Apple didn't invent their own key...that key is there on Windows as well (it just has a different name). Apple is more consistent in which key to use and why, unlike Windows. This is debatable based on your preference, but from a pure HMI stand point, the Apple way is "easier" (notice I didn't say better).
Screen shots can be done with keyboard shortcuts (UNIX legacy) or by opening Grab and using the menus. Non-issue.
Apple has done nothing to hide the command line. It's applications/utilities/terminal, or just type terminal in the system search bar in the top right corner.
If you want to argue that command line file management makes it *easier* for people to not get lost, then you obviously can't appreciate the UI of OSX (or Windows, for that matter).
Windows has juggled the Windows menu. Apple doesn't so much. That's yet another reason the Apple UI is considered "better" or "easier" by experts. Hierarchical menus work for most people, but not all. It's a preference, and obviously not one of yours.
Reading your last paragraph, it seems your distaste for Macintosh stems from pre-OSX issues. OSX has been around for nearly 10 years now, though, so most of your complaints seem to be outdated.
You missed my point. You don't survive 20 years of desktop failure before you have your first success. You aren't around after 20 years if all you have is failures. So it follows that their desktop computing business is by no measurement a 30 year failure, because they made enough money to make it into the uber-crazy income years of the iStuff.
How has OSX done in the market place? Don't ask me, because I'm in the Education/Flash/Premiere/After Effects realm. I'd say that every 95 out 100 computers are Macs, given my world-view.
That's a big reason why the media reports on it constantly. They themselves are the fanbois.
Exactly.
And I can say all this talk about the intuitiveness of the user interface is hype.
And the vast majority of usability experts would tell you that you are wrong. Not that Apple stuff is perfect, it does set a high bar. Try http://www.nngroup.com/ for starters.
The first thing that threw me was the titlebar on their GUI, and that's entirely their fault for getting nasty with patents.
No, it is the product of user interface engineering called conveyance that allows the user to always expect a certain behavior to behave the same way (i.e. the title bar is always at the top of your screen).
MS style GUIs have the titlebar attached to the top of the respective window. The Mac has the active window's titlebar glued to the top of the screen.
Yes they do. Not because they didn't want to get sued by Apple, but because of the notion of "proximity". MS decided proximity was a more important design feature than conveyance. While I agree with the MS stance, it clearly is more confusing to have multiple windows with multiple title bars open than having one title bar for the active window.
The next thing I gradually learned about were various "open-apple some-key" commands. Nothing intuitive at all about those.
Nothing intuitive about using English? Apple Key + "S" for "S"ave, O for open, Q for quit (as if ALT + F4 is more intuitive than Quit?) Additionally, Apple does a better job of standardizing keyboard shortcuts. MS does a better job of customizing shortcuts, but that doesn't make it more intuitive (it makes it more customizable).
The other thing about Apple is they make sure young people are exposed to their products.
I'm pretty sure Apple is more interested in people with large amounts of disposable income. I haven't really seen a cheap Apple computer in a while.
They have always pushed their computers hard to educational institutions.
What company wouldn't?
It's no good making sure the school's lab is well equipped if students won't use them.
Not to toot my own horn, but I have published curriculum on teaching technology, and kids now days don't care about the platform as long as it has an Internet connection.
There are people who like Apple, people who hate people who like Apple, and people who don't care.
But loudly hating somebody because they like something is far more egregious than being loud about liking something. Except in college football. Everyone hates SEC fans.
Wait, what? You expect an Apple hater to provide sources for his made-up statistics? Blasphemy! Don't you know we all buy iStuff because we are insecure and only care about what people think about us based on our consumer electronic devices!?
And Apple hardware historically is rated very high (usually tops) in reliability. I personally don't care about user opinions, because users are people and people, in general, are stupid. Just take a look at cnet or amazon user reviews someday.
My thoughts exactly. I love it when critics of OSX dismiss any criticism of their criticism as "fanboyism". If you are going to criticize something like iTunes, you should probably state your case why it sucks and not just assume everyone thinks it sucks.
Apple for some reason is immune to this, however. Call it loyalism or what you will, But users are willing to look past missing functionality (copy/paste, MMS, 3G, multitasking) as long as the device works well for most needs.
The only way I can send a file created on say Pages from my iPad to someone else is through e-mail.
Just curious, what's so bad about that solution? I host all my files to my Mobile Me account so I have access to them anywhere. Do iPads not have Mobile Me (or similar apps/services)?
