1.) One of the important elements of all 6 movies was that droids were so ubiquitous that they were hardly noticed. Droids, to them, are like cell phones to us.
So in Ep4, the barkeep saying like "we don't allow their kind in here!" is kind of like a place demanding you turn off your cell...
Also, did anyone get flashbacks to Mega Man 2 when Darth was riding on the convenient flat head of the droid over the Lava? A bit silly.
Maybe I'm confused, but aren't all those options available under the "File" menu in IE? So you're kvetching that it's under the file menu and not a right click option? Or what?
Close other tabs doesn't help with my point, since I want to see what each tab is before I close it...without an extension I click somewhere on the left, on the tab, to bring it to the front, then I mouse all the way over to the right to hit X, and I have to keep going back and forth.
Re: plain old new window...I still say, it's much easier to type in a URL to a window that has junk on it then it is to get back to where you were in a blank or homepage'd window...therefore, it would make sense to have a configurable "new window clones current window" option.
Re: IE FTP...I use it for binary files all the time, never had a corrupted file. Don't know if it does ASCII mode. I don't think it does sftp, which is a drawback.
Debatable. I'm more than happy with the way Firefox handles passwords.
I'm not, but I have trouble understanding how it works so that I can complain about it properly...which is itself a complaint. For instance, it seems like once upon a time I told not to remember this one http auth, and now it NEVER offers to remember it. Also, sometimes it gets filling out usernames and passwords exactly backwards, on CGI forms...I'd like it to prefill my username and let me type in my password. Instead, it wants to fill in the password after I type my username...given that my username is a lot more public than my password, some hypothetical badguy who got hold of my computer might know or guess my username, and would be good to go.
A valid point. But how often is it necessary to search within a textarea?
You might as well argue "why have taxtareas, don't one line text fields work fine?" So to answer your question, ALL THE DAMN TIME...I edit my website through online forms with textareas, and going back to correct a mistake is a lot harder when I can't ctrl-F find it! Sometimes I have to cut and paste the whole entry into a text editor.
I've heard this is a known bug in certain versions of Firefox, and I think Firefox's search bar is worlds better than IE's dialog (which has absolutely retarded prefilling behaviors), so I'm not too upset, but still.
This is something that I really despise about IE. Why would I want a duplicate of the page I already have open?! Anyway, I always start with a blank document, so no time is wasted waiting to load a page which will just be changed regardless.
I often want a duplicate page to launch child browsing, for instance...I might want to keep a "pristine" copy of the main forum page open, and then have a new one to play with.
Given that my startpage is ALWAYS one click away, and making a new window on the current window might be arbitrarily difficult (sometimes there's state not captured in the URL) I'd say cloning the window is a good canidate for a config option. And not having shift- or ctrl-clicked windows having a history has no user advantages I can see, and many drawbacks I've run into.
Boxes better than question marks? Debatable.
No way...with question marks, I don't know if they were question marks originally, or if Firefox changed 'em. With boxes, I have a pretty good idea that it's a character set I can't view properly. Question Marks as a placeholder for unprintable characters is a bug. (So dabate me. Why are question marks better?)
It seems to me that it resets the cursor blink cycle, at least in 1.0.3 which I'm currently using.
Not in the 1.0.3. *I'm* using. Especially with http auth dialog. It sounds like a small thing but it's really grating.
Firefox also has pretty powerful GUI configuration. It's not very obvious, but you can right-click in a blank area of the menu and select "customize"..
It's pretty good for customizing what buttons appear, but has no facility for arranging the positions of the bars. (This might be a too tough to do in a sane, multi-platform way)
IE drives me crazy by not selecting the address bar on CTRL-L, but instead popping up a dialog. Sometimes I just want to edit the current URL from the keyboard, damnitt!
Heh, I've heard this before...you might be looking for the key pattern "alt-d"--that's why the d in "Address" is underlined...it even gives you a hint, unlike Firefox Ctrl-L
Though alt-d, URL, return isn't any fewer keystrokes than ctrl-o, URL, return.
Right click on the tab and select "close". Or just middle-click it.
It's a lot more steps to right click a menu, locate the "close tab" (in a relatively difficult to hit, last on list position) then to click on a nice red X. And I can't readily middle click on my laptop. I think there is a plugin that fixes this though, and it is a subjective complaint.
[I'm answering this on the assumption that you have legitimate gripes and are not just a MS shill. If this is not the case, please disregard.]
I'm absolutely arguing on "good faith"--I've actually switched to Firefox and have for about a month. Once I grokked tabs (at first I thought "well, the taskbar is my tab row, basically) as a way of semantically grouping certain webtasks I was hooked. Also I appreciate being less of MS's "bitch" and it might ease the way to changing OSes in the future.
I understand that Firefox "errs" on the side of future upgradeability, but I do appreciate that when I sit down at an average, vanilla PC, I have a graphical FTP browser via IE. I dislike having seperate downloads for options, because it raises the cost of sitting down at someone elses PC.
