I've always been struck by how closely Iraq has followed the path described by that all-American sf writer, Robert Heinlein, in so many of his juvenile novels (e.g., Red Planet) -- the invading power conquers at first through the use of overwhelming force, but is drummed out in the end by guerilla resistance. In his novels, the resistors are always noble and never vicious, but apart from that, the similarities are pretty damned close.
I'm not sure your last paragraph is entirely realistic, for a couple of reasons: 1) Impact is all in terrorism. There'll be a lot of impact from simultaneous multiple acts on soft targets such as shopping malls, but much more from hard targets. That's why they're hardened. Al Qaeda could have chosen an easier, less risky route than 9/11 but didn't because it wanted as much impact as possible. 2) Risks of compromise rise dramatically as the scale of the terror plot increases. To have the same impact as a 9/11 through hitting softer targets, a terror group would need to attack many more targets (see 1 above). This is feasible, and of course, some other risks decrease, but it's not clear that they'll fall enough to compensate from the rise in compromise risk associated with a larger scale plot.
You seem to be missing my point with your first sentence in exactly the way that the first poster did. It's not a question of whether it is, in principle, possible to play media and use cell phone functionality on your BlackBerry, but how well those features are implemented. iPhones, as with virtually all things Apple, break only a little bit of new ground in terms of "things no-one has ever tried to do before" but break significant new ground in terms of "making this idea that's sort of been around for a while really straightforward and elegant to use".
Just as an example, I mentioned in merging calls on the iPhone in my OP. I've had a blackberry for a couple of years and I don't know if or how to merge two calls. There's a "new call" option that comes up when you press the clickwheel while you're on an existing call, but I don't know whether using it drops or merges the current call, and I'm not about to piss someone off while I find out. And the BlackBerry's interface is better than many other smartphones...
1) The two segments are business and consumer, not business and casual users. Plenty of consumers have a $350 iPod and a phone worth (at least) $150. Quite a lot have a BlackBerry as well. It seems reasonable to assume some will prefer to have one device to replace the first two, if not the third as well. 2) Your view of what's useful and what's a gimmick for a phone is bizarre. Most mobiles are pretty shit at their core job of making and receiving calls -- it's a major PITA trying to merge two calls for example -- getting this kind of feature really really right is what counts. Visual voicemail, to take another example, is a step-change improvement in vmx management. Plenty of business users will be very keen to get their hands on those features, although whether they'll be able to or not will generally depend on factors beyond their control.
It's hardly just the genocides perpetrated by the British and their allies that are not taught in schools. Almost every genocide is not taught about, with the exception of the Holocaust, including those of Britain's enemies in the past, such as the Soviet and Maoist mass killings last century.
While I agree that the iPhone is indeed encumbered, if you're a cell-phone enthusiast, I'm not sure you're really the target market here. You look at the iPhone and say "Apple doesn't understand the cell phone market at all. The price is way too high for the feature set". The target market looks at the iPhone and says, "at last, a phone that allows you to merge calls, find a number, use voicemail etc etc quickly and intuitively! How come I could never do this stuff on my Nokia?" The target market is *not* geek, it's rich people who consider themselves savvy and cool.
Given that one of the main points the article made was that he used a lot of the school's admin's time trying unsuccessfully to block access to MySpace from school computers, your comment raises doubts as to your competence to read and understand simple English.
Excellent. So quick to condemn a five year old. There are dozens of possible circumstances that could have contributed to the child acting the way they did: death, divorce, illness, criminality etc. etc. Blaming the evil child and feckless parents in a case where you know nothing of the background is the act of a truly spectacularly ideological prick. Tell you what though, you certainly seem to embody the truth of your theory that your upbringing made you what you are today.
It's not stupid. You make my point -- car after-market compatibility is useful, but hardly essential to a new model's success. Most people are very happy just to take the car as is.
The market for the iPhone is not likely to be professionals, as the iPhone isn't (currently) designed to be enterprise-ready. It's consumers who want a better phone. And better means, doing core jobs really really well -- calling, emailing, playing music, PDA stuff. (Incidentally, I think that that applies to most professionals too). I can just about read a spreadsheet on my blackberry, but no-one at my firm bothers to do this. We do look at slides, mind you, and I could imaging that getting the iPhone enterprise-ready would include Apple or an approved third party prepping an office-doc viewer. For damn sure, a presentation is going to look a lot better as a slideshow on that big screen than on my BB.
