For my thoughts on the one button laptops, I prefer it. Some folks like one model of car, some like others. I wouldn't say it's because one car manufacturer has a hatred for features in the other. It's just a matter of options/choice/preference. Choice is good? amiright?
When I can buy OS X retail and install it on a Thinkpad I'll be happy to agree with you.
Since that's not going to happen, where's the choice?
I don't rest my finger on the pad, because any subsequent motion of my hand causes small movements, and because I have to make muliple strokes on the pad to move the mouse any distance so I am in the habit of stroking the pointer around and only touching the pad when I'm actually moving the pointer.
Even if you don't have a finger on the pad, plonking two down at the same time shouldn't result in any pointer movement
I find that plonking down *one* at a time can cause movement.
The point is, you can easily use a Microsoft wheel mouse on a Mac.
Indeed, there isn't even a clue-anticlue explosion when it's plugged in. Though you couldn't under OS 9, and Apple still doesn't ship an actual two-button mouse, and application support for the right button is still not universal (which I elaborate on in another comment in this thread).
your Windows PC
You take that back!
have you activated multiple finger scrolling and clicking?
Yes, I have already explained this in far more detail in another followup.
Agreed. Pluto is a planet, so is Eris. Naming the latter after the goddess of chaos and discord was a splendid idea (as well as a lovely if possibly unintended homage to the late Robert Anton Wilson, though not as good as naming it Mickey would have been).
Is it this one? "While trying to load some of those files, it does not provide the full path of the DLL file to the function which loads the DLL file to the memory, and therefore Windows will search for this file in the user's machine using the directories provided in the PATH environment variable, and will load the first match it will found."
If so, why is %PROFILE%\Desktop in %PATH%?
Oh, no, it's this one: "While this is true, the behavior of the "DLL Search Order" (when it's disabled) is to look for the DLL in the current directory, right after the Internet Explorer's directory. As most users execute Internet Explorer from the Desktop, the current directory will be of course the user's Desktop (see screenshot below)."
Why is Internet Explorer's current directory the desktop?
It's not because Internet Explorer is in %PROFILE%\Desktop, because it isn't.
It's not because Internet Explorer is a shortcut on the Desktop, because that would run it with the current directory in the destination directory of the shortcut.
Perhaps it's because the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop is a special case, because of the browser-desktop integration?
As the same blog explains, you could have Safari download an executable to the desktop that pretends to be e.g. Internet Explorer. If they normally launch IE from the desktop, they could click the fake IE next time, running arbitrary code.
Yes, that's a standard part of a social engineering attack. This does make social engineering attacks easier, and should be fixed (let's start by downloading to something like %PROFILE%\Downloads instead of the Desktop). This is similar to the problem where Safari on OS X will install Dashboard widgets for you... that should not be possible.
But next to having downloaded files execute automatically? That's a minor issue.
My point is that people expect more from a "boot disk" now than they did 10-20 years ago.
And I'm not talking about "how much stuff do you put on the disk". It doesn't matter if the CD image is 2M, 20M, or 200M, that's not going to change how long it takes to boot!
I'm talking about "how long does it take to boot to the GUI".
As a baseline, let's say the windows 98 se boot floppy.
Let's not.
Windows is also too bloated.
I bet it's closer than you think.
The fact that your CD boots as slowly as a floppy means CD's still take as long to boot as floppies used to.
This is not a security flaw in Safari, it's using what SHOULD be no more than a DOS attack on Safari to make an attack on the longstanding security flaws inherent in the Windows browser-desktop integration. The same flaws can be attacks with minimal social engineering... convincing a significant number of users to download a file despite any warnings is NOT a hard process... the majority of malware over the past decade that have used related flaws in the Windows security model have managed to propagate using social engineering tricks.
I am still boggled by the fact that Microsoft didn't fix the deep problems here ten years ago.
Well people expect different things from a live CD than an DOS boot floppy.
What does a Live CD need to do *at boot* that an HP Integral or Amiga 1000 don't? They all boot to a GUI with windows, icons, a desktop, and so on.
Imagine trying to boot dos + WFW 3.11 on floppy, plus a dialer and netscape.
I don't have to imagine it, I've done it. Pointing to a REALLY bad implementation that (by the way) Gnome is doing a really BAD job of emulating is hardly the way to convince me that the bloat of Gnome and KDE is justified.
Not to mention people used to tweak boot floppies for their systems and not load extras.
So you're claiming the entire field of scientific research into usability is not credible
No, I'm claiming that I haven't had anyone provide a credible study. There may be some, but they all seem to be locked up somewhere.