I LOVE "clone this window" and I also really miss how child windows (from shift- or ctrl-click) don't capture the history. In navigating certain webforums, it's a handicap sometimes when I want to go back to the main discussion window from a thread I'm following in a new window but I prematurely closed that main discussion window. I really think it should be a configurable option, and every time I find a window with no "history" I think I'm back in Netscape 4.7 crapland. (And to answer your question, I think ctrl-t should have an option to do what ctrl-n does, i.e. go to my homepage...but this bothers me less than it used to)
I do use the keyboard a lot (which is why I'm probably missing the speciffic alt-d mapping to jump the cursor to the URL bar) but I gotta say...I think the mouse is used for local firebrowsing a LOT more than the keyboard.
Anyway, I have used Firefox, and most of these complaints still stand. I don't think it's just newbyism, and the "open link in new window loses the history" is starting to get on my nerves.
I find it useful enough that it would be good to have it as a configurable option.
Seriously, what's a realistic ratio of how often you want to select from inside the middle of a word to how often you want to copy the whole thing? I'd say it's a about 1:20 for me, so increasing the "target area" for my mouse to hit is a usability win.
I don't always agree with its rules about whitespace, especially when it comes to HTML markup but even with that, I prefer it to Firefox's old school approach.
And it's funny usually I prefer the simplistic but easier to predict ideal (i.e. Firefox select) to the "DWIM" approach (what IE does) but in this case I've gotten use to the DWIM select and miss it in Firefox.
# IE has a very usable FTP 2-way client, Firefox has an FTP browser only. # IE has a better password-remembering system. # Firefox's Ctrl-F doesn't seem to search input form fields. # IE's "mouse select jumps to word boundaries" is not perfect but better than Firefox's character based model. # Ctrl-N in IE brings up a clone of the current window, complete with history. Firefox opens up my startpage...redundant, because I can easily launch it from the start menu. # Ctrl-T in Firefox opens up a new and utterly blank tab...even more useless than the Ctrl-N behavior! # IE shows undisplayable characters with box placeholders, Firefox uses question marks. # Tabbing in Firefox doesn't doesn't reset the cursor blink cycle, or something, so you don't get instant confirmation that you're typing in the correct box. # IE has better drag and drop editing of the toolbars, including the "File Edit View" bar. (I like compressing that bar, 5 small buttons, and the address bar all on one line.) # Ctrl-O in firefox is the normal file open dialog...not as useful as IE's URL-or-file-browse feature. # I wish Firefox had an option to let each tab have its own close button...often I want to quickly close a bunch of tabs based on their title, but instead I have to switch to each one and close it seperately.
Some of those are just matters of opinion, none are that that major, but IE does have some usability pluses.
Don't know if this is useful, and I think it's only free as in beer, but if a user is raw enough that they dont know about photoshop, "IrfanView" has decent batch resizing and touchup abilities.
An interesting thought in all this... I'm slowly formalizing a philosophy that the most "control flow" should happen in a single file, preferably readable on a single screen. Difficult tasks should be delegated to appropraite API and/or objects.
We keep talking about "comment your code" but so many modern technologies (J2EE, I'm looking at you) try to do more and more "without writing a single line of code!" So in some ways we're set back. I guess you can "comment your XML file!" but it seems to be that there's often a disconnect.
Re:I would buy a Mac...
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You might want something with a DVD player...I couldn't load iLife w/ garageband when I wnet that route.
My interesting "work" is online, rented server space, http://kisrael.com and http://loveblender.com , mostly perl scripts and HTML there, some light image work and Java dev on my PC.
The other thing is, I am about the most effecient user of keyboard and mouse that I know, I'm really good at getting to things very quickly, using keyboard accelerators when that makes sense, using the mouse when it doesn't, creating shortcuts in the start menu, alt-tabbing, macros in text editors, all that good stuff. And, along with my philisophical problems with the dock, I haven't wanted to have to relearn so much of that (or return OSX to make it like WinXP...not only is that abhorent, but I'm stuck if I switch to someone else's Mac)
I had an ibook for a brief time and traded it to a friend in exchange for work on my house...the killer app was going to be garageband but I cheaped out and got an older ibook, no DVD, on ebay, and it didn't come bundled with it.
Now I feel left out...sigh...I do like my Averatec chapie PC laptop, builtin 802-11g and DVD player, CD burner. Runs a little warm and is noiser than the Mac, but it was a bit cheaper and gets the job done.
Dang, I really don't get the appeal of OSX...I've got into dumb arguments here on why the dock doesn't "work for me" (odd blend of "shortcuts" and "tasks"...long story.)
But mostly...I dunno, most of my interesting work I do on a server command line. All I need is a decent text editor, some misc tools, and a web browser, everything else is almost inconsequential, and I find Windows UI to be surprisingly well designed, if not very innovative.
Actually, it's more the "PCs AREN'T FOR (ADVANCED) GAMES (BECAUSE ITS TOO HARD TO KEEP A CURRENT SYSTEM)" zealots...I'm one of them. And finding out both my $800 (in 2004) laptop and $800 (in 2002) PC don't play "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" as well as my (what, $250 in 2000?) PS2.
