replace it.

No, Apple is pretty, and I like the interface, and finding open source apps to run on it is a pleasure. But aside from perhaps a graphics and DVD Studio Pro platform, I don't feel I can count on Apple to give me the support I need to run a business.

There is a FarCry™ between the mac and PC!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows XP has FarCry Mac OS X doesn't have FarCry (yet)
:-D
My Name is Calvin, AND I AM AN IDIOT LOLOLOL!!!11

Re:There is a FarCry™ between the mac and PC!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anybody care?

Re:The difference is

[OrangeTide]

Mine is reported as a 7-button mouse in X11

Re:The difference is

[OrangeTide]

maybe it's not "revolting" maybe people call you on it because it isn't true? But that couldn't be it.

Cocoa Frameworks

[macmurph]

Dear Jeff Raskin,

Have you looked at Cocoa and Interface Builder? They are beautiful. I've been able to quickly throw together great OS X applications without much programming experience.

For all those interested I recommend the book at:
http://www.cocoaprogramming.net

Also, how can you or anyone ignore the onslaught of viruses and security lapses in all 9 of Microsofts completely different operating systems (e.g. MS-DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95, Win NT, Win 98, Win 2000, Win XP, etc.)?

OpenBSD calls these exploits "Bugs". Keeping OpenBSD "Bug free" has been a goal from its inception. Hence it is the most secure OS in the world.

Apple's OS X is not OpenBSD, but it shares a common heritage and certainly has better security than any OS Microsoft has ever released.

Re:Cocoa Frameworks

[jp10558]

You are missing his point here though. He's not arguing about security but useability. Two totally different things.

The most secure system in the world is turned off and locked in a closet, but you wouldn't be able to use it. It probably would be pretty bug free too.

There are many aspects to a system that are important, but - as MS has found - nothing much matters if users can't use it. Which is why MS can sell insecure OS's and have people use them.

irrelevant to UI...

[jpellino]

except for those times when the not modern, non-vm, not true multitasking OS turns your UI into the blue screen of death or the single ">" mac window...

do you remember letter writing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wrote a letter on my Atari 400 once. Skipping the keyboard (by far the worst I've ever used), it was hard. Sure Atari-writer came up instantly from the cartrage. Well unless I wanted to save my work, then Dos has to load from disk. But it wasn't long and I was typing. Then... hmm, no spell check. I got one from a magazine (had to type it in by hand, but we will ignore that). That means save my work, turn computer off, remove cartrage. Find the spell check disk (the program was booted from disk), reboot, wait for program to load. Put work back in drive... And the spell check wasn't even that good. Then after making the changes, go back to Atari-writer to print. Luckily my printer emulated one of the 4 supported models. Modern computers are faster if you spell check just once.

Note that today, my spelling (spelliling as I mistyped the first time) mistakes are highlighted in real time. A simple right click and I a have spell check that does a lot better at suggesting words.

Re:The difference is

[RevAaron]

Exactly the point... your GF doesnt know there is a contextual menu... is she happy with her mac? does it do exactly what she wants it to? does she have to learn to do things in a way that is not immediately apparent?

The one button interface is a blessing for a lot of people who just want to write email and browse the 'net without bothering to understand the complexities of the OS.

Indeed, the difference is that on a Mac you can get by in the OS and the apps without *needing* a right mouse button. On a PC, you often can't get by without having a second mouse button. If for some reason you don't have two mouse buttons, on a PC they give you the little context key on the keyboard- the button with what looks to be a menu stuck between the right Windows and the right Control keys. It works in a pinch, but it is a pain, far less convenient than an actual mouse button- or as Mac OS 9/X allow you to do, control-click when you are button-2 less. Without either of these options, I can't imagine how much of a pain it is to use Linux with only one mouse button.

Er, I have done that- I think I had to use F11 and F12 on my ibook as middle and right mouse buttons. It sucks balls.

Re:The difference is

[moonbender]

Yes, I'm aware of it. And my name isn't Dick.

Mouse Wars

[merikus]

Hm. If that's the case, then people could have Mouse Wars. Plug in two mice, put the pointer at the center of the screen, and whoever gets the pointer to their opponent's side wins!