I haven't burned a disk in years and thumb drives are not allowed in my work environment. Files over the network/cloud/internet are pretty good options. I prefer them to physical media (to a reasonable degree, depending on file size).
but more and more it's becoming obvious the future of Apple is not macs, but iDevices in a closed iEcosystem.
Anyone who thinks Apple will quit making consumer desktops and laptops obviously hasn't been alive very long. They also aren't paying attention to the laptop market share numbers either. And last I checked, the film, sound and print industries aren't porting all their Adobe CS5 Master Collections to iPads and iPhones.
You said it yourself. "Most" people won't type html tags. This is not a case of Apple forcing you to do anything "their" way. It's Apple's way of making a good user experience based on an analysis of how people will most likely use this device.
I design training user interfaces. We make hard decisions about placement of buttons and prompts all the time based on an analysis of the learner. Military customers get a different UI than corporate customers...not because either one is better than the other, but because an analysis of their skills and ways of doing things shows they are different and learn differently, thus need a different learning environment.
Your list is typically overstated and filled with relatively irrelevant nit picks.
The Calendar app is actually quite nice to use (more "dreamy" than Outlook, less feature-rich, but easier to use). Not allowing random Joe Slashdotter for Monday and Wednesday scheduled events is not some conspiracy by Apple to force you to use the software their way. It's a trade-off. To make what you are asking requires resources and Apple sees no benefit of adding a feature that doesn't really do anything for most people.
Copy/paste was omitted due to engineering trade-offs and getting stuff to market in a timely manner. They added it later because it's deemed to be an important feature, unlike your Calendar issue. Why people keep bitching about Apple product shortcomings after the shortcoming no longer exists is beyond me.
Not sure what your PDF problem since I don't have an iPad. My iPhone, however downloads pdfs and makes them available in the iBooks app without using iTunes. I'm not sure I believe you, since it doesn't make any sense for the same app to work differently on a iPhone or an iPad.
As for transferring files FROM an iPad, I've seen the logic here is that the iPad is a media consumption device, not a production device. As Steve Jobs would say, you're using it wrong. Seriously, though, you are applying your vision and definition of a tablet computer to be a desktop computer that comes in a skinny form, when Apple is defining it as something completely different (and magical!)
With that, I don't like the iPad, and have no need for it (I'm a content producer more than a consumer). I suggest, like me, if you don't like the feature set, don't buy the device.
The notion that Apple "focuses on the user experience" quickly seems absurd as soon as you try to do anything that Apple didn't account for or is actually trying to prevent.
But you can't just slap together a piece of software that crashes every 5 seconds and only exports one file format and call it Windows Movie Maker!!! and list it as a "feature". That's the problem with Microsoft...they do the bare minimum so they can add it to their features list. Quantity over quality.
I prefer the Jobsian method of, "if it doesn't work to my unrealistic high standards, then it doesn't ship" over, "you can kind of make.avi files with that right?? Ship it! And make sure you tell everyone it's just as good as iMovie!"
That wasn't because of vendor lockin. That was because no sites worked in any other browser except IE on a Windows computer.
I think you just nicely described the phenomena of vendor lock in by saying it wasn't vendor lock in. Ironic.
And yes, I remember the web "back then". I've been surfing the web with some variant of MacOS since 1989, and the claims of incompatibility are grossly overstated. If it weren't for the web and it's open standards, there'd BE no MacOS, as it only survived the dark years because of the healthy online support community. Can't buy Office for Mac at your local Best Buy? Go online. Can't find a retailer within 100 miles? Buy a Mac online. That web service only works with IE and WinPC? Choose any of the other thousands of sites that will work. Can't play that video codec? Go online and get a converter.
Microsoft may abuse its position through vendor lockin, but to get TO that position it was doing something right.
I'm trying to think of what "something" means in this context. A cycle of forced upgrades, ensuring steady cash flow? Proprietary media codecs? Purposeful non-cross-platform compatibility ensuring strangleholds on market shares? Making sales of an OS by shipping OEM versions instead of, you know, earning the demand of customers who actually WANT your product and don't just get it pre-bundled? Copying (badly) anything innovative that other companies do and re-brand it as a feature set?
Nope. Can't figure out what that "something" is that Microsoft supposedly did right, other than shrewd business practices leading to monopoly convictions. Of course they are good at making money, if that's the "something" you are referring to.