I kind of like how Gmail's policy of "keep suspected spam 30 days, than discard" makes it pretty easy to gauge your spamrate...from this summer, it was above 14K, but now it's closer to 8.5K. I don't know how much of that comes from zombie nets, or if there's some other factor (since I own a few domains, and receive any email sent to them, sometimes I get waves of bounces when someone hijacks my domain name as a from address) but it does seem like spam ain't as bad as it used to be.
With a screen hangin' out there in the open for anything to scratch when you put it away. The analog stick is great but I really think clamshell is a more solid design going into the future.
I have a GBA, Laptop, a Sony Clie, a digital camera, a cellphone w/ color screen, a LCD monitor at work and at home. I don't recall seeing dead pixels on any of them, especially not right outta the box.
I think it should be a pretty reasonable thing to expect these days.
Yes, but it's not just the games. The DS has kid-friendly features like a clamshell design (harder to damage), cartridges (disks scratch, we've had gameboy games go through the washing machine ok), the resulting quick cartridge game-start time, and lower prices. Those aren't just good kid-friendly features, those are all things we want from a nice, portable system.
I might eat my words, but it seems to me that handhelds will always lag consoles, so handhelds should focus on SAFELY portable, quick pick up and play experiences. Nintendo has walloped all comers with battery life and size and formfactor, and maybe a library of games...Sony is in a better position to compete on games, so it'll be interesting.
I've only dabbled with tab browsing, but it's interesting that so many people find it so appealing. This kind of ties into UI preferenes, like OSX Dock vs. Task Bar + Start button, but I don't like it...I think of each browser window as a seperate activity I'm involved in and want to return to, so I like having each take its own one click spot on the taskbar. (though I guess if my only or primary activity at a given time was browsing, it wouldn't be so bad, and the other windows would still be a click away.)
And it's just as amusing to see you resort to the USA-in-Vietnam "declare victory and pull out" strategy rather than having a decent discussion.
I wasn't bragging about having a flatpanel, except to point out that your "get a bigger screen dumbass" metaresponse was uncalled for (which is what really started the name calling)
I find the dock to be an unpleasant mishmash of start/quicklaunch and the taskbar. YMMV.
You totally ignore my central thesis, which is this: There is a practical difference between applications with open windows (which will generally have context that the user wants to return to) and applications that aren't currently running. (which have no such context). Furthermore, some people will find it useful to have an OS that makes the two sets of things clearly distinct. (Even though I don't like or use quicklaunch, it provides icons that are grouped seperate and visually distinct from the buttons for open windows.)
Apparently, your only retort to this "you don't understand computers. And please don't argue, I already said you don't understand computers". Do you have anything more rational than that?
I've also said that I think the MacOS makes sense for some people...you're the one who argues that anyone who doesnt prefer it to WinXPs system doesn't understand computers-- and I resent that, and that taking a stand counter to yours makes me an "incompetent anti-Mac troll".
And, furthermore, don't complain about my telling you that your mental model is wrong. It's just objectively broken. Deal with it, suck it up and change your way of looking at your computer.
Ha, ha, ha. You are a jerk, man, a narrowsighted idiot. I can see the Mac viewpoint...one menubar per app rather than window, the weird malange of "currently running apps" and "yet to be launched apps" of the Dock...it makes a certain type of sense. But your declaration that other viewpoints are broken is just stupid.
That went by so fast, my head is spinning. So what you're saying here is that Microsoft added this "quick launch" feature because two clicks is too many... but it's not because the "Start" menu is too complicated? This makes sense... how?
two or more clicks = "slower" (than one click) "slower" != "too complicated"
Get it?
Again, my head spins. You claim to "value screen real estate." Okay, I can accept that. "Buy a bigger screen, you dumbass," is the proper response, of course, but we'll skip past that for the moment.
Then you say that Windows 95 was better because it made "all running programs more visible."
Ok, I misspoke. Physical screen real estate is indeed an issue...for my 12.1" laptop, to my 19" flatpanel. But come to think of it, it's not what the most important thing: it's on-screen clutter.
Icons add to clutter. But some clutter can be worthwhile...shortcuts to launch a new app window aren't worth it. But the "clutter" of a taskbar IS worth it, because those represent activities I'm currently enganged in and am likely to want to return to soon...otherwise I would have closed the app window.
So with my limited time with the dock, I felt as if I'd have to search through the clutter of both running apps and not-yet-running apps to get back to where I was. That doesn't happen when you have a seperation.
It makes me think of the bad old days of Windows 3.1... there, programs minimized to a little icon on the equivalent of the desktop. I guess ditching that in favor of the taskbar lets people then use the desktop as a big file folder, but again, clean seperation between "apps you might want to start from scratch" and "apps you were working with, so maybe they have context you want to get back".
I care because a running application represents "something I was working on in the past" and a non-running application is "something I might want to work on in the future"
. No it doesn't. That's a document or perhaps a window. The application is an executable, it doesn't hold any user data, neither in concept, not in practice.