As I said in my original post, I'll bet few people bother installing third-party apps, and I'll bet that when they do, it's often to install functionality that the iPhone already has. Are you challenging my contentions?
For heaven's sake, it's about the *quality of the implementation*! Apple is betting that consumers want a phone that does email, web-browsing, music-playing, mapping etc really well. And current phones don't. They don't even do calling very well -- no phone has got a conferencing solution as easy to use as the iPhone's.
Your statement about "throughout history" is bizarre in the context of a discussion about an iPod successor. iPods are clearly less modifiable and flexible than other MP3 players and that hasn't mattered to date.
The way you describe wanting to use your smartphone is completely different from what I see other people do. I work at a large firm of professionals, all of whom have blackberries (which I presume you would class as a smartphone; certainly, it's a competitor to the iPhone). There are probably only two or three who have ever bothered installing a third party app. What people really want, judging by their complaints, is for the core functionality -- calling, PDA stuff, emailing and web-browsing, to work much better than it does.
Your statement about the iPhone doing "infinitely less" b/c it won't let you install any software you like is just dumb. Of course, in principle, the iPhone is limited in this respect compared with other smartphones, but the questions are, a) just how big is the after-market for 3rd party smartphone software? Does a significant share of the market use this feature at present? and b) of those who do install 3rd party software, how many are doing so simply to add features that the iPhone already has? I'll bet the answers to those questions are a) no, only a fairly small share (?10 to 20%) do this, and b) at least 50% are not adding any functionality that the iPhone doesn't already have.
You are arguing, in effect, that a product's success depends on the range of features that could in principle be installed, as opposed to the range of useful features that actually are installed. Why don't you try that approach with a car which can have a toaster and microwave installed but whose key may or may not lock the door, and see how far you get.
Oh, come on. I have a Canon Ixus 55. Nice little camera. I plugged it into the laptop I use for work -- a compaq tc4400. Nothing happened. It took a lot of futzing around to get pictures off it. I tried the same on my MacBook at home. iPhoto opened up automatically, showed me a picture of my camera, named it correctly as a Canon Ixus 55 and asked if I wanted to import my pictures. The two user experiences were not even remotely similar in terms of ease of use. The point is not what's *technically feasible*, it's about what's *readily doable* without any fuss. There's a world of difference.
On the zoom, I've already told you that you don't allow the slides to zoom up in size till you're able to read the text and that that is the critical functionality that I (and thousands of others) are looking for. I note that you also still haven't said how I'm supposed to know what the "100%" size refers to.
On copying and pasting, I'm sorry but your answer is just silly. If the clipboard is clever enough to recognise it's copying a jpg and automatically converts the file to a bloated bmp, why not offer the option to the user instead? With a nice clear dialog box saying "would you like to copy this as a jpg (smaller file size; picture quality will deterioriate if you repeatedly copy); or as a bmp (larger file size; picture quality will not deteriorate"), or something similar? And then support keyboard shortcuts for each option for the power users. I just don't believe you that this is an inherently difficult problem to solve. Certainly the current behaviour, where file sizes unexpectedly bloat and the average user will have no idea why, is completely bizarre and stupid.
On the swap objects command, I didn't go into all the details, but it's set up as a tool bar, with buttons. You can swap two objects horizontally or vertically, using two different buttons. They stay within the same bounding box, so as I said in the last post, the top edge of the top object and the bottom edge of the bottom object are the reference points for vertical swaps (and analogously for horizontal swaps). If you swap horizontally, they don't move vertically, and vice-versa. They will therefore only overlap if they did so in the first place. It's utterly simple and your questions about which one goes on top and resizing just don't matter, because there's never a situation in which you'd do this. If you're swapping A and B, and object C is already at B's position, then which of B and C will be on top is exactly the same as would be the case if you had manually moved B to its new position. I'll lay money on the fact that this behaviour is at least as predictable as standard powerpoint commands, and a damned sight *more* predictable to your average user than the fact that pasting a picture into their presentation is going to bloat the file size dramatically. I just don't believe that people's needs for swapping two frickin' objects are anywhere near as varied and unpredictable as you're holding them out to be. (And your in-principle objection of course applies to every single command -- there's nothing that makes it inherently insoluble in the case of swapping objects and not in the case of pasting pictures)
As to why I neither sell this tool, nor have persuaded my colleague to do so. It's fine, but it's hardly rocket science (that's why I'd like Microsoft to incorporate it and can't see why you're making such a fuss about it). We're both pretty well-paid, he more than me, and aren't really interested in selling it, even if it would make more money, as we'd certainly have to give up our current jobs to do so. And our current jobs are more interesting. BTW, I didn't say "any ten year old can figure out how to do this", I said that the behaviour of the function should be the same as what you'd expect if you asked a ten-year old kid to swap two physical objects. That's entirely different. You're kind of proving my point about Microsoft's limited ability to listen to its customers, hear what they're actually saying, and meet their usability needs.