In my view, Apple is the only company focusing on the user experience (and the only company focusing on the user) as opposed to feature lists products that will be close to become unusable.
While I agree 100% with your sentiment, I'm guessing the replies to your post are going to be ugly. People on slashdot are going to eat "focusing on the user" for lunch. While Apple is a little deserved of criticism for their hyper-control, the end (generally speaking) justifies the means for MOST people (non-nerds).
I find the Speed coverage to be pretty good. It's no worse than the Eurosport coverage. I thought all the TV coverage for F1 races were bound by the host nation cameras anyways?
There's already an Apple TV. You have to buy content, not subscribe to content. I prefer subscription to ownership, as most things I'll watch are live sporting/music events that I don't need to own. You can rent content on the Apple store, but I haven't seen any sporting events on there.
I think one of the reasons Netflix is so cheap is because of all the people like me who pay for it, but don't use it enough to get our money's worth. There's lots of stuff like this, such as the GI Bill. Soldiers pay $100 a month for 12 months and earn something like $50,000 for college. Most of them never use it, so their $1200 goes towards paying for the very few who do use it.
I seriously watch maybe 1 movie a month, which I could get at Blockbuster for $1.99. Instead, I pay $10 or something a month, $120 a year and watch maybe 10 movies. Once EVERYTHING is available on-demand, I'll use it more. As it stands now, most stuff I want to watch at that moment is mail-only, so I end up not watching it.
I don't think the necessarily need to die...just have a smaller market share. There's still a need to service people who don't stream movies and who don't want to use Netflix.
If companies would just accept that you can't show growth every year for the next 100 years, this wouldn't be that big of a story.
Slashdot Mirror
Quickly, because I have to go to work.
Apple didn't invent their own key...that key is there on Windows as well (it just has a different name). Apple is more consistent in which key to use and why, unlike Windows. This is debatable based on your preference, but from a pure HMI stand point, the Apple way is "easier" (notice I didn't say better).
Screen shots can be done with keyboard shortcuts (UNIX legacy) or by opening Grab and using the menus. Non-issue.
Apple has done nothing to hide the command line. It's applications/utilities/terminal, or just type terminal in the system search bar in the top right corner.
If you want to argue that command line file management makes it *easier* for people to not get lost, then you obviously can't appreciate the UI of OSX (or Windows, for that matter).
Windows has juggled the Windows menu. Apple doesn't so much. That's yet another reason the Apple UI is considered "better" or "easier" by experts. Hierarchical menus work for most people, but not all. It's a preference, and obviously not one of yours.
Reading your last paragraph, it seems your distaste for Macintosh stems from pre-OSX issues. OSX has been around for nearly 10 years now, though, so most of your complaints seem to be outdated.
You missed my point. You don't survive 20 years of desktop failure before you have your first success. You aren't around after 20 years if all you have is failures. So it follows that their desktop computing business is by no measurement a 30 year failure, because they made enough money to make it into the uber-crazy income years of the iStuff.
How has OSX done in the market place? Don't ask me, because I'm in the Education/Flash/Premiere/After Effects realm. I'd say that every 95 out 100 computers are Macs, given my world-view.
That's a big reason why the media reports on it constantly. They themselves are the fanbois.
Exactly.
And I can say all this talk about the intuitiveness of the user interface is hype.
And the vast majority of usability experts would tell you that you are wrong. Not that Apple stuff is perfect, it does set a high bar. Try http://www.nngroup.com/ for starters.
The first thing that threw me was the titlebar on their GUI, and that's entirely their fault for getting nasty with patents.
No, it is the product of user interface engineering called conveyance that allows the user to always expect a certain behavior to behave the same way (i.e. the title bar is always at the top of your screen).
MS style GUIs have the titlebar attached to the top of the respective window. The Mac has the active window's titlebar glued to the top of the screen.
Yes they do. Not because they didn't want to get sued by Apple, but because of the notion of "proximity". MS decided proximity was a more important design feature than conveyance. While I agree with the MS stance, it clearly is more confusing to have multiple windows with multiple title bars open than having one title bar for the active window.
The next thing I gradually learned about were various "open-apple some-key" commands. Nothing intuitive at all about those.
Nothing intuitive about using English? Apple Key + "S" for "S"ave, O for open, Q for quit (as if ALT + F4 is more intuitive than Quit?) Additionally, Apple does a better job of standardizing keyboard shortcuts. MS does a better job of customizing shortcuts, but that doesn't make it more intuitive (it makes it more customizable).