I must have an old mouse around here somewhere to try this out...

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you assume that more mouse buttons = better user interface? Personally I think one button makes it a bit easier to use.

I still get the "right or left button" comment when ever I tell someone to "click" on something in windows.

But, alas, I own a mac with a two button mouse - but that's only cuz I needed a SCROLL WHEEL!

Jef Raskin and OSX-WinXP

[theolein]

I've read Raskin's bitter monologues on his site as to how he was neglected by everyone from Steve Jobs to Robert Cringley. I am utterly surprised at how bitter the man is 23 years after he left Apple. I've read the human interface and his obsession with the Canon Cat (He still publishes the Canon Cat manuals on his website, as if anyone is really interested in a product that was dropped from the market 6 months after it was released, which was no wonder because the days of specialised dedicated word processors etc were almost gone by then).

His pet project, THE, a text editor has not garnered any popularity, on any platform. On CLI's, vi, joe, pico, emacs etc still are more popular.

I personally think that Jef would be better off to realise that the way things were cannot be changed and the way things are will only change for the better if the majority of the millions of computer users accept the changes. Slagging off the user interfaces mainly paints him as that which he is: an embittered old man whose only claim to fame is that he was on the Macintosh team for a while in the early 80's.

Re:Jef Raskin and OSX-WinXP

[jefraskin]

theolein should do a bit of research before leaping into a discussion. I just put the Canon Cat manuals on the site (in the last week or so) because of many requests for them, and a kind volunteer who wanted them enough to do the scanning.

My "pet project" has not been released, it's still being built, which would make it a miracle if it had even presence on any platform, much less popularity.

And, if he had read my site, he'd know that THE is not a text editor.

As for "bitter", that's a matter of personal take. If theolein wishes to be ageist, we'll ask how he feels about calling someone "old" when he's gotten a bit more mature. Like in his 60s or 70s.

Perhaps he's jealous of the millions of dollars just poured into my company, or the fun our crew is having developing better ways to use technology. Anyway, a definitely underinformed flame.

want a headache, fast?

[jpellino]

go read this:

http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/manual.html

(I'd embed the link, but in the spirit of using-keys-is-faster-than-using-a-mouse, I'll defer to Jef's conventions...)

Note the entire section on new notation on how to read and write how to use keyboard keys.

And we're the experienced crowd.

Re:What i like about XP

[tomcio.s]

The issue here isn't entirely reading requirements. It's the fact that a G3 isn't that out of date, but is still unable to run something.
Well, by the same logic my P3 isn't that out of date, and still, it's no good for many applications.

You can get a 15" screen for nearly the same price with a PC
Please point me to it. Oh, make sure it has comparable software bundle + battery life. And a non-shared video card and wifi.

Anyone who buys a scanner with a proprietary PCI card without researching it first isn't too bright, imo...
Agreed, unless you are old enough to have been around since before USB and those were 'standard' - well, proprietary scsi cards really (which btw is the case I am describing).

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[Anonymous Coward]

CHOICE.

With several types/kinds of mice out there which one do you offer users? Wireless? Ergo? Multi button? Multi scroll?

If I were in charge I would stick with what a majority of your user base is used to.

Getting used to having a choice isn't too hard, and in fact quite enjoyable once you start.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[bedouin]

It's kind of awkward, on my PowerMac I prefer a multibutton mouse. However on my iBook, I prefer the one button trackpad. Whenever I use a PC laptop with two trackpad buttons I constantly click the right button accidently, and accessing the right button slows me down since I have to reposition my hand a bit to do it.

Re:What i like about XP

[alienw]

The machine I am posting from has both Mandrake 10 and XP. I prefer Mandrake, but XP runs at least as fast. It's a 700MHz Duron with only 256 megs of RAM, which should be roughly the same speed as your 550MHz P3 (given your machine has 3x the RAM and 2x the cache). It definitely runs faster IMO than OS X on a G3.

Re:What i like about XP

[Shaft0rama]

Agreed, unless you are old enough to have been around since before USB and those were 'standard' - well, proprietary scsi cards really (which btw is the case I am describing).