Finally, on usability, when you say "Microsoft and Apple lead the pack", are you claiming you're as good as Apple?! Are you willing to concede they might just be a touch better on usability? And are you actually claiming you're any good in absolute terms, not relative to the pack? Because if you are, there's a whole bunch of users I've worked with over the years who'd probably like to invite you to step outside to discuss their opinion of that claim.
1) I don't want the whole of ppt to work like iPhotos, but there is a pretty much exactly analogous function that I would want to see, which is the one I described -- improving the slide sorter to allow seamless zooming up and down of slide size to enable rapid reordering of slide packs. How about giving me a substantive answer as to why what I want to do, which is 60% done by the current functionality already, would be either a bad or impossible thing for you to provide?
2) I *do* want to paste pictures, I just don't want them to take up vast amounts of memory -- all I want to be able to do is click on a picture, hit ctrl-c and hit ctrl-v to paste into ppt without it becoming huge. The difference between pasting and inserting is non-obvious to me and I don't see why you say what I want to do is to insert and not paste. It's what I *have* to do, which is something else entirely.
3)You haven't shown why the solution to the specific problem you saw with the "swap objects" comand wasn't an answer. Instead, you're saying I don't care about other people's problems. But a) you don't appear to care about the problem I have in not being able to swap objects round easily, and b) I made the problem you cited go away!
4) It's not mine to sell. Otherwise, believe me, I would.
Finally, I know you know how to write software, and I know you're not stupid, but surely you're not going to hold out that Microsoft has a track record even close to approaching the best in the business for usability, are you?
"There's a "zoom" slider in the lower right that lets you set the size of the slides in that view. At the default size on my 19" LCD monitor running at 1280 * 1024, I can read titles easily but not regular text. At 100%, I can read regular text easily. You should be pretty happy with that." Happy with that?! You've got to be kidding, right? Why wouldn't this work like iPhoto and let you seamlessly zoom the slide size up and down, including way past the current 100% limit. And btw, 100% of what?? It's certainly not 100% of the actual size of the slide when printed, which would appear to be the most obvious reference point.
"This is the clipboard's problem, not PowerPoint's. It's an issue with the historical operations of a critical system component buried in the depths of system code that absolutely positively CANNOT lose backward compatibility."
Then make clipboard copy work as insert picture behind the scenes or give a warning and provide insert picture as an alternate on the dialogue box or something. Not that difficult.
"These are great ideas. However, they are also very hard problems. Let's take the "swap positions" idea. When the objects in question are the same size and have the same place in the Z-order, it's a no-brainer, but that's the only time it consistently works as expected. Imagine that we have a 100 by 100 image at position (100, 100), and a 200 by 200 image at position (200, 200). When we swap them, the larger image covers the other image entirely. Should the small image be moved forward in the Z-order? Should the two images have been resized when we swapped them? Since I had the bottom right of one image touching the top left of the other, should the application detect this and alter its behavior to retain this relationship? And what the hell happens if I have three objects selected?"
You're seeing problems where none exist. A colleague of mine wrote an add-in that does the swap objects perfectly -- by which I mean the behaviour is exactly as you would expect. The objects are placed so that the top-most and bottom-most positions of the pair are maintained. There's therefore no overlap issue, unless there was one to start with. And the swap objects command only works for two objects, because it does a single job well. We also have split/join text boxes and align left-to-right and top-to-bottom functions that people have written in-house, among many other missing features. It sounds like you guys are thinking too hard and thinking the wrong way. You should be asking yourself, "what would I normally expect this feature to do? Is that what it's doing? If I asked a ten-year old kid to do this with physical objects, what would they do?
A pile of bollocks. This might be true for a certain limited subset of commands you might wish to run on your computer, including some Office-style commands, but I'd love to know how you'd plan to create a slide with objects as well as text in a CLI! Equally, could you please explain how a CLI would be a sensible method for applying red-eye reduction to a photograph, for example? What CLI command works better than using a pointing device to tell the PC where the centre of the eye is?
Mate, if you're pissing about spending looking at two dozen styles for slides instead of building the content, you have no need to worry about ppt slowing you down.