Most people respond by asserting that I am rejecting an entire field of scientific research, but decline to actually provide a reference to a single study to support this assertion.
Have you considered [...] just reading the academic papers published online.
Well, hey, you want to be an exception to the rule? You know what to do.
There are a lot of rigorous usability studies, usually testing a particular interface and looking for problem tasks/workflows.
I haven't seen any studies comparing a computer system with a single-button mouse and menu buttons (eg, Apple's menu bar), versus one with multi-button mice and contextual menus (eg, the Xerox Star), where both are designed for the interface and consistently implemented across the UI. I have seen Apple's study, I have seen studies of X11 (which loses immediately against EITHER of the options I'm talking about), and I have seen studies of user interfaces for specific applications. I have NEVER seen a study that actually supports Apple's claims that contextual menus are bad.
We're talking about chording keys that substitute for extra mouse buttons,
There's only one of those, control-click. I'm not at any point advocating five-button mice (even though Apple has effectively created one on the Mac by putting four of the buttons on the keyboard), I'm talking about the original three-button Xerox Star design that Apple hacked into a one-button model:
Select - Usually click, sometimes not available. Execute - Usually double-click, sometimes single-click. Menu - Usually control-click, sometimes in some third-party applications it's option-click or command-click, often not available.
That's the original design. Simple and consistent. You have to learn what three buttons mean, but they mean the same thing in all applications.
On the Mac, now, I'm talking about command click, option click, shift-click, as well as things like option-delete in iTunes and command-double-click in Tiger text widgets and the terminal, and the various key-drag variants in Finder. You can't discover all these by exploring the interface, because some of them are destructive and others are hard to back out of.
So what is your problem with Apple's implementation of the second mouse button?
* It can't be used one-handed. * The control-key moves. It's in a different place on my Macbook Pro and on my desktop keyboard. * It's different on different devices. On the Mighty Mouse it's "lift the index finger and click", on the older mice it's "press the Ctrl key (no not that one, that's the Fn key) and click, on the Trackpad it's "control-click or two-finger-tap". You can also get it with tap-and-hold, so if you're going to drag a file, don't linger! * It's badly implemented in the API. Applications STILL have to handle at least three separate events (control-click, right-click, and click-and-hold) explicitly. Many applications don't bother. The result is more inconsistency.
You don't need to load a word processor, web browser, or programming and debugging tools during boot.
You do need to load the GUI, yes.
If you cant boot to a GUI from a CD faster than an HP Integral (running System V UNIX on a 68000!) could from a floppy, there's something wrong with your GUI.
That's running UNIX, mind. I'm not expecting you to beat an Amiga 1000, though that *was* loading firmware as well from the kickstart, but you should at least be able to do better than a mid '80s UNIX box.
Have you ever performed a usability study on a modern computer?
No, but I've read as many of them as I can get my hands on, and have found none of them credible. It's easy to see the errors: you'll find them comparing mockups of user interfaces that never actually got implemented, or user interfaces that are clearly designed to make one or another operation work better, or have taken the interface the experimenter doesn't like to extremes (like the "five button mouse"). I have, for the past quarter of a century, rarely even had any user interface experts provide an example of a study other than Apple's original flawed work.
I can also use argumentum ad verecundiam if you want. I have 20 years of experience as a system administrator, supporting users that ranged from clueless executives and secretaries to programmers with PhDs. The biggestTrue, they are not easily discoverable, but that is only one part of usability. Novice users don't need to discover them. Advanced suers have no problem figuring them out quite quickly.
I'm an advanced user. I have decades of experience with Macs and just about every other user interface that uses a mouse and windows, including every version of Mac OS, the Lisa, and all three of the GUIs Xerox developed on the Dorado and Dolphin boxes. I am still discovering magic keys in Apple applications by means of word-of-mouth and google.
Care to cite an example? I know of only two applications on OS X that are exceptions to this rule, one of which is an abysmal custom interface trying to exactly mimic the Windows version
If you mean iTunes, that's a custom UI developed on the Mac and ported to Windows that Apple has used as a testbed for user interface ideas. If any application should have evolved into a witness for the best that Apple could do, that's the one.
[contextual menus preventing customization] Yes it does, at least as currently implemented on Windows
I'm not a Windows user, and I'm not comparing OS X with Windows. I'm right now using contextual menus WITH user customization on OS X. I have done the same on other window systems... all the way back to the beginning, back before the Mac wis a twinkle in Raskin's eye.