Most scanners worked fine with any SCSI cards. I don't think blaming everyone for a few cheapo scsi cards is fair.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, every Mac user I know using their machine professionally has done nothing of the kind.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Powerbook trackpad and the associated single button for Q3. While I may not be the best, I would take great exception to saying that it is in any way a handicap.

Your case rests like a rotting fish.

Old saying

[Anonymous Coward]

The only intuitive user interface is the nipple.
Everything else is learned.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's return the troll.

Are you stoned?

The two-button mouse is one of the many things that regularly infuriate me about Windows. The context menu on Windows encourages people who don't know where things should go to just toss them into the menu. They have to hunt through mostly-irrelevant options in the context menu that may or may not even have to do with the context.

It is a feature, not a limitation. There is no advantage whatsoever to a second mouse button.

OS/X and Ease of Use

[Anonymous Coward]

Jef Raskin is... Jef Raskin, somebody has to be. Completely skipping over the OS/X vs. XP debate, who created the Mac, and the meaning of existence.

The one thing I am extremely curious about is. HOW does it make sense to anybody, that people should prefer THIS (and I quote):

http://humane.sourceforge.net/the/manual.html

SP0012 HUMANE ENVIRONMENT MANUAL V44

Updated 25 December 2003

AUTHORS AND EDITORS

Jef Raskin (This document's organization is based partially on the Canon Cat manual by David Alzofon, David Caulkins, Jef Raskin, and Dr. James Winter.) Contains edits by Rebecca Fureigh, Astrid Raffinpeyloz, Benja Fallenstein, Guy Parker, and Richard Karpinski.

QUASIMODES

Holding Shift (or any other modifier key) establishes what is called a quasimode. In this case, it is the Shift quasimode.

A quasimode exists only as long as a key that establishes it is held down. For a discussion of why proper use of quasimodes can aid usability, see THI, p 35.

GETTING STARTED WITH A NEW DOCUMENT IN THIS EARLY VERSION

When you double click on the Humane Editor icon to launch it, this prototype will quickly go through a few gyrations where it puts up a window and takes it away. To start a new document, use the New command from the File menu, or type

Command\ n\ n/ Command/

---[Snip]

This goes on, and on, and on... For many pages.

*WHO* is Jef Raskin writing this for? I don't get it. It looks like something the average emacs user would enjoy as light reading. But here's a newsflash: nobody I know reads any of this crap. From step 1 you are already asking for an insane and unreasonable amount of focus and attention from people who simply want to GET THINGS DONE "without the computer getting in the way."

This is better than pretty melting windows, special effects and a mouse?

Finally, Jef Raskin, "One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run."

Insignificant to whom? I drive a Mercedes because I choose to and enjoy the experience. I may be able to get from point A to point B using a Kia, but I choose not to.

Enriched environments are highly conducive to being creative and USING THE COMPUTER to create something.

Raskin on Linux UIs

[Zhe Mappel]

It would be interesting to see him make a more modern computer interface, but he seems content to just make vague complaints nowadays.

Check out Raskin's April 2004 keynote for the Desktop Linux Summit Conference. He is especially good on the problem of inherited disadvantages in UIs that have been around for decades now. The GUI, he says, has "outlived its usefulness." Less is more, and Linux is offers an excellent opportunity to break from a troubled tradition.

Among his insights--and this is something the people working on OS X might heed, too--is the following:

" ...too many interface designers act like interior decorators rather than structural engineers. We need both, but if an interface (or a building) is to stand up, the use of pretty colors and good visual design alone is not going to hack it."

Re:Raskin on Linux UIs

[Anonymous Coward]

> The GUI, he says, has "outlived its usefulness."

Perhaps Raskin needs to engage in a little self-criticism too. He might not even have to change his phrasebook.

.....just speaking for me...