The example you've given is so far down the list of day-to-day annoyances for regular ppt users, it's not funny.
How about telling us if the basics are fixed? You know, things like ppt's inability to provide any sort of view that enables easy shuffling of slides (because the "slide sorter" view won't let you view a slide at a large enough scale to see what's on it). Things like the fact that a photo that's *pasted* into a presentation takes up a vast amount of memory and slows your computer to a crawl, but if it's *inserted*, there's no problem. The fact that there's no command that enables you to autoplace two objects adjacent to each other. Or to swap their position on the slide. Or to split or join text boxes.
I think we need to distinguish between the sort of interpersonal skills that almost everyone learns in babyhood and childhood through unconscious processes, and those interpersonal skills that one actively, consciously, learns in later life.
The examples I gave all fall in the latter category, not the former.
But your counter-example also hits the nail on the head. When I came into the room with my colleagues for my meeting, we wanted to get on with developing the risk management plan for the organisation. Pissing about with the lightswitches is a waste of time. Especially when in one room they're where you'd expect them to be, right by the door, while in the very next room they're "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard" -- and there's no way of telling them apart from the aircon switches, and if you flip the wrong one, you'll end up freezing your tits off for twenty minutes because the aircon can't be reset any more frequently than that. *That's* what dealing with stupid IT systems is like.
You're absolutely right that electronics is highly complex. But you're absolutely wrong in contending that what you call "social skills" is easy to learn or simple.
I think what's happening is that you're not recognising that interpersonal skills are easy to describe but much more difficult to do.
It's revealing that you use making small talk as an example of interpersonal skills. It's a fairly trivial use of interpersonal skills. Far higher up the list, in a work environment, would come such skills as listening actively, giving and receiving feedback, asserting, managing conflict, coaching, mentoring, inspiring others, running meetings, asking insightful questions, collaborating, synthesising, facilitating, developing trust-based relationships, influencing.... and many many more. Becoming an expert practitioner in these skills, being able to use them effectively while being authentic ("true to yourself"), centered and calm, despite the myriad of difficult situations that human life throws at you, is no easier to learn than becoming an expert programmer.
All his points have *not* been addressed. You haven't discussed the possibility of an accidental shooting of a passenger anywhere ("the drunk idiot in the first class cabin who was toying with the weapon accidentally shot his neighbor"). You think you have, because you've talked about shooting a drunken passenger in a fit of air rage who pulls his gun out, but that's not the same thing at all. In the latter case, you could reasonably assume that the aggressor would stand up, making them a clear and relatively easy target. In the former, it wouldn't even be particularly clear who had fired the shot except to a couple of immediate neighbours, and it's quite likely that several people will immediately stand up (and start screaming) once the shot is fired. How do you know whom to shoot? And why would a further shooting be a helpful response? Wouldn't your preferred solution to all such situations ("shoot the shooter") just have lead to some rather unfortunate positive feedback? And even assuming that the response to hearing a gunshot isn't simply that everyone pulls out their own weapons and starts firing away at everyone else, what if the vigilante missed the shooter and hit your child? Are you just going to sit there and take it? How would that square with your philosophy?
You know, when Robert Heinlein played with the idea of a fully armed citizenry, he had the very good sense to incorporate a duelling code, loosely based on historical models. The suggestion of "let's take this fight outside, sir" was a necessary practical part of armed societies. It's tricky to replicate on a plane.
So the big question is, who's right, Oxfam or Starbucks. Surprisingly enough, Oxfam hasn't simply pulled this all out of their collective ass: they've thought through the relevant legal and economic arguments, including directly addressing issues such as the relative value of trademarks and geographic certifications. See
this for details.
When you say the least value added step in the process, you're kind of right and kind of wrong. After all, without the coffee, there's nothing to ship, QC, store, or package, and there's a lot less to sell in the Starbucks outlets. But yes, there's a lot of supplier competition.
The standard economic argument happens to be a bunch of shite. People will pay extra for a product for all sorts of reasons, and these may have to do with intangible factors (including a nice warm feeling inside just as much as rational, objective, factors (which incidentally may be nothing of the sort). Two examples: lots of people will pay extra for a black MacBook rather than have a white one; and a Vuitton suitcase is priced the way it is because of the brand, not because it is so much better than a cheap white-label alternative at carrying your luggage. Why am I stupidly distorting the market by choosing a pricier coffee for an intangible reason, and not in the case of computers or bags?