We're getting bogged down in terminoogy here....At the bottom of my windows PC is a series of buttons, each corresponding to a window, each representing something I'm working on. Nestled away under the start button are a bunch of applications I might want to start up new windows of.
Why think about tasks? Sorry, terminology...I was using the laypersons version of "task", something I'm doing.
Palm uses the same idea, except I think in practice it closes any given app once you exit it, abut then restores state so seamlessly that it's not an issue for the user.
The concept is that when you select an application you shouldn't care whether it's already running or not.
Aargh, I'm so not making myself clear here. the user absolutely DOES care if the application was running or not because that instance has likely captured some state that the user wants to return to:
I have an "explorer" window open to a certain folder...it's saving the state of what directory Im looking at. I have a Textpad window open, with a document I want to come back to...it has state I care about, the changes I've made to my file. I have a browser window open to gmail...I navigatd to that page. It has state I care about. And finally I have this active browser window.
I care about these activities. I want to be relocate any one of them as quickly and easily as possible, so I sacrifice screen real estate at the bottom of my screen.
Now as you rightly point out, for most apps I don't give a crap if it's "really" running in the background or swapped out to disk...as long as when I click on the relevant part of the task bar, the thing is brought up front and center, just like I left it.
THe start menu is hiding shortcuts to starting new instances/windows/whatever of applications: a new window of textpad w/ a blank document, a new filefolder open to an arbitrary place, a new browser window set to my generic startpage. I don't really care about the state of any of these things. So I like that they're more out of the way.
I like alt-tabbing through windows. I wouldn't want to start alt-tabbing and launching new windows...the distinction between an application with an open window and one without is obvious and useful to me.
In a similar vein, I usually disable XP's offer to "group similar taskbar buttons". For me, each browser window is a distinct activity of mine, so I want each to be a click away. Same for explorer windows, each one represents a different activity.
That's a reasonable take on the Dock, it does combine Start Menu functionality with some Taskbar stuff. But I consider it to be: where I keep my stuff. Stuff I use a lot and stuff I need to get at in a hurry when I need it. It's all right there. Use it as a dock and it'll make more sense than trying to mix metaphors from a different environment.
Like I say elsewhere, I find thinking of "activities I've started in the past and want to come back to" clearly seperated from "activities I could start to do in the future" to be a very helpful distinction, and I like how Windows seperates those.
Question for people who prefer Windows: how do you live without a one-step comand to show the target of a shortcut ? A contextual menu option would suffice, ctrl-r would be better. Maybe it's just my organizational scheme, coming from the Mac, but I think that having to open Properties and click a button makes Windows suck all by itself.
Honestly I don't make new shortcuts *all* that often, and when I do, a combination of the icon and the caption make it crystal clear what to expect from clicking on the shortcut. Only very rarely do I need to say "now where DOES this thing go??" and since it's a rare activity, no need to "use up" a keyboard-abbreviation for it wold be a waste.
Seriously, what's your usage paradigm where you're frequently having to check the target of a shortcut? It might be an interesting behavioral difference...
Have you not been paying attention at all? It's not the same. It's different, and simpler. You talk about all these different things: "Start" menu, task bar, "quick launch." It's all segregated. Only applications which are currently running appear in the "task bar," introducing this new and redundant concept called a "task." I don't know about you, but to me a "task" is the thing I'm trying to accomplish, like writing a letter or posting a photo to the Web. I might use one application to do it, or I might use a few, or I might use none at all and do it entirely on paper. Trying to inaugurate a new piece of jargon for what is nothing more than a running application just confuses people.
See, to me, there's: * Stuff I've Already Started Doing, and might want to get back to, so its holding a context ("return to running application") * Stuff I might want to start doing in the future. no context, clean slate ("launch application")
Conceptually the two things are very different to me. Don't you differentiate between things you've already started doing, and things you need to start doing from scratch? 'Cause the Dock only barely does.
Meanwhile, non-running applications show up in the "Start" menu, alongside lots of stuff that's not an application. Non-running applications also appear in this "quick launch" thing, apparently because the "Start" menu is too complicated.
See, now you're the one being obnoxious. "Quick Launch" isn't because it's too complicated, it's because it's two clicks when some people just want one. I value screen real estate more than that, and like my "start something new" icons hidden anyway (and tend to arrange things so I can keyboard launch things easily...windows key, first letter of activity) so I don't use Quicklaunch.
Win95 leapfrogged ahead of Mac at that time, IMO, by making all running programs more visible, not hidden in a drop down menu. I understand people liking the dock, and it is about as function as the current Windows paradigm, but the latter matches my mental model of "activities started in the past" vs "activities to start in the future"
Slashdot Mirror
1.) One of the important elements of all 6 movies was that droids were so ubiquitous that they were hardly noticed. Droids, to them, are like cell phones to us.
So in Ep4, the barkeep saying like "we don't allow their kind in here!" is kind of like a place demanding you turn off your cell...