The other thing about Apple is they make sure young people are exposed to their products.
I'm pretty sure Apple is more interested in people with large amounts of disposable income. I haven't really seen a cheap Apple computer in a while.
They have always pushed their computers hard to educational institutions.
What company wouldn't?
It's no good making sure the school's lab is well equipped if students won't use them.
Not to toot my own horn, but I have published curriculum on teaching technology, and kids now days don't care about the platform as long as it has an Internet connection.
There are people who like Apple, people who hate people who like Apple, and people who don't care.
But loudly hating somebody because they like something is far more egregious than being loud about liking something. Except in college football. Everyone hates SEC fans.
Wait, what? You expect an Apple hater to provide sources for his made-up statistics? Blasphemy! Don't you know we all buy iStuff because we are insecure and only care about what people think about us based on our consumer electronic devices!?
And Apple hardware historically is rated very high (usually tops) in reliability. I personally don't care about user opinions, because users are people and people, in general, are stupid. Just take a look at cnet or amazon user reviews someday.
He's a sample of laptop reliability from 2009: http://mac.blorge.com/2009/05/05/macbooks-sweep-consumer-reports-quality-survey/
when it comes to Apple's desktop computing business, it's a 30 year history of failure.
So you are saying Apple used 20 years of failure experience to produce the most defining electronic gadget of this lifetime? Mod +1 Interesting!
I'm not sure I've ever read a technical review (or even a casual review) defining OSX as "failure" either.
My thoughts exactly. I love it when critics of OSX dismiss any criticism of their criticism as "fanboyism". If you are going to criticize something like iTunes, you should probably state your case why it sucks and not just assume everyone thinks it sucks.
Apple for some reason is immune to this, however. Call it loyalism or what you will, But users are willing to look past missing functionality (copy/paste, MMS, 3G, multitasking) as long as the device works well for most needs.
.
FTFY. "Shiny" can bite my shiny metal ass.
The only way I can send a file created on say Pages from my iPad to someone else is through e-mail.
Just curious, what's so bad about that solution? I host all my files to my Mobile Me account so I have access to them anywhere. Do iPads not have Mobile Me (or similar apps/services)?
I haven't burned a disk in years and thumb drives are not allowed in my work environment. Files over the network/cloud/internet are pretty good options. I prefer them to physical media (to a reasonable degree, depending on file size).
but more and more it's becoming obvious the future of Apple is not macs, but iDevices in a closed iEcosystem.
Anyone who thinks Apple will quit making consumer desktops and laptops obviously hasn't been alive very long. They also aren't paying attention to the laptop market share numbers either. And last I checked, the film, sound and print industries aren't porting all their Adobe CS5 Master Collections to iPads and iPhones.
You said it yourself. "Most" people won't type html tags. This is not a case of Apple forcing you to do anything "their" way. It's Apple's way of making a good user experience based on an analysis of how people will most likely use this device.
I design training user interfaces. We make hard decisions about placement of buttons and prompts all the time based on an analysis of the learner. Military customers get a different UI than corporate customers...not because either one is better than the other, but because an analysis of their skills and ways of doing things shows they are different and learn differently, thus need a different learning environment.
Your list is typically overstated and filled with relatively irrelevant nit picks.
The Calendar app is actually quite nice to use (more "dreamy" than Outlook, less feature-rich, but easier to use). Not allowing random Joe Slashdotter for Monday and Wednesday scheduled events is not some conspiracy by Apple to force you to use the software their way. It's a trade-off. To make what you are asking requires resources and Apple sees no benefit of adding a feature that doesn't really do anything for most people.
Copy/paste was omitted due to engineering trade-offs and getting stuff to market in a timely manner. They added it later because it's deemed to be an important feature, unlike your Calendar issue. Why people keep bitching about Apple product shortcomings after the shortcoming no longer exists is beyond me.
Not sure what your PDF problem since I don't have an iPad. My iPhone, however downloads pdfs and makes them available in the iBooks app without using iTunes. I'm not sure I believe you, since it doesn't make any sense for the same app to work differently on a iPhone or an iPad.
As for transferring files FROM an iPad, I've seen the logic here is that the iPad is a media consumption device, not a production device. As Steve Jobs would say, you're using it wrong. Seriously, though, you are applying your vision and definition of a tablet computer to be a desktop computer that comes in a skinny form, when Apple is defining it as something completely different (and magical!)