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I've always been struck by how closely Iraq has followed the path described by that all-American sf writer, Robert Heinlein, in so many of his juvenile novels (e.g., Red Planet) -- the invading power conquers at first through the use of overwhelming force, but is drummed out in the end by guerilla resistance. In his novels, the resistors are always noble and never vicious, but apart from that, the similarities are pretty damned close.
I'm not sure your last paragraph is entirely realistic, for a couple of reasons:
1) Impact is all in terrorism. There'll be a lot of impact from simultaneous multiple acts on soft targets such as shopping malls, but much more from hard targets. That's why they're hardened. Al Qaeda could have chosen an easier, less risky route than 9/11 but didn't because it wanted as much impact as possible.
2) Risks of compromise rise dramatically as the scale of the terror plot increases. To have the same impact as a 9/11 through hitting softer targets, a terror group would need to attack many more targets (see 1 above). This is feasible, and of course, some other risks decrease, but it's not clear that they'll fall enough to compensate from the rise in compromise risk associated with a larger scale plot.
You seem to be missing my point with your first sentence in exactly the way that the first poster did. It's not a question of whether it is, in principle, possible to play media and use cell phone functionality on your BlackBerry, but how well those features are implemented. iPhones, as with virtually all things Apple, break only a little bit of new ground in terms of "things no-one has ever tried to do before" but break significant new ground in terms of "making this idea that's sort of been around for a while really straightforward and elegant to use".
Just as an example, I mentioned in merging calls on the iPhone in my OP. I've had a blackberry for a couple of years and I don't know if or how to merge two calls. There's a "new call" option that comes up when you press the clickwheel while you're on an existing call, but I don't know whether using it drops or merges the current call, and I'm not about to piss someone off while I find out. And the BlackBerry's interface is better than many other smartphones...
1) The two segments are business and consumer, not business and casual users. Plenty of consumers have a $350 iPod and a phone worth (at least) $150. Quite a lot have a BlackBerry as well. It seems reasonable to assume some will prefer to have one device to replace the first two, if not the third as well.
2) Your view of what's useful and what's a gimmick for a phone is bizarre. Most mobiles are pretty shit at their core job of making and receiving calls -- it's a major PITA trying to merge two calls for example -- getting this kind of feature really really right is what counts. Visual voicemail, to take another example, is a step-change improvement in vmx management. Plenty of business users will be very keen to get their hands on those features, although whether they'll be able to or not will generally depend on factors beyond their control.
It's hardly just the genocides perpetrated by the British and their allies that are not taught in schools. Almost every genocide is not taught about, with the exception of the Holocaust, including those of Britain's enemies in the past, such as the Soviet and Maoist mass killings last century.
While I agree that the iPhone is indeed encumbered, if you're a cell-phone enthusiast, I'm not sure you're really the target market here. You look at the iPhone and say "Apple doesn't understand the cell phone market at all. The price is way too high for the feature set". The target market looks at the iPhone and says, "at last, a phone that allows you to merge calls, find a number, use voicemail etc etc quickly and intuitively! How come I could never do this stuff on my Nokia?" The target market is *not* geek, it's rich people who consider themselves savvy and cool.
Given that one of the main points the article made was that he used a lot of the school's admin's time trying unsuccessfully to block access to MySpace from school computers, your comment raises doubts as to your competence to read and understand simple English.
Excellent. So quick to condemn a five year old. There are dozens of possible circumstances that could have contributed to the child acting the way they did: death, divorce, illness, criminality etc. etc. Blaming the evil child and feckless parents in a case where you know nothing of the background is the act of a truly spectacularly ideological prick. Tell you what though, you certainly seem to embody the truth of your theory that your upbringing made you what you are today.
It's not stupid. You make my point -- car after-market compatibility is useful, but hardly essential to a new model's success. Most people are very happy just to take the car as is.
The market for the iPhone is not likely to be professionals, as the iPhone isn't (currently) designed to be enterprise-ready. It's consumers who want a better phone. And better means, doing core jobs really really well -- calling, emailing, playing music, PDA stuff. (Incidentally, I think that that applies to most professionals too). I can just about read a spreadsheet on my blackberry, but no-one at my firm bothers to do this. We do look at slides, mind you, and I could imaging that getting the iPhone enterprise-ready would include Apple or an approved third party prepping an office-doc viewer. For damn sure, a presentation is going to look a lot better as a slideshow on that big screen than on my BB.
As I said in my original post, I'll bet few people bother installing third-party apps, and I'll bet that when they do, it's often to install functionality that the iPhone already has. Are you challenging my contentions?