Also, did anyone get flashbacks to Mega Man 2 when Darth was riding on the convenient flat head of the droid over the Lava? A bit silly.
Maybe I'm confused, but aren't all those options available under the "File" menu in IE? So you're kvetching that it's under the file menu and not a right click option? Or what?
Close other tabs doesn't help with my point, since I want to see what each tab is before I close it...without an extension I click somewhere on the left, on the tab, to bring it to the front, then I mouse all the way over to the right to hit X, and I have to keep going back and forth.
Re: plain old new window...I still say, it's much easier to type in a URL to a window that has junk on it then it is to get back to where you were in a blank or homepage'd window...therefore, it would make sense to have a configurable "new window clones current window" option.
Re: IE FTP...I use it for binary files all the time, never had a corrupted file. Don't know if it does ASCII mode. I don't think it does sftp, which is a drawback.
Debatable. I'm more than happy with the way Firefox handles passwords.
I'm not, but I have trouble understanding how it works so that I can complain about it properly...which is itself a complaint. For instance, it seems like once upon a time I told not to remember this one http auth, and now it NEVER offers to remember it. Also, sometimes it gets filling out usernames and passwords exactly backwards, on CGI forms...I'd like it to prefill my username and let me type in my password. Instead, it wants to fill in the password after I type my username...given that my username is a lot more public than my password, some hypothetical badguy who got hold of my computer might know or guess my username, and would be good to go.
A valid point. But how often is it necessary to search within a textarea?
You might as well argue "why have taxtareas, don't one line text fields work fine?" So to answer your question, ALL THE DAMN TIME...I edit my website through online forms with textareas, and going back to correct a mistake is a lot harder when I can't ctrl-F find it! Sometimes I have to cut and paste the whole entry into a text editor.
I've heard this is a known bug in certain versions of Firefox, and I think Firefox's search bar is worlds better than IE's dialog (which has absolutely retarded prefilling behaviors), so I'm not too upset, but still.
This is something that I really despise about IE. Why would I want a duplicate of the page I already have open?! Anyway, I always start with a blank document, so no time is wasted waiting to load a page which will just be changed regardless.
I often want a duplicate page to launch child browsing, for instance...I might want to keep a "pristine" copy of the main forum page open, and then have a new one to play with.
Given that my startpage is ALWAYS one click away, and making a new window on the current window might be arbitrarily difficult (sometimes there's state not captured in the URL) I'd say cloning the window is a good canidate for a config option. And not having shift- or ctrl-clicked windows having a history has no user advantages I can see, and many drawbacks I've run into.
Boxes better than question marks? Debatable.
No way...with question marks, I don't know if they were question marks originally, or if Firefox changed 'em. With boxes, I have a pretty good idea that it's a character set I can't view properly. Question Marks as a placeholder for unprintable characters is a bug. (So dabate me. Why are question marks better?)
It seems to me that it resets the cursor blink cycle, at least in 1.0.3 which I'm currently using.
Not in the 1.0.3. *I'm* using. Especially with http auth dialog. It sounds like a small thing but it's really grating.
Firefox also has pretty powerful GUI configuration. It's not very obvious, but you can right-click in a blank area of the menu and select "customize"..
It's pretty good for customizing what buttons appear, but has no facility for arranging the positions of the bars. (This might be a too tough to do in a sane, multi-platform way)
IE drives me crazy by not selecting the address bar on CTRL-L, but instead popping up a dialog. Sometimes I just want to edit the current URL from the keyboard, damnitt!
Heh, I've heard this before...you might be looking for the key pattern "alt-d"--that's why the d in "Address" is underlined...it even gives you a hint, unlike Firefox Ctrl-L
Though alt-d, URL, return isn't any fewer keystrokes than ctrl-o, URL, return.
Right click on the tab and select "close". Or just middle-click it.
It's a lot more steps to right click a menu, locate the "close tab" (in a relatively difficult to hit, last on list position) then to click on a nice red X. And I can't readily middle click on my laptop. I think there is a plugin that fixes this though, and it is a subjective complaint.
[I'm answering this on the assumption that you have legitimate gripes and are not just a MS shill. If this is not the case, please disregard.]
I'm absolutely arguing on "good faith"--I've actually switched to Firefox and have for about a month. Once I grokked tabs (at first I thought "well, the taskbar is my tab row, basically) as a way of semantically grouping certain webtasks I was hooked. Also I appreciate being less of MS's "bitch" and it might ease the way to changing OSes in the future.
I understand that Firefox "errs" on the side of future upgradeability, but I do appreciate that when I sit down at an average, vanilla PC, I have a graphical FTP browser via IE. I dislike having seperate downloads for options, because it raises the cost of sitting down at someone elses PC.