With that, I don't like the iPad, and have no need for it (I'm a content producer more than a consumer). I suggest, like me, if you don't like the feature set, don't buy the device.
Yes. Because no one ever uses "features".
The notion that Apple "focuses on the user experience" quickly seems absurd
as soon as you try to do anything that Apple didn't account for or is actually
trying to prevent.
But you can't just slap together a piece of software that crashes every 5 seconds and only exports one file format and call it Windows Movie Maker!!! and list it as a "feature". That's the problem with Microsoft...they do the bare minimum so they can add it to their features list. Quantity over quality.
I prefer the Jobsian method of, "if it doesn't work to my unrealistic high standards, then it doesn't ship" over, "you can kind of make .avi files with that right?? Ship it! And make sure you tell everyone it's just as good as iMovie!"
That wasn't because of vendor lockin. That was because no sites worked in any other browser except IE on a Windows computer.
I think you just nicely described the phenomena of vendor lock in by saying it wasn't vendor lock in. Ironic.
And yes, I remember the web "back then". I've been surfing the web with some variant of MacOS since 1989, and the claims of incompatibility are grossly overstated. If it weren't for the web and it's open standards, there'd BE no MacOS, as it only survived the dark years because of the healthy online support community. Can't buy Office for Mac at your local Best Buy? Go online. Can't find a retailer within 100 miles? Buy a Mac online. That web service only works with IE and WinPC? Choose any of the other thousands of sites that will work. Can't play that video codec? Go online and get a converter.
Microsoft may abuse its position through vendor lockin, but to get TO that position it was doing something right.
I'm trying to think of what "something" means in this context. A cycle of forced upgrades, ensuring steady cash flow? Proprietary media codecs? Purposeful non-cross-platform compatibility ensuring strangleholds on market shares? Making sales of an OS by shipping OEM versions instead of, you know, earning the demand of customers who actually WANT your product and don't just get it pre-bundled? Copying (badly) anything innovative that other companies do and re-brand it as a feature set?
Nope. Can't figure out what that "something" is that Microsoft supposedly did right, other than shrewd business practices leading to monopoly convictions. Of course they are good at making money, if that's the "something" you are referring to.
In my view, Apple is the only company focusing on the user experience (and the only company focusing on the user) as opposed to feature lists products that will be close to become unusable.
While I agree 100% with your sentiment, I'm guessing the replies to your post are going to be ugly. People on slashdot are going to eat "focusing on the user" for lunch. While Apple is a little deserved of criticism for their hyper-control, the end (generally speaking) justifies the means for MOST people (non-nerds).
This thing is taking so long, they should just scratch the whole movie and make a Duke Nuke 'em movie instead.
Bank of America
Chase (and before that Wamu)
Wells Fargo
I've had accounts with these three over the past 5 years and I've always been able to go back at least a year and get a .pdf (at minimum).
That's what I figured. Franchises suck.
I find the Speed coverage to be pretty good. It's no worse than the Eurosport coverage. I thought all the TV coverage for F1 races were bound by the host nation cameras anyways?
There's already an Apple TV. You have to buy content, not subscribe to content. I prefer subscription to ownership, as most things I'll watch are live sporting/music events that I don't need to own. You can rent content on the Apple store, but I haven't seen any sporting events on there.
There were no video games for rent when I was a kid. I already had three kids of my own when the NES came out.
Now get off my lawn.
I think one of the reasons Netflix is so cheap is because of all the people like me who pay for it, but don't use it enough to get our money's worth. There's lots of stuff like this, such as the GI Bill. Soldiers pay $100 a month for 12 months and earn something like $50,000 for college. Most of them never use it, so their $1200 goes towards paying for the very few who do use it.
I seriously watch maybe 1 movie a month, which I could get at Blockbuster for $1.99. Instead, I pay $10 or something a month, $120 a year and watch maybe 10 movies. Once EVERYTHING is available on-demand, I'll use it more. As it stands now, most stuff I want to watch at that moment is mail-only, so I end up not watching it.
I don't think the necessarily need to die...just have a smaller market share. There's still a need to service people who don't stream movies and who don't want to use Netflix.
If companies would just accept that you can't show growth every year for the next 100 years, this wouldn't be that big of a story.
I think the lesson here is, if you are going to go into the service/merchandising business, be prepared to deal with a lot of stupid customers.