For heaven's sake, it's about the *quality of the implementation*! Apple is betting that consumers want a phone that does email, web-browsing, music-playing, mapping etc really well. And current phones don't. They don't even do calling very well -- no phone has got a conferencing solution as easy to use as the iPhone's.
Your statement about "throughout history" is bizarre in the context of a discussion about an iPod successor. iPods are clearly less modifiable and flexible than other MP3 players and that hasn't mattered to date.
The way you describe wanting to use your smartphone is completely different from what I see other people do. I work at a large firm of professionals, all of whom have blackberries (which I presume you would class as a smartphone; certainly, it's a competitor to the iPhone). There are probably only two or three who have ever bothered installing a third party app. What people really want, judging by their complaints, is for the core functionality -- calling, PDA stuff, emailing and web-browsing, to work much better than it does.
Your statement about the iPhone doing "infinitely less" b/c it won't let you install any software you like is just dumb. Of course, in principle, the iPhone is limited in this respect compared with other smartphones, but the questions are, a) just how big is the after-market for 3rd party smartphone software? Does a significant share of the market use this feature at present? and b) of those who do install 3rd party software, how many are doing so simply to add features that the iPhone already has? I'll bet the answers to those questions are a) no, only a fairly small share (?10 to 20%) do this, and b) at least 50% are not adding any functionality that the iPhone doesn't already have.
You are arguing, in effect, that a product's success depends on the range of features that could in principle be installed, as opposed to the range of useful features that actually are installed. Why don't you try that approach with a car which can have a toaster and microwave installed but whose key may or may not lock the door, and see how far you get.
Oh, come on. I have a Canon Ixus 55. Nice little camera. I plugged it into the laptop I use for work -- a compaq tc4400. Nothing happened. It took a lot of futzing around to get pictures off it. I tried the same on my MacBook at home. iPhoto opened up automatically, showed me a picture of my camera, named it correctly as a Canon Ixus 55 and asked if I wanted to import my pictures. The two user experiences were not even remotely similar in terms of ease of use. The point is not what's *technically feasible*, it's about what's *readily doable* without any fuss. There's a world of difference.
Nope, you're still not convincing me.
On the zoom, I've already told you that you don't allow the slides to zoom up in size till you're able to read the text and that that is the critical functionality that I (and thousands of others) are looking for. I note that you also still haven't said how I'm supposed to know what the "100%" size refers to.
On copying and pasting, I'm sorry but your answer is just silly. If the clipboard is clever enough to recognise it's copying a jpg and automatically converts the file to a bloated bmp, why not offer the option to the user instead? With a nice clear dialog box saying "would you like to copy this as a jpg (smaller file size; picture quality will deterioriate if you repeatedly copy); or as a bmp (larger file size; picture quality will not deteriorate"), or something similar? And then support keyboard shortcuts for each option for the power users. I just don't believe you that this is an inherently difficult problem to solve. Certainly the current behaviour, where file sizes unexpectedly bloat and the average user will have no idea why, is completely bizarre and stupid.
On the swap objects command, I didn't go into all the details, but it's set up as a tool bar, with buttons. You can swap two objects horizontally or vertically, using two different buttons. They stay within the same bounding box, so as I said in the last post, the top edge of the top object and the bottom edge of the bottom object are the reference points for vertical swaps (and analogously for horizontal swaps). If you swap horizontally, they don't move vertically, and vice-versa. They will therefore only overlap if they did so in the first place. It's utterly simple and your questions about which one goes on top and resizing just don't matter, because there's never a situation in which you'd do this. If you're swapping A and B, and object C is already at B's position, then which of B and C will be on top is exactly the same as would be the case if you had manually moved B to its new position. I'll lay money on the fact that this behaviour is at least as predictable as standard powerpoint commands, and a damned sight *more* predictable to your average user than the fact that pasting a picture into their presentation is going to bloat the file size dramatically. I just don't believe that people's needs for swapping two frickin' objects are anywhere near as varied and unpredictable as you're holding them out to be. (And your in-principle objection of course applies to every single command -- there's nothing that makes it inherently insoluble in the case of swapping objects and not in the case of pasting pictures)
As to why I neither sell this tool, nor have persuaded my colleague to do so. It's fine, but it's hardly rocket science (that's why I'd like Microsoft to incorporate it and can't see why you're making such a fuss about it). We're both pretty well-paid, he more than me, and aren't really interested in selling it, even if it would make more money, as we'd certainly have to give up our current jobs to do so. And our current jobs are more interesting. BTW, I didn't say "any ten year old can figure out how to do this", I said that the behaviour of the function should be the same as what you'd expect if you asked a ten-year old kid to swap two physical objects. That's entirely different. You're kind of proving my point about Microsoft's limited ability to listen to its customers, hear what they're actually saying, and meet their usability needs.