I LOVE "clone this window" and I also really miss how child windows (from shift- or ctrl-click) don't capture the history. In navigating certain webforums, it's a handicap sometimes when I want to go back to the main discussion window from a thread I'm following in a new window but I prematurely closed that main discussion window. I really think it should be a configurable option, and every time I find a window with no "history" I think I'm back in Netscape 4.7 crapland. (And to answer your question, I think ctrl-t should have an option to do what ctrl-n does, i.e. go to my homepage...but this bothers me less than it used to)
I do use the keyboard a lot (which is why I'm probably missing the speciffic alt-d mapping to jump the cursor to the URL bar) but I gotta say...I think the mouse is used for local firebrowsing a LOT more than the keyboard.
Anyway, I have used Firefox, and most of these complaints still stand. I don't think it's just newbyism, and the "open link in new window loses the history" is starting to get on my nerves.
I find it useful enough that it would be good to have it as a configurable option.
Seriously, what's a realistic ratio of how often you want to select from inside the middle of a word to how often you want to copy the whole thing? I'd say it's a about 1:20 for me, so increasing the "target area" for my mouse to hit is a usability win.
I don't always agree with its rules about whitespace, especially when it comes to HTML markup but even with that, I prefer it to Firefox's old school approach.
And it's funny usually I prefer the simplistic but easier to predict ideal (i.e. Firefox select) to the "DWIM" approach (what IE does) but in this case I've gotten use to the DWIM select and miss it in Firefox.
An excerpt from the firefox forums I posted to : http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2510 92&highlight=
# IE has a very usable FTP 2-way client, Firefox has an FTP browser only.
# IE has a better password-remembering system.
# Firefox's Ctrl-F doesn't seem to search input form fields.
# IE's "mouse select jumps to word boundaries" is not perfect but better than Firefox's character based model.
# Ctrl-N in IE brings up a clone of the current window, complete with history. Firefox opens up my startpage...redundant, because I can easily launch it from the start menu.
# Ctrl-T in Firefox opens up a new and utterly blank tab...even more useless than the Ctrl-N behavior!
# IE shows undisplayable characters with box placeholders, Firefox uses question marks.
# Tabbing in Firefox doesn't doesn't reset the cursor blink cycle, or something, so you don't get instant confirmation that you're typing in the correct box.
# IE has better drag and drop editing of the toolbars, including the "File Edit View" bar. (I like compressing that bar, 5 small buttons, and the address bar all on one line.)
# Ctrl-O in firefox is the normal file open dialog...not as useful as IE's URL-or-file-browse feature.
# I wish Firefox had an option to let each tab have its own close button...often I want to quickly close a bunch of tabs based on their title, but instead I have to switch to each one and close it seperately.
Some of those are just matters of opinion, none are that that major, but IE does have some usability pluses.
Or Crimson Skies.
Or Fuzion Frenzy, if you have 3 friends around.
The "hug" line was not an adequate replacement, but I think Adams confesses to nicking that line from soomewhere else, it's kind of an old gag.
Don't know if this is useful, and I think it's only free as in beer, but if a user is raw enough that they dont know about photoshop, "IrfanView" has decent batch resizing and touchup abilities.
An interesting thought in all this...
I'm slowly formalizing a philosophy that the most "control flow" should happen in a single file, preferably readable on a single screen. Difficult tasks should be delegated to appropraite API and/or objects.
We keep talking about "comment your code" but so many modern technologies (J2EE, I'm looking at you) try to do more and more "without writing a single line of code!" So in some ways we're set back. I guess you can "comment your XML file!" but it seems to be that there's often a disconnect.
You might want something with a DVD player...I couldn't load iLife w/ garageband when I wnet that route.
I've been thinking some more about this.
My interesting "work" is online, rented server space, http://kisrael.com and http://loveblender.com , mostly perl scripts and HTML there, some light image work and Java dev on my PC.
The other thing is, I am about the most effecient user of keyboard and mouse that I know, I'm really good at getting to things very quickly, using keyboard accelerators when that makes sense, using the mouse when it doesn't, creating shortcuts in the start menu, alt-tabbing, macros in text editors, all that good stuff. And, along with my philisophical problems with the dock, I haven't wanted to have to relearn so much of that (or return OSX to make it like WinXP...not only is that abhorent, but I'm stuck if I switch to someone else's Mac)
I had an ibook for a brief time and traded it to a friend in exchange for work on my house...the killer app was going to be garageband but I cheaped out and got an older ibook, no DVD, on ebay, and it didn't come bundled with it.
Now I feel left out...sigh...I do like my Averatec chapie PC laptop, builtin 802-11g and DVD player, CD burner. Runs a little warm and is noiser than the Mac, but it was a bit cheaper and gets the job done.
Dang, I really don't get the appeal of OSX...I've got into dumb arguments here on why the dock doesn't "work for me" (odd blend of "shortcuts" and "tasks"...long story.)
But mostly...I dunno, most of my interesting work I do on a server command line. All I need is a decent text editor, some misc tools, and a web browser, everything else is almost inconsequential, and I find Windows UI to be surprisingly well designed, if not very innovative.
Actually, it's more the "PCs AREN'T FOR (ADVANCED) GAMES (BECAUSE ITS TOO HARD TO KEEP A CURRENT SYSTEM)" zealots...I'm one of them. And finding out both my $800 (in 2004) laptop and $800 (in 2002) PC don't play "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City" as well as my (what, $250 in 2000?) PS2.