I hope you realize that two-finger click isn't active by default and you need to activate it in the system preferences.
Yes. It "doesn't work for me" means "I do not find it an adequate replacement for a second button. I need to be able to activate the contextual menu without tapping the touchpad, because it's too easy for me to jiggle the mouse in the process whether I'm one- or two- finger tapping.
Even when Macs were generic-looking beige boxes that you couldn't tell at a glance from a Dell or HP, people were buying them for the software they ran, not the hardware. If Microsoft Windows had been available in 1983 when Microsoft started advertising it (yes, really), and Apple made a really nice computer running Windows, they wouldn't have been "in trouble" in the '90s, they'd have been "out of business" in the '80s... no matter how revolutionary the Banana 9000 was.
I've got a T-Mobile touch-screen phone right now. With Pocket PC software in it, it sucks. If Apple had taken that hardware, painted it white, and written software for it... with or without a multi-touch screen... they would have had a product. If Apple designed an MP3 player without a click wheel, it would still be a great MP3 player... and, hey, they did, and it was, and I loved my iPod Shuffle until the battery died.:)
It really is the software. The hardware is sizzle, the software is the steak.
This looks like sarcasm to me. Or at least it looks like it should be sarcasm.
I guess it depends on how much you love or hate IOS, but people buy Cisco devices because they run IOS... not because they're green, look nice in a rack, and have 12 RJ45s and 128M of RAM.
That it's used to implement so-called "websites" doesn't qualify
That it's basically a better hypercard, however, does.
you could implement a "website" as an ActiveX control, but I don't think that qualifies either. At the very least, it wouldn't be a good target for a standard.
To be honest, to me this seems like a thing of the past. Apple-critics tend to use it as an argument against Macs but really, that was fixed when the Mighty Mouse came out.
The mighty mouse is exactly the kind of passive-aggressive **** that I'm talking about. The Mighty Mouse does not allow chording, and to reliably get right clicking out of it I have to hold my hand in an uncomfortable position tat severly aggravates my RSI. I use a Microsoft wheel mouse, the two-button-plus-wheel cheap mouse, and it works far better than any mouse Apple has produced.
If you're working on a Macbook or Macbook pro, I find the "double-finger click" (whatever you want to call it) equally if not more convenient than having a right-click button.
I've been working on the Macbook Pro since it's been out, and it doesn't work worth a damn for me.
Is the "passive-aggressive relationship with multiple mouse buttons" really still a reality?
Not only reality, but what you're pointing to are the symptoms.
As a usability expert, I can assure you misuse of secondary mouse buttons is one of the most common usability problems,
Argumentum ad verecundiam. I've been seeing people make claims like this for almost 25 years now, and I have yet to see a single credible study that supports it.
Single button mice are more "demo friendly". That's it.
* Applications are *not* as consistent as you claim. There are many actions even in Apple's apps that are only available through the contextual menu, or through magic chords.
* These magic chords, the alternate mechanisms for replacing the context menu in Mac OS, are not "discoverable". I've been using the Mac almost as long as it's been out... my first Mac was the original 128K Macintosh, I'm definitely a "power user", and I'm still discovering new command-option-shift-double-click combos.
* Using contextual menus does not prevent user configuration.
Mostly it is just Windows users complaining because it is different or people who don't actually use OS X regularly complaining about what they assume would be a problem.
Argumentum ad hominem, too. Not guilty. I use OS X regularly, I've used Macs for almost a quarter of a century. OS X is my primary desktop.
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You only need to probe for legacy hardware. Any hardware since, oh, sometime in the '90s should have already been enumerated during POST.
If we're talking about boot to gui time, dos doesn't matter.
... and BOOTED OFF FLOPPIES.
Who the hell is talking about DOS? I certainly aren't.
Amiga 1000: 1985
HP Integral: 1985
THings that existed during that time period which had guis.
Like the Amiga 1000 and HP Integral.
I have a NeXT, and I can tell you it doesn't boot all that fast, especially with OpenSTEP 4.2.
I had a NeXT, too. Gave it to someone who wanted one and whose wife didn't object to bringing it home, when I left ABB.
It was running Display Postscript on a 68040, mate. It's amazing it booted at all.
Today's boot CDs aren't running DPS, they're just running X11. Which is bloated compared to Intuition, but it's no Display Postscript.
You seem to be complaining about something that you can't demonstrate an example of when it did work right.
Amiga 1000.
HP Integral.