Finally, on usability, when you say "Microsoft and Apple lead the pack", are you claiming you're as good as Apple?! Are you willing to concede they might just be a touch better on usability? And are you actually claiming you're any good in absolute terms, not relative to the pack? Because if you are, there's a whole bunch of users I've worked with over the years who'd probably like to invite you to step outside to discuss their opinion of that claim.
Your replies are non-replies.
1) I don't want the whole of ppt to work like iPhotos, but there is a pretty much exactly analogous function that I would want to see, which is the one I described -- improving the slide sorter to allow seamless zooming up and down of slide size to enable rapid reordering of slide packs. How about giving me a substantive answer as to why what I want to do, which is 60% done by the current functionality already, would be either a bad or impossible thing for you to provide?
2) I *do* want to paste pictures, I just don't want them to take up vast amounts of memory -- all I want to be able to do is click on a picture, hit ctrl-c and hit ctrl-v to paste into ppt without it becoming huge. The difference between pasting and inserting is non-obvious to me and I don't see why you say what I want to do is to insert and not paste. It's what I *have* to do, which is something else entirely.
3)You haven't shown why the solution to the specific problem you saw with the "swap objects" comand wasn't an answer. Instead, you're saying I don't care about other people's problems. But a) you don't appear to care about the problem I have in not being able to swap objects round easily, and b) I made the problem you cited go away!
4) It's not mine to sell. Otherwise, believe me, I would.
Finally, I know you know how to write software, and I know you're not stupid, but surely you're not going to hold out that Microsoft has a track record even close to approaching the best in the business for usability, are you?
"There's a "zoom" slider in the lower right that lets you set the size of the slides in that view. At the default size on my 19" LCD monitor running at 1280 * 1024, I can read titles easily but not regular text. At 100%, I can read regular text easily. You should be pretty happy with that."
Happy with that?! You've got to be kidding, right? Why wouldn't this work like iPhoto and let you seamlessly zoom the slide size up and down, including way past the current 100% limit. And btw, 100% of what?? It's certainly not 100% of the actual size of the slide when printed, which would appear to be the most obvious reference point.
"This is the clipboard's problem, not PowerPoint's. It's an issue with the historical operations of a critical system component buried in the depths of system code that absolutely positively CANNOT lose backward compatibility."
Then make clipboard copy work as insert picture behind the scenes or give a warning and provide insert picture as an alternate on the dialogue box or something. Not that difficult.
"These are great ideas. However, they are also very hard problems. Let's take the "swap positions" idea. When the objects in question are the same size and have the same place in the Z-order, it's a no-brainer, but that's the only time it consistently works as expected. Imagine that we have a 100 by 100 image at position (100, 100), and a 200 by 200 image at position (200, 200). When we swap them, the larger image covers the other image entirely. Should the small image be moved forward in the Z-order? Should the two images have been resized when we swapped them? Since I had the bottom right of one image touching the top left of the other, should the application detect this and alter its behavior to retain this relationship? And what the hell happens if I have three objects selected?"
You're seeing problems where none exist. A colleague of mine wrote an add-in that does the swap objects perfectly -- by which I mean the behaviour is exactly as you would expect. The objects are placed so that the top-most and bottom-most positions of the pair are maintained. There's therefore no overlap issue, unless there was one to start with. And the swap objects command only works for two objects, because it does a single job well. We also have split/join text boxes and align left-to-right and top-to-bottom functions that people have written in-house, among many other missing features. It sounds like you guys are thinking too hard and thinking the wrong way. You should be asking yourself, "what would I normally expect this feature to do? Is that what it's doing? If I asked a ten-year old kid to do this with physical objects, what would they do?
GUIs are not useful to well trained users?
A pile of bollocks. This might be true for a certain limited subset of commands you might wish to run on your computer, including some Office-style commands, but I'd love to know how you'd plan to create a slide with objects as well as text in a CLI! Equally, could you please explain how a CLI would be a sensible method for applying red-eye reduction to a photograph, for example? What CLI command works better than using a pointing device to tell the PC where the centre of the eye is?
Mate, if you're pissing about spending looking at two dozen styles for slides instead of building the content, you have no need to worry about ppt slowing you down.
