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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.
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?
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.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
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.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
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
bamph
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?
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