Tell me, Mister Bones, when did they make Internet Explorer a special case on the desktop?
Why, it was in 1997, when they started the whole browser-desktop integration mess.
Without that, they wouldn't have had any reason to treat it any different from any of the other apps they included on the desktop by default.
Especially since the browser does not integrate with the desktop
That's not what "browser-desktop integration" refers to.
For my thoughts on the one button laptops, I prefer it. Some folks like one model of car, some like others. I wouldn't say it's because one car manufacturer has a hatred for features in the other. It's just a matter of options/choice/preference. Choice is good? amiright?
When I can buy OS X retail and install it on a Thinkpad I'll be happy to agree with you.
Since that's not going to happen, where's the choice?
the Internet icon is a special case (like My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Network Places, and My Documents).
Which is to say that it's the fault of browser-desktop integration, yesno?
Every time I think I'm a cynical bastard some cynical bastard comes along and one-ups me.
Ask Apple:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/
If you already have a finger on the pad
I don't rest my finger on the pad, because any subsequent motion of my hand causes small movements, and because I have to make muliple strokes on the pad to move the mouse any distance so I am in the habit of stroking the pointer around and only touching the pad when I'm actually moving the pointer.
Even if you don't have a finger on the pad, plonking two down at the same time shouldn't result in any pointer movement
I find that plonking down *one* at a time can cause movement.
Where do you need chorded-clicks?
Paste in XTerminals and other X11 clients.
The point is, you can easily use a Microsoft wheel mouse on a Mac.
Indeed, there isn't even a clue-anticlue explosion when it's plugged in. Though you couldn't under OS 9, and Apple still doesn't ship an actual two-button mouse, and application support for the right button is still not universal (which I elaborate on in another comment in this thread).
your Windows PC
You take that back!
have you activated multiple finger scrolling and clicking?
Yes, I have already explained this in far more detail in another followup.
Agreed. Pluto is a planet, so is Eris. Naming the latter after the goddess of chaos and discord was a splendid idea (as well as a lovely if possibly unintended homage to the late Robert Anton Wilson, though not as good as naming it Mickey would have been).
Is it this one? "While trying to load some of those files, it does not provide the full path of the DLL file to the function which loads the DLL file to the memory, and therefore Windows will search for this file in the user's machine using the directories provided in the PATH environment variable, and will load the first match it will found."
If so, why is %PROFILE%\Desktop in %PATH%?
Oh, no, it's this one: "While this is true, the behavior of the "DLL Search Order" (when it's disabled) is to look for the DLL in the current directory, right after the Internet Explorer's directory. As most users execute Internet Explorer from the Desktop, the current directory will be of course the user's Desktop (see screenshot below)."
Why is Internet Explorer's current directory the desktop?
It's not because Internet Explorer is in %PROFILE%\Desktop, because it isn't.
It's not because Internet Explorer is a shortcut on the Desktop, because that would run it with the current directory in the destination directory of the shortcut.
Perhaps it's because the Internet Explorer icon on the desktop is a special case, because of the browser-desktop integration?
Nah, that's crazy talk.
As the same blog explains, you could have Safari download an executable to the desktop that pretends to be e.g. Internet Explorer. If they normally launch IE from the desktop, they could click the fake IE next time, running arbitrary code.
Yes, that's a standard part of a social engineering attack. This does make social engineering attacks easier, and should be fixed (let's start by downloading to something like %PROFILE%\Downloads instead of the Desktop). This is similar to the problem where Safari on OS X will install Dashboard widgets for you... that should not be possible.
But next to having downloaded files execute automatically? That's a minor issue.
My point is that people expect more from a "boot disk" now than they did 10-20 years ago.
And I'm not talking about "how much stuff do you put on the disk". It doesn't matter if the CD image is 2M, 20M, or 200M, that's not going to change how long it takes to boot!
I'm talking about "how long does it take to boot to the GUI".
As a baseline, let's say the windows 98 se boot floppy.
Let's not.
Windows is also too bloated.
I bet it's closer than you think.
The fact that your CD boots as slowly as a floppy means CD's still take as long to boot as floppies used to.
That's what I'm complaining about!
This is not a security flaw in Safari, it's using what SHOULD be no more than a DOS attack on Safari to make an attack on the longstanding security flaws inherent in the Windows browser-desktop integration. The same flaws can be attacks with minimal social engineering ... convincing a significant number of users to download a file despite any warnings is NOT a hard process... the majority of malware over the past decade that have used related flaws in the Windows security model have managed to propagate using social engineering tricks.