[zogger]

...and no one else, purely anecdotally, I only had one app that would consistently bogue out on me, and that was netscape. Once I got hip to iCab browser, that was it, stability, no more sad macs or cherry bombs. Even if you did get a crash, your FS stayed intact wonderfully, at least fgor me it did. Yes, I ran techtool and norton disk doctor (or disk first aid, but I liked norton better, and yes, I paid for it) periodically, as a planned maintenance, it didn't take long, they did the job. As to memory management, you used "get info" on the app and upped alloted RAM to what you wanted it to be, along with virtual memory if that is what you wanted. Run a new app, check it out, if it needed more you gave it more until you liked it. Didn't take long, worked well then. It wasn't automatic, but it was easy to do. Never had any issues downloading or installing apps, still to this day about the easiest out there, never had a major show stopper conflict I can recall, and choosing a set of extensions is pretty easy. Never got "owned", it didn't exist AFAIK and am aware of, no remote owning if you had appleshare turned off, I never even saw a firewall in those days (except on friends windows machines) let alone seemed to need one. I don't game, so that wasn't an issue, and I never used MS office, so that wasn't an issue. Eveything else I wanted to do I did. Wrote docs, built web pages, listened to tunes, surfed, chatted IRC and IMed with ICQ. Regular old just did it stuff.

It was pretty good for the times, and I still use classic occasionally. As to OSX, no idea, I don't currently own any apple hardware it will run on, so never tried it. Near as I can see from reading though, it is roughly equivalent to a modern Linux OS, so I am happy enough using what I have, older x86 hardware with enough RAM installed to make it useable. I am between a guru power user and a raw noob, so it seems to be OK now. Never been afraid to learn new stuff, but I have always had a practical nature, and I don't see the need to make things overly complex when I don't personally need them to be, just because it's possible, I don't adhere to "rube goldbergism" just because you can. Different strokes and all. If I absolutely postiviely with zero doubt need to do some advanced fine tweaking, I will google for advanced instructions from folks who know how to do it, so that's about it. I do a LOT more stuff in meatspace then sit in front of a screen, this is neither my business nor my only hobby or interest.

Good grief, it's the Guardian. Watcha expect?

[jefraskin]

Rarely has an interview mixed up my answers and gotten so much so wrong in so little space. Wired magazine is also in my personal doghouse for similar inadvertent distortion made in the name of editorial pruning. Nonetheless, if you are using the same application in OSX and on Windows, there is little difference in either look or feel (which is what I was talking about). Get into the OSs and the difference grows, in Mac's favor. Become a developer and there's a world of difference, and OSX is considerably easier to deal with, usually. But not always.

Clear Lack of Understanding

[lux55]

One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run.

Not to nitpick, but this shows a clear lack of understanding why 90% of Mac users choose to purchase Macs over PCs. Techie users may recognize the fact that it is more powerful and that it works better, but even for techie users the Mac is a clear status symbol.

Look at the "Digital Lifestyle" campaign for a hint as to why Macs are selling again. It has nothing to do with technical merit or superiority. That's simply a nice bonus, and is only the main factor in the purchasing decision for a very small margin of their sales.

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[DannyiMac]

So, when it all comes down to it, the status symbol you are talking about is just hardware. Apple could port Mac OS X to x86. Would it be the same? No. Macs are stylish desktops/laptops. Jef is pointing out the poor underpinnings that need to be changed inorder to have the ultimate computer where you could literally do whatever you want in a shorter time it takes now.

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[lux55]

Macs are stylish desktops/laptops.

Yes, style. Lifestyle. Status symbols. Same reason 12 year olds want cell phones now, or 16 year olds want Nike's (or whatever brand is "in" nowadays). This means both stylish hardware and stylish software. Apple IS better at both. Mac OS X on x86 would be a disaster -- a 50% complete solution.

When people purchase expensive cars, they may claim it's because they're better, but the primary motivation is actually the status symbol. They just happen to be better as a secondary benefit.

What I'm saying is that Jef seems to not understand this, but that (based solely on this interview, which I did read) he believes this stems from the simplicity/effectiveness of the user experience. If this were the case, why haven't Internet "appliance" PCs taken off? For all but the power user, they accomplish far more coherently (arguably, of course -- user experience is a somewhat subjective domain) what the other 90% of users want to do with a computer (web browsing, email, chat, pictures, movies, and songs -- business uses such as word processing and spreadsheets are separate).