I kind of like how Gmail's policy of "keep suspected spam 30 days, than discard" makes it pretty easy to gauge your spamrate...from this summer, it was above 14K, but now it's closer to 8.5K. I don't know how much of that comes from zombie nets, or if there's some other factor (since I own a few domains, and receive any email sent to them, sometimes I get waves of bounces when someone hijacks my domain name as a from address) but it does seem like spam ain't as bad as it used to be.
With a screen hangin' out there in the open for anything to scratch when you put it away. The analog stick is great but I really think clamshell is a more solid design going into the future.
I have a GBA, Laptop, a Sony Clie, a digital camera, a cellphone w/ color screen, a LCD monitor at work and at home. I don't recall seeing dead pixels on any of them, especially not right outta the box.
I think it should be a pretty reasonable thing to expect these days.
Yeah, I realized that the system I use to keep track of which is which is weirdly mnemonic;
"e.g." are two letters that surround f which is what "for example" starts with
"i.e." starts with an "i" which starts the second word of "that is" (but "for example" lacks)
Clunky, but it works. I developed and apply these rules subconsiously, really.
Yes, but it's not just the games. The DS has kid-friendly features like a clamshell design (harder to damage), cartridges (disks scratch, we've had gameboy games go through the washing machine ok), the resulting quick cartridge game-start time, and lower prices.
Those aren't just good kid-friendly features, those are all things we want from a nice, portable system.
I might eat my words, but it seems to me that handhelds will always lag consoles, so handhelds should focus on SAFELY portable, quick pick up and play experiences. Nintendo has walloped all comers with battery life and size and formfactor, and maybe a library of games...Sony is in a better position to compete on games, so it'll be interesting.
I've only dabbled with tab browsing, but it's interesting that so many people find it so appealing. This kind of ties into UI preferenes, like OSX Dock vs. Task Bar + Start button, but I don't like it...I think of each browser window as a seperate activity I'm involved in and want to return to, so I like having each take its own one click spot on the taskbar. (though I guess if my only or primary activity at a given time was browsing, it wouldn't be so bad, and the other windows would still be a click away.)
And it's just as amusing to see you resort to the USA-in-Vietnam "declare victory and pull out" strategy rather than having a decent discussion.
I wasn't bragging about having a flatpanel, except to point out that your "get a bigger screen dumbass" metaresponse was uncalled for (which is what really started the name calling)
I find the dock to be an unpleasant mishmash of start/quicklaunch and the taskbar. YMMV.
You totally ignore my central thesis, which is this:
There is a practical difference between applications with open windows (which will generally have context that the user wants to return to) and applications that aren't currently running. (which have no such context). Furthermore, some people will find it useful to have an OS that makes the two sets of things clearly distinct. (Even though I don't like or use quicklaunch, it provides icons that are grouped seperate and visually distinct from the buttons for open windows.)
Apparently, your only retort to this "you don't understand computers. And please don't argue, I already said you don't understand computers". Do you have anything more rational than that?
I've also said that I think the MacOS makes sense for some people...you're the one who argues that anyone who doesnt prefer it to WinXPs system doesn't understand computers-- and I resent that, and that taking a stand counter to yours makes me an "incompetent anti-Mac troll".
And, furthermore, don't complain about my telling you that your mental model is wrong. It's just objectively broken. Deal with it, suck it up and change your way of looking at your computer.
... but it's not because the "Start" menu is too complicated? This makes sense ... how?
Ha, ha, ha. You are a jerk, man, a narrowsighted idiot. I can see the Mac viewpoint...one menubar per app rather than window, the weird malange of "currently running apps" and "yet to be launched apps" of the Dock...it makes a certain type of sense. But your declaration that other viewpoints are broken is just stupid.
That went by so fast, my head is spinning. So what you're saying here is that Microsoft added this "quick launch" feature because two clicks is too many
two or more clicks = "slower" (than one click)
"slower" != "too complicated"
Get it?
Again, my head spins. You claim to "value screen real estate." Okay, I can accept that. "Buy a bigger screen, you dumbass," is the proper response, of course, but we'll skip past that for the moment.
Then you say that Windows 95 was better because it made "all running programs more visible."
Ok, I misspoke.
Physical screen real estate is indeed an issue...for my 12.1" laptop, to my 19" flatpanel. But come to think of it, it's not what the most important thing: it's on-screen clutter.
Icons add to clutter. But some clutter can be worthwhile...shortcuts to launch a new app window aren't worth it. But the "clutter" of a taskbar IS worth it, because those represent activities I'm currently enganged in and am likely to want to return to soon...otherwise I would have closed the app window.
So with my limited time with the dock, I felt as if I'd have to search through the clutter of both running apps and not-yet-running apps to get back to where I was. That doesn't happen when you have a seperation.