I am still boggled by the fact that Microsoft didn't fix the deep problems here ten years ago.
Well people expect different things from a live CD than an DOS boot floppy.
What does a Live CD need to do *at boot* that an HP Integral or Amiga 1000 don't? They all boot to a GUI with windows, icons, a desktop, and so on.
Imagine trying to boot dos + WFW 3.11 on floppy, plus a dialer and netscape.
I don't have to imagine it, I've done it. Pointing to a REALLY bad implementation that (by the way) Gnome is doing a really BAD job of emulating is hardly the way to convince me that the bloat of Gnome and KDE is justified.
Not to mention people used to tweak boot floppies for their systems and not load extras.
And the problem with this is what?
So you're claiming the entire field of scientific research into usability is not credible
No, I'm claiming that I haven't had anyone provide a credible study. There may be some, but they all seem to be locked up somewhere.
Most people respond by asserting that I am rejecting an entire field of scientific research, but decline to actually provide a reference to a single study to support this assertion.
Have you considered [...] just reading the academic papers published online.
Well, hey, you want to be an exception to the rule? You know what to do.
There are a lot of rigorous usability studies, usually testing a particular interface and looking for problem tasks/workflows.
I haven't seen any studies comparing a computer system with a single-button mouse and menu buttons (eg, Apple's menu bar), versus one with multi-button mice and contextual menus (eg, the Xerox Star), where both are designed for the interface and consistently implemented across the UI. I have seen Apple's study, I have seen studies of X11 (which loses immediately against EITHER of the options I'm talking about), and I have seen studies of user interfaces for specific applications. I have NEVER seen a study that actually supports Apple's claims that contextual menus are bad.
We're talking about chording keys that substitute for extra mouse buttons,
There's only one of those, control-click. I'm not at any point advocating five-button mice (even though Apple has effectively created one on the Mac by putting four of the buttons on the keyboard), I'm talking about the original three-button Xerox Star design that Apple hacked into a one-button model:
Select - Usually click, sometimes not available.
Execute - Usually double-click, sometimes single-click.
Menu - Usually control-click, sometimes in some third-party applications it's option-click or command-click, often not available.
That's the original design. Simple and consistent. You have to learn what three buttons mean, but they mean the same thing in all applications.
On the Mac, now, I'm talking about command click, option click, shift-click, as well as things like option-delete in iTunes and command-double-click in Tiger text widgets and the terminal, and the various key-drag variants in Finder. You can't discover all these by exploring the interface, because some of them are destructive and others are hard to back out of.
So what is your problem with Apple's implementation of the second mouse button?
* It can't be used one-handed.
* The control-key moves. It's in a different place on my Macbook Pro and on my desktop keyboard.
* It's different on different devices. On the Mighty Mouse it's "lift the index finger and click", on the older mice it's "press the Ctrl key (no not that one, that's the Fn key) and click, on the Trackpad it's "control-click or two-finger-tap". You can also get it with tap-and-hold, so if you're going to drag a file, don't linger!
* It's badly implemented in the API. Applications STILL have to handle at least three separate events (control-click, right-click, and click-and-hold) explicitly. Many applications don't bother. The result is more inconsistency.
I don't think you realize how big gnome/kde actually are.
:)
I don't think you're looking at the problem right.
"How big Gnome/KDE are" is part of it.
You don't need to load a word processor, web browser, or programming and debugging tools during boot.
You do need to load the GUI, yes.
If you cant boot to a GUI from a CD faster than an HP Integral (running System V UNIX on a 68000!) could from a floppy, there's something wrong with your GUI.
That's running UNIX, mind. I'm not expecting you to beat an Amiga 1000, though that *was* loading firmware as well from the kickstart, but you should at least be able to do better than a mid '80s UNIX box.
Have you ever performed a usability study on a modern computer?
No, but I've read as many of them as I can get my hands on, and have found none of them credible. It's easy to see the errors: you'll find them comparing mockups of user interfaces that never actually got implemented, or user interfaces that are clearly designed to make one or another operation work better, or have taken the interface the experimenter doesn't like to extremes (like the "five button mouse"). I have, for the past quarter of a century, rarely even had any user interface experts provide an example of a study other than Apple's original flawed work.
I can also use argumentum ad verecundiam if you want. I have 20 years of experience as a system administrator, supporting users that ranged from clueless executives and secretaries to programmers with PhDs. The biggestTrue, they are not easily discoverable, but that is only one part of usability. Novice users don't need to discover them. Advanced suers have no problem figuring them out quite quickly.
