If "friendly AI, please don't walk directly in front of my gun when I'm shooting at someone" is really that hard to code, then humanity never had any business writing anything more complicated than Pong.
For python to be healthy in the future, it needs to cut out all the added syntactic sugar bloating the syntax since 2.2 and substitute it with complex XML support.
Informative titles are one of the most basic usability principles. Any programmer who can't grasp something this basic is probably going to have a lot of other usability issues with their software.
Case in point, we have a product named "Joomla". The Joomla administration has links to sections ambigously titled "Modules" and "Components". What's the difference between the two? Don't they refer to the same thing? And "mambots"--need I say more?
I've actually found all those years of posting to Slashdot and newsgroups quite useful in an educational setting. By posting to forums frequently, one gets a lot of practice at using writing to argue for a particular point of view. The same skills required to get a +5 insightful are also essential in writing a good term paper.
I would argue with the statement that XCode is more intuitive than Visual Basic.
To write very basic mac software using XCode/Cocoa, you basically have to learn MVC design patterns. While this is probably a good thing in that it teaches you how to write more flexible and extensible desktop software, it takes a while to wrap your mind around why you can't just call [nsTableView addColumn:whatever] and instead add the column to a representitive data structure and then call reload.
Then you've got stuff like Cocoa bindings and Core Data, which add completely new and different syntaxes and ways of doing things that are in some cases totally alien to the MVC stuff you've just learned. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the nuances of KVO/KVC, array operators, indexed accessors, predicates, etc. Again, these tools are important for every mac developer to learn, as they can dramatically speed up development time and add flexibility. However, you'll spend a lot of time learning.
What we really need, besides XCode, is a replacement for Hypercard that brings application development down to the level of mere mortals.
I've found that geeks (especially OSS ones) are often unable to understand the concept of an engineering tradeoff that makes a sacrifice in program's technical elegance and efficiency to gain a better and more robust experience for end users. That's what the app bundle system basically is, an engineering tradeoff that Apple made to benefit users that placed a higher priority on usability robustness and consistency than efficiency and elegance of design.
I liken witnessing OSS developers attack the app bundle system to watching people who design economy cars for a living yell and scream about how a tank has really lousy fuel efficiency because of all of the bloat of that uneeded heavy armor.
A member of a superior group of people with a superior software development methodology that exceeds the capabilities of every other software development methdology in every kind of way producing the most perfect software ever created which will inevitably take over the world: "Free Software Developers have conquered the server closet, and with OpenOffice they'll soon conquer the Desktop as well".
Volunteer n.
A term used to describe a Free Software Developer, often employed in a lame attempt to silence legitimate criticism of a severe and often usability-related flaws of the supposedly superior software: "John Devorak should stop whining incessantly about how OpenOffice is cluttered and maligning the work of people who have given him a gift. He has no right to complain about the work of volunteers".
self-defeating adj.
Injurious to one's or its own purposes or welfare: "The Free Software Community software's self-defeating strategy of refusing to acknowledge significant usability problems with their software and demonizing the people who notice them will get them nowhere on the desktop" (Ilan G. Volow).
Forget about your freedom to get stuff done with a minimum of fuss, the most valuable and sacred freedom that you as mac user hold dear, and a freedom that the GNU people not only do not consider to be a valid freedom but which they have actively actively trampeled on again and again since 1984.
Live as a slave who is forced to read lengthy manuals and cryptic documentation and use a command line whenever you want to do something simple like add a printer to your system. Learn to enjoy getting slapped in the face on IRC channels when you ask for help, and then getting slapped in the face again by the very same people when you talk about the awful usability of Free Software and the problems you faced setting up your printer and the zealots accuse you of being a liar who spreads FUD about linux being too hard to use.
Listen to zealots talk about how much they want freedom, how much they want to steal the desktop from microsoft, hear them whine about how it's evil proprietary practices that make people not want to use linux, and then read such ignorant bullshit written by the parent post in a different section of Slashdot
Then your Aunte shouldn't use a computer, or should only operate, and have a sysadmin to administrate it. A computer is NOT a toy, and the companys that try to turn it into one just so they can also profit from the iliterate masses are just giving knifes to monkeys.
The problem is that many interaction designers who might have contributed to OSS become alienated from that process when they propose necessities like designing UI before code and get told by the OSS community "go code it yourself", "that's not the unix way", "that's just the opinion of so-called 'usability experts'" etc.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that the hacker culture that dominates OSS is refusing to admit that this is happening and is attributing the lack of interaction designer participation to interaction designers "not knowing that Open Source exists".
I think it's pretty much safe to say that as long as OSS refuses to own up to its mistakes, to make the many needed policy and cultural changes it needs to make, and to renounce their backwards Unix Cultural Bigotry (tm), there will be few interaction designers participating in OSS in the near future.
You only get the Paris Hilton porn if you have the BlueTooth sniper rifle and pick up a quad-damage modifier. Otherwise, you get past episodes of "The Simple Life".
I don't think it's a matter of them having taken over the OSS movement. I think that these people comprised the bulk of the OSS movement from the beginning. This "choice" belief is basically a unix value, and guess who founded the OSS movement?
I think it's really more of an issue of the whole "matter-of-choice" thing having previously worked in places like server closets and in geek basements where consistency didn't matter, and then the unix people who founded OSS getting a real rude awakening when they try to apply their precious unix methodologies and philosophies to areas like end-user computing where multiple inconsistent choices fail miserably.
The Unix people will never, ever try to understand that the desktop is a radically different environment from the server, with a radically different way of doing things and a radically different definition of what failure really is. This is why there needs to be a movement to permanently divorce Unix from the concept of Open Source.
For 12 years I was a slave in the land of DOS, unable to do anything with my computer, constantly living in fear of it, constantly limited in my ability to do anything I wanted to because I couldn't deal with cryptic, ridiculous commands. Until the macintosh set me free.
Jef, you are the original Free Software pioneer. While others like Stallman may have promoted freedom for the programmer to modify code, you promoted freedom for the everyday person to use their computer.
While you may have LEAPed beyond this existence familiar to us all, and for some things there is no undo, others will carry on your work and fight for that which you held dear.
CoreAudio and the Quicktime are quite possibly the two most worst-documented sets of Apple technologies out there. I don't understand how a company that builds nearly its entire bottom line on being a multimedia powerhouse can afford to make development of multimedia applications so problematic for some many people. If you want to write a simple application that records audio or lets you playback video in a custom way, you are so totally screwed.
You just don't know how bad it is until you're up at 3AM at your wits' end looking at a PDF of a 1997 edition of "Inside Macintosh" where all the sample code is in pascal.
"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange."
I think it's more that most unix geeks aren't trained to evaluate user interaction, and typically their ill-informed evaluation of a person using a piece of desktop software only lasts for the first minute and a half after they've installed in on that person's machine. After which time they happily go back to watching star trek, coding something in vi, or playing nethack and not giving a damn about the experience of the person they've just "migrated".
I'd suspect that if we had an honest, long-term evaluation of OpenOffice by people who actually knew what we were doing (as opposed to Unix geeks), we'd probably see a lot more documents getting lost, a lot more mistakes being made, and