Another only semi-related reason why Apple still beats the "appliance" PC is because users also want the choice (ie. freedom) to do more with it if they want. Apple lets you do this, while it's not in the nature of an appliance to do so. This is a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of "appliance" makers of their target audience (ie. democrats -- lovers of freedom).

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[DannyiMac]

Don't talk to me about actually reading some interview which only hints at what Jef is trying to do. I've read his book, I'm involved with THE, and I've read virtually everything on this website. You don't understand.

When questioned about the iMac G5, Jef said, "The unfoldable portable-shaped box on a stalk? It is a practical and space-saving design. But the interface needs fixing. One only cares about getting something done. Apple has forgotten this key concept. The beautiful packaging is ho-hum and insignificant in the long run." In the long run, one uses computers to accomplish a task, no matter if it's surfing the web, writing an email, or editing movies. The process of doing each can be made more efficient and easier.

Jef doesn't want to bound our hands and only use Macs for a single task. Computers are appliances, information appliances. With THE, computers can do the exact same things as they do today. Lover of freedom ehh? Well, if you think about it interface wise, then you are not free.

I guess you've forgotten about Apple's Think Different campaign, but you are just thinking the same.

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[lux55]

That's a decent regurgitation of Jef's rhetoric, but it's not a very convincing defense. I don't mean to offend you, and I'm not trying to undervalue you or Jef's work. I didn't say I disagree that the interface could stand to be improved. No interface will ever be perfect, and so interfaces will always stand to be improved upon. Just as no programming language will every be perfect either. It's not possible.

However, quotes like "One only cares about getting something done" are simply untrue. Apple is a business, and even if this statement were true in the long run (which is still not the case), there would be no incentive for Apple to focus on it. The packaging is what makes sales today, and it will be the packaging and marketing that will determine whether they continue to make sales in the long run as well.

This is the gap between theoretical knowledge and the real world. Theoretically, everything could be perfected, and should be. In practice, it just doesn't work out that way. That's not to say researchers like Jef aren't important or valuable, they are! But they are important in the same way the LISP programming language is important to modern computing -- as in influence, not for their directly impact.

But don't talk to me about Thinking Differently, especially after I just read that completely discrediting Matrix analogy on Jef's web site.

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[DannyiMac]

Okay whatever.

My Matrix parody, though, is true. Otherwise there wouldn't be much argument, would there?

Re:Clear Lack of Understanding

[zpok]

"...even for techie users the Mac is a clear status symbol"

That's interesting, I don't agree, and I'm sure lots of mac users don't. Here's my reply.

Do you use a mac?

Status symbol my ass. Really, look at the advertising campaign, and what you see is... marketing. Big surprise. Look at the Windows ads and what you see is... marketing. Look at the IBM Linux boy. What do you see?

Let me tell you my reason to use a mac: it's a joy to use. It doesn't sit before a window, or in the garden, almost nobody ever sees the computer, it's not a status symbol. I don't have an iPod - although I'm now tempted with the iPod Photo...

I have extensive (user-) experience with PC's and although I do agree XP and OS X aren't that far apart, I wouldn't buy a HOME computer if it had to be a PC, I'd happily learn to live without one.

The main differences are: one is nice and shiny, easy, non-obtrusive, useful, the other is a pain in the bottom.

And that's without taking into account that in order to do the stuff I do now just for fun, would become a quest for compatibility and GUI nightmare. Some of the things would come at too high a price and some wouldn't be possible at all.

Yes, for a professional turnkey

[Anonymous Coward]

For any given application, your tool might not be right. Raskin's obsessions about interface relate to general purpose computers, not specialty tools like an HD editing and compositing machine.

You can go pro or con on FCP as a professional tool. Try getting any given orthodontist to coherently edit his vacation video using iMovie, and then you'll be playing in Raskin's neighborhood.

Macs work very well for photo-editin', word processin', web-surfin', home video editin', song downloadin', and recipie indexin'. Not as well, maybe, as a machine which specialized in each one of these functions, and slightly better than XP, I guess. Their interface is a little better. But not for everything.