The example you've given is so far down the list of day-to-day annoyances for regular ppt users, it's not funny.
How about telling us if the basics are fixed? You know, things like ppt's inability to provide any sort of view that enables easy shuffling of slides (because the "slide sorter" view won't let you view a slide at a large enough scale to see what's on it). Things like the fact that a photo that's *pasted* into a presentation takes up a vast amount of memory and slows your computer to a crawl, but if it's *inserted*, there's no problem. The fact that there's no command that enables you to autoplace two objects adjacent to each other. Or to swap their position on the slide. Or to split or join text boxes.
That kind of stupidity gets on everyone's tits.
I think we need to distinguish between the sort of interpersonal skills that almost everyone learns in babyhood and childhood through unconscious processes, and those interpersonal skills that one actively, consciously, learns in later life.
The examples I gave all fall in the latter category, not the former.
But your counter-example also hits the nail on the head. When I came into the room with my colleagues for my meeting, we wanted to get on with developing the risk management plan for the organisation. Pissing about with the lightswitches is a waste of time. Especially when in one room they're where you'd expect them to be, right by the door, while in the very next room they're "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard" -- and there's no way of telling them apart from the aircon switches, and if you flip the wrong one, you'll end up freezing your tits off for twenty minutes because the aircon can't be reset any more frequently than that. *That's* what dealing with stupid IT systems is like.
You're absolutely right that electronics is highly complex. But you're absolutely wrong in contending that what you call "social skills" is easy to learn or simple.
I think what's happening is that you're not recognising that interpersonal skills are easy to describe but much more difficult to do.
It's revealing that you use making small talk as an example of interpersonal skills. It's a fairly trivial use of interpersonal skills. Far higher up the list, in a work environment, would come such skills as listening actively, giving and receiving feedback, asserting, managing conflict, coaching, mentoring, inspiring others, running meetings, asking insightful questions, collaborating, synthesising, facilitating, developing trust-based relationships, influencing.... and many many more. Becoming an expert practitioner in these skills, being able to use them effectively while being authentic ("true to yourself"), centered and calm, despite the myriad of difficult situations that human life throws at you, is no easier to learn than becoming an expert programmer.
All his points have *not* been addressed. You haven't discussed the possibility of an accidental shooting of a passenger anywhere ("the drunk idiot in the first class cabin who was toying with the weapon accidentally shot his neighbor"). You think you have, because you've talked about shooting a drunken passenger in a fit of air rage who pulls his gun out, but that's not the same thing at all. In the latter case, you could reasonably assume that the aggressor would stand up, making them a clear and relatively easy target. In the former, it wouldn't even be particularly clear who had fired the shot except to a couple of immediate neighbours, and it's quite likely that several people will immediately stand up (and start screaming) once the shot is fired. How do you know whom to shoot? And why would a further shooting be a helpful response? Wouldn't your preferred solution to all such situations ("shoot the shooter") just have lead to some rather unfortunate positive feedback? And even assuming that the response to hearing a gunshot isn't simply that everyone pulls out their own weapons and starts firing away at everyone else, what if the vigilante missed the shooter and hit your child? Are you just going to sit there and take it? How would that square with your philosophy?
You know, when Robert Heinlein played with the idea of a fully armed citizenry, he had the very good sense to incorporate a duelling code, loosely based on historical models. The suggestion of "let's take this fight outside, sir" was a necessary practical part of armed societies. It's tricky to replicate on a plane.
So the big question is, who's right, Oxfam or Starbucks. Surprisingly enough, Oxfam hasn't simply pulled this all out of their collective ass: they've thought through the relevant legal and economic arguments, including directly addressing issues such as the relative value of trademarks and geographic certifications. See this for details.
When you say the least value added step in the process, you're kind of right and kind of wrong. After all, without the coffee, there's nothing to ship, QC, store, or package, and there's a lot less to sell in the Starbucks outlets. But yes, there's a lot of supplier competition.
The standard economic argument happens to be a bunch of shite. People will pay extra for a product for all sorts of reasons, and these may have to do with intangible factors (including a nice warm feeling inside just as much as rational, objective, factors (which incidentally may be nothing of the sort). Two examples: lots of people will pay extra for a black MacBook rather than have a white one; and a Vuitton suitcase is priced the way it is because of the brand, not because it is so much better than a cheap white-label alternative at carrying your luggage. Why am I stupidly distorting the market by choosing a pricier coffee for an intangible reason, and not in the case of computers or bags?