It makes me think of the bad old days of Windows 3.1... there, programs minimized to a little icon on the equivalent of the desktop. I guess ditching that in favor of the taskbar lets people then use the desktop as a big file folder, but again, clean seperation between "apps you might want to start from scratch" and "apps you were working with, so maybe they have context you want to get back".
.
No it doesn't. That's a document or perhaps a window. The application is an executable, it doesn't hold any user data, neither in concept, not in practice.
We're getting bogged down in terminoogy here....At the bottom of my windows PC is a series of buttons, each corresponding to a window, each representing something I'm working on. Nestled away under the start button are a bunch of applications I might want to start up new windows of.
Why think about tasks?
Sorry, terminology...I was using the laypersons version of "task", something I'm doing.
Palm uses the same idea, except I think in practice it closes any given app once you exit it, abut then restores state so seamlessly that it's not an issue for the user.
The concept is that when you select an application you shouldn't care whether it's already running or not.
Aargh, I'm so not making myself clear here.
the user absolutely DOES care if the application was running or not because that instance has likely captured some state that the user wants to return to:
I have an "explorer" window open to a certain folder...it's saving the state of what directory Im looking at. I have a Textpad window open, with a document I want to come back to...it has state I care about, the changes I've made to my file. I have a browser window open to gmail...I navigatd to that page. It has state I care about. And finally I have this active browser window.
I care about these activities. I want to be relocate any one of them as quickly and easily as possible, so I sacrifice screen real estate at the bottom of my screen.
Now as you rightly point out, for most apps I don't give a crap if it's "really" running in the background or swapped out to disk...as long as when I click on the relevant part of the task bar, the thing is brought up front and center, just like I left it.
THe start menu is hiding shortcuts to starting new instances/windows/whatever of applications: a new window of textpad w/ a blank document, a new filefolder open to an arbitrary place, a new browser window set to my generic startpage. I don't really care about the state of any of these things. So I like that they're more out of the way.
I like alt-tabbing through windows. I wouldn't want to start alt-tabbing and launching new windows...the distinction between an application with an open window and one without is obvious and useful to me.
In a similar vein, I usually disable XP's offer to "group similar taskbar buttons". For me, each browser window is a distinct activity of mine, so I want each to be a click away. Same for explorer windows, each one represents a different activity.
That's a reasonable take on the Dock, it does combine Start Menu functionality with some Taskbar stuff. But I consider it to be: where I keep my stuff. Stuff I use a lot and stuff I need to get at in a hurry when I need it. It's all right there. Use it as a dock and it'll make more sense than trying to mix metaphors from a different environment.
Like I say elsewhere, I find thinking of "activities I've started in the past and want to come back to" clearly seperated from "activities I could start to do in the future" to be a very helpful distinction, and I like how Windows seperates those.
Question for people who prefer Windows: how do you live without a one-step comand to show the target of a shortcut ? A contextual menu option would suffice, ctrl-r would be better. Maybe it's just my organizational scheme, coming from the Mac, but I think that having to open Properties and click a button makes Windows suck all by itself.
Honestly I don't make new shortcuts *all* that often, and when I do, a combination of the icon and the caption make it crystal clear what to expect from clicking on the shortcut. Only very rarely do I need to say "now where DOES this thing go??" and since it's a rare activity, no need to "use up" a keyboard-abbreviation for it wold be a waste.
Seriously, what's your usage paradigm where you're frequently having to check the target of a shortcut? It might be an interesting behavioral difference...
Have you not been paying attention at all? It's not the same. It's different, and simpler. You talk about all these different things: "Start" menu, task bar, "quick launch." It's all segregated. Only applications which are currently running appear in the "task bar," introducing this new and redundant concept called a "task." I don't know about you, but to me a "task" is the thing I'm trying to accomplish, like writing a letter or posting a photo to the Web. I might use one application to do it, or I might use a few, or I might use none at all and do it entirely on paper. Trying to inaugurate a new piece of jargon for what is nothing more than a running application just confuses people.
See, to me, there's:
* Stuff I've Already Started Doing, and might want to get back to, so its holding a context ("return to running application")
* Stuff I might want to start doing in the future. no context, clean slate ("launch application")
Conceptually the two things are very different to me. Don't you differentiate between things you've already started doing, and things you need to start doing from scratch? 'Cause the Dock only barely does.
Meanwhile, non-running applications show up in the "Start" menu, alongside lots of stuff that's not an application. Non-running applications also appear in this "quick launch" thing, apparently because the "Start" menu is too complicated.
See, now you're the one being obnoxious.
"Quick Launch" isn't because it's too complicated, it's because it's two clicks when some people just want one. I value screen real estate more than that, and like my "start something new" icons hidden anyway (and tend to arrange things so I can keyboard launch things easily...windows key, first letter of activity) so I don't use Quicklaunch.
Win95 leapfrogged ahead of Mac at that time, IMO, by making all running programs more visible, not hidden in a drop down menu. I understand people liking the dock, and it is about as function as the current Windows paradigm, but the latter matches my mental model of "activities started in the past" vs "activities to start in the future"