Actually don't some things have limited leap keys?

[SuperKendall]

I would say, that perhaps the Palm with it's applcation keys come clostest to being modern leap keys.

It would be interesting to revisit some of his ideas and see if they could be used well in smaller portable devices, or would fit better into modern OSes at all.

Old news, he didn't like system 3.2

[pbjones]

He has been down on macOSX looooong before MacOSX. He is a pureist and nothing will ever meet his high standards. So this article is nothing new. It was different when Mac started, when apps and things were simple, but none expected video editing, music production, CG movies on a machine and OS that ran in 128k of RAM. The market drives computing and features, I am sorry to say that the people have spoken and his simplicity is now found in my mobile phone, and not on my desktop.

Re:Old news, he didn't like system 3.2

[DannyiMac]

You just don't get it. I think you're comparing hardware changes to software. I'm sure with appropriate software and hardware changes the old 128k Macs can run complex applications as you mentioned. I'm sure with the appropriate modifications, your computer can run your phone's OS. This isn't about that. The Humane Environment can have commands that can do all of the photo editing, CG processing as you want. People don't want a user interface that is complex and hard to learn, but attempts to make them "easier" have lead us to where we are today.

Re:Old news, he didn't like system 3.2

[pbjones]

I am very aware of the difference, s/w and h/w. My point is that we now do inherently more complex tasks than we did on a 128k mac, and any sort of changes that are made to hardware to bring it up to date changes the original situation which is one where h/w and s/w are interdependant. The interface is more complex because we now do things like browse the internet, we generally didn't do this in 1984, we also have to cater to other peoples experiences, and what may be complex to one person is simple to another. My kids have been exposed to computers since 3 or 4 years old, I didn't see a real computer until I was 18. They will learn faster because of experience, the current UI is easy for them because they have experienced many UI, the problem that I see as a teacher and a user and a programmer is not that the UI sux, it's that people expect everything to be easy. It isn't, make something foolproof and only a fool will use it.

Re:Old news, he didn't like system 3.2

[DannyiMac]

What I am saying is that it DOES NOT have to be more complex. THE will enable people to have the same functionality as they do today, only it will be easier.

The fundamental interface is wrong. Cute analogy. It is sad when people have to resort to analogies that are just meaningless wordplay to convey their ideas.

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[Zcipher]

I'll tell you one thing that sucks about the Mac UI: You cannot tab to controls other than textboxes.

Actually that's one of my endless frustrations with web browsing in windows; it's a tremendous pain in the ass if, say, there are some links ahead of the login boxes for a website, or if the boxes are broken up by links to help content, etc. This means tabbing through 400 billion "click here for help" and "back to home" or "see this site in swahili" pages, whereas all I really want is to get to the type in boxes or back up into the URL bar. And heaven forbid you accidentally overshoot one (yes I know there's a key chord to go back, but I maintain I shouldn't need it).

So the "suckage" of that particular design decision is at least debatable.

GeoWindows??

[dbirchall]

Do you mean the GEOS-64/128/Apple II GUIs from Berkeley Softworks, and the later PC-GEOS GUI from the same company, then named GeoWorks? PC-GEOS didn't have a GUI of its own; it had a flexible interface model (pretty advanced for PC stuff at that point) that used a system library (SPUI class, I think - specific UI) to apply look and feel. It shipped with a MOTIF SPUI by default, but there was some school-targeted version that had an OS/2-like (CUA?) SPUI as well. Interestingly, the PC-GEOS SDK called GOC (GEOS Objective C; Objective-C with a set of frameworks) for development... much like MacOS X does now with Cocoa! -Dan (used to be a big GEOS user, then went Linux, then OS X)

Re:GeoWindows??

[IAmTheDave]

GeoWorks! Sigh... I knew it sounded wrong. Used to own it too... way back round my first PC. Shoulda known better.

Re:GeoWindows??

[zonker]

another interesting tidbit... back in the very beginning of aol, they used pc-geos as their windowing system (on top of dos).

around that same time i remember lots of bbs's using geos too.

Re:What is it with one-button mice?