I'm an advanced user. I have decades of experience with Macs and just about every other user interface that uses a mouse and windows, including every version of Mac OS, the Lisa, and all three of the GUIs Xerox developed on the Dorado and Dolphin boxes. I am still discovering magic keys in Apple applications by means of word-of-mouth and google.
Care to cite an example? I know of only two applications on OS X that are exceptions to this rule, one of which is an abysmal custom interface trying to exactly mimic the Windows version
If you mean iTunes, that's a custom UI developed on the Mac and ported to Windows that Apple has used as a testbed for user interface ideas. If any application should have evolved into a witness for the best that Apple could do, that's the one.
[contextual menus preventing customization] Yes it does, at least as currently implemented on Windows
I'm not a Windows user, and I'm not comparing OS X with Windows. I'm right now using contextual menus WITH user customization on OS X. I have done the same on other window systems... all the way back to the beginning, back before the Mac wis a twinkle in Raskin's eye.
I hope you realize that two-finger click isn't active by default and you need to activate it in the system preferences.
Yes. It "doesn't work for me" means "I do not find it an adequate replacement for a second button. I need to be able to activate the contextual menu without tapping the touchpad, because it's too easy for me to jiggle the mouse in the process whether I'm one- or two- finger tapping.
Even when Macs were generic-looking beige boxes that you couldn't tell at a glance from a Dell or HP, people were buying them for the software they ran, not the hardware. If Microsoft Windows had been available in 1983 when Microsoft started advertising it (yes, really), and Apple made a really nice computer running Windows, they wouldn't have been "in trouble" in the '90s, they'd have been "out of business" in the '80s... no matter how revolutionary the Banana 9000 was.
:)
I've got a T-Mobile touch-screen phone right now. With Pocket PC software in it, it sucks. If Apple had taken that hardware, painted it white, and written software for it... with or without a multi-touch screen... they would have had a product. If Apple designed an MP3 player without a click wheel, it would still be a great MP3 player... and, hey, they did, and it was, and I loved my iPod Shuffle until the battery died.
It really is the software. The hardware is sizzle, the software is the steak.
This looks like sarcasm to me. Or at least it looks like it should be sarcasm.
I guess it depends on how much you love or hate IOS, but people buy Cisco devices because they run IOS... not because they're green, look nice in a rack, and have 12 RJ45s and 128M of RAM.
That it's used to implement so-called "websites" doesn't qualify
That it's basically a better hypercard, however, does.
you could implement a "website" as an ActiveX control, but I don't think that qualifies either. At the very least, it wouldn't be a good target for a standard.
You mean like Silverlight?
To be honest, to me this seems like a thing of the past. Apple-critics tend to use it as an argument against Macs but really, that was fixed when the Mighty Mouse came out.
The mighty mouse is exactly the kind of passive-aggressive **** that I'm talking about. The Mighty Mouse does not allow chording, and to reliably get right clicking out of it I have to hold my hand in an uncomfortable position tat severly aggravates my RSI. I use a Microsoft wheel mouse, the two-button-plus-wheel cheap mouse, and it works far better than any mouse Apple has produced.
If you're working on a Macbook or Macbook pro, I find the "double-finger click" (whatever you want to call it) equally if not more convenient than having a right-click button.
I've been working on the Macbook Pro since it's been out, and it doesn't work worth a damn for me.
Is the "passive-aggressive relationship with multiple mouse buttons" really still a reality?
Not only reality, but what you're pointing to are the symptoms.
As a usability expert, I can assure you misuse of secondary mouse buttons is one of the most common usability problems,
Argumentum ad verecundiam. I've been seeing people make claims like this for almost 25 years now, and I have yet to see a single credible study that supports it.
Single button mice are more "demo friendly". That's it.
* Applications are *not* as consistent as you claim. There are many actions even in Apple's apps that are only available through the contextual menu, or through magic chords.
* These magic chords, the alternate mechanisms for replacing the context menu in Mac OS, are not "discoverable". I've been using the Mac almost as long as it's been out... my first Mac was the original 128K Macintosh, I'm definitely a "power user", and I'm still discovering new command-option-shift-double-click combos.
* Using contextual menus does not prevent user configuration.
Mostly it is just Windows users complaining because it is different or people who don't actually use OS X regularly complaining about what they assume would be a problem.
Argumentum ad hominem, too. Not guilty. I use OS X regularly, I've used Macs for almost a quarter of a century. OS X is my primary desktop.