[melatonin]

As a Mac user, I'm annoyed that I have to "Option-Click", "Control-Click" and "Command-Click" --- i.e. make motions which require two hands, when a simple 3-button mouse would let me do all of these quickly and easily. How are these key-click combinations "more user-friendly" than single clicks on a multi-button mouse?

Really, a Mac is used best with two hands. Your left hand controls the left side of the keyboard, and the right hand (duh) controls the mouse. The left hand can cut, copy, paste, undo, redo, find, find again, save, close windows, quit applications, select all, cycle through windows, cycle through applications, and while cycling through applications (Command tab, command still held down), quit applications (hit Q while an app is highlighted, with the command key still down). By holding down the option key and dragging the mouse, you can copy just about anything. Shift-clicking modifies selections. Control clicking brings up contextual menus.

Really, this unity of the Mac interface is much more functional than Windows most of the time.

Not everyone cares for a two-button mouse. 90% of people don't use contextual menus. I find that using a scroll wheel makes my finger tired -- I can option-click in the scroll bar to jump to the part of the document I want (but if the scroll wheel is there, I tend to use it... much to the dismay of my finger).

I have a two button Microsoft mouse at work and a one button mouse at home. I'm fine using either one; I don't care to use a two button mouse at home; I don't think it's better.

Just look at the (fixed) menubar - easy!

[GrahamCox]

OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS
Hmmm, how hard is it to look in the same place in the menu bar which never moves and READ which app is topmost? In this respect OS X is WAY better than OS 9, where I agree your comment is valid. In fact the menubar is now very logical - system elevl stuff, then application general stuff, inclusing its name as title, then application specific menus. Really the menubar is a very stable and nice piece of interface, and XP totally fails in this respect. It's just as hard if not harder to figure out what app is "topmost" on XP, unless it's one of those nasty MDI jobs that take over the whole damn monitor and act weirdly - windows INSIDE windows? what were they thinking?

Re:Just look at the (fixed) menubar - easy!

[Anonymous Coward]

What you forget is that it generally doesn't matter which "app" is "topmost" on XP. If you need to use an app's menu, just click on the menu attached to the window you want to use. If you want to type, odds are the window with the blinking caret is the one that matters. Only Macs have this problem because their menu bar is detached from the window it relates to.

As for windows inside windows, it actually makes sense because it shows you which windows belong to which apps. It is very obvious which window is a Photoshop document and which one is my image viewer. On a Mac, there's no obvious way to tell which window is the Photoshop window and which one belongs to the image viewer. Why doesn't my Photoshop tool work? Oh, I didn't notice the menu bar change to indicate that I'm no longer in Photoshop.

Additionally, it seems that Mac users never use multiple monitors. There is nothing more annoying than trying to use an app on one monitor while the menu bar is on a different one! The problem is compounded by the difficulty in using Mac menus with just a keyboard.

aQazaQa

Actually click and drag IS from Apple

[GrahamCox]

Xerox PARC didn't have click and drag, it had click, release, move, click, drop... It was Apple's Lisa that first had Click-drag-drop. As for Vannevar Bush, don't forget his ideas were only ever ideas on paper, as part of a dissertation. No hardware, no software, and no petty implementation details like drag n drop.

Hmph.

[SphericalCrusher]

Basic would run faster if he ran it on that G4 as well. And at least the G4 runs the "modern language" (Which is most likely AppleScript.) The Apple II wouldn't even know what any of it was. And it's quite obvious that AppleScript (or the "modern language" that he is referring to) is a lot more powerful and complex than Basic ever thought about being...

What a whiny little baby

[The Foo]

It would seem he is just pissed about Apples succes, and him not being there. What a whiny little baby, I bet he uses AOL.

Re:What a whiny little baby

[DannyiMac]

No... he's had time to perfect his art of interface design and wants to share his research with others.

Hey people, RTFB

[DannyiMac]

One of my favorite books is Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface. Once you read it, you will understand how poor current interfaces are today. What Jef has on his site is basically the spec sheet for a humane enviroment.

Further more, he is right, Windows is becoming more like the Mac and the Mac is becoming more like Windows. They are both stuck and cannot change (Although, I do think Mac OS X does edge out Windows XP in ease of use). I hate it when Windows users freak out when they sit down at a Mac--THEY ARE THE SAME.

One example of how computers have gotten completely messed up is calculators. Most of you have calculators next to you computer. Why? You have a $500+ device sitting in front of you that can do millions of calculations per second. Why not use it? Because one has to "go through contortions worthy of a circus sideshow in order to do simple arithmetic."

I suggest you go to Amazon or your favorite book store and pick it up. This book will help developers design better interfaces to their programs and improve efficency of use.

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[NotClever]

Actually, I wasn't trolling. We just got an iMac for my girlfriend, and that's one of the biggest PITA's we've run into.

We'll take a look at the disabilities options. Seems strange to classify it that way.

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[NotClever]

You're right, that does suck under Windows, I was (mentally) referring to non web based apps... We haven't had our Mac long enough to see the benefit side of it!

Re:It's nice to hear some criticism of the Mac

[NotClever]

Any Mac program. If you have some text boxes, and some check boxes, you can't just tab to the check boxes...

As others have pointed out, you can enable this functionality in the disability section of the system, which as I've posted elsewhere, seems a strange place to put it.

Well DUH!

[kuzb]

I think there's a far cry between the Mac & XP.

especially since one is an operating system and one isn't.

Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...

[CaptainAvatar]

You clearly don't know a big enough sample of Mac users. I'm an IT manager, we have easily 70 Macs in the department, and I've never seen anyone ditch their one-button mouse - including myself - ever. It's a non-issue, because most people who buy Macs just don't care. Those few who do can buy another mouse. I understand that this is irritating, and there's no real reason why Apple couldn't be more accomodating on this, but is it really such a big deal? Either the other advantages of the Mac outweigh the disadvantage of having to buy an extra mouse, or they don't. If the former, you're still winning. If the latter, buy a PC and stop whining.

good Title

[sydres]

When i Read it my first thought was why is this fellow standing on a mac and why is slashdot reporting it

Wrong

[ZxCv]

Don't forget that NT started their numbering with 3.5...

Bzzt, wrong. NT started with 3.1. Perhaps 3.5 was the first really popular version of NT, but the first publicly released version of NT was, in fact, 3.1.

Re:Wrong

[schematix]

blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah.

Re:The difference is

[natd]

Hang on then, while we are at it - a FOUR button WHEEL mouse works fine too.

I have an MS Explorer and it automatically has the side buttons doing the 'back and forwards' thing in Firefox. And the wheel works.

The Compaqs and Dells at work didn't come with 4 mouse buttons - I don't see people complain about that - they toss it out and buy the mouse they like.

I know this isn't news to any Mac users but seemingly a great many Windows users just can't get over that you aren't forced to use the Apple mouse. I will add however, that the current Apple mouse is GREAT to use and somehow feels much more accurate than my MS Explorer.

yes

[Anonymous Coward]

can't be bothered to read the waffle but Raskin is right. Apple have failed and lost their way. end of story

Goobers

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially the people here should know of Eric Raymond and seen his 'Tao' of Unix programming, and even seen the final chapter where he compares Unix with other operating systems.

The observations Raymond makes about the old MacOS are the same Raskin makes, but the difference is Raymond (and I) say Unix is better, while Raskin says the opposite.

Raskin had his chance. He had his fifteen years of fame. It's over now, and all he can do is continue to capitalise on it.

But MacOS is no more, and that kind of development paradigm did NOT work well that time either (for the Mac) and if Raskin says otherwise, then you know what an ignoramus he is.

Under the bonnet MacOS was always a horrible mess. When you start from the wrong end because your Fearless Leader is totally convinced he's found the NeXT BiG ThinG, you're going to end up in a mess like this.

Only a few years later Jobs tried doing it differently. He got the best people from everywhere to give him the best they could come up with - NeXT.

And that is what we have at Apple today. Raskin is a latter day Paul Bunyan. He can still bark, and can still interest the weak-willed, but those who care about what is happening don't have time for this nonsense.

It's a different world we live in today, and the year is 2004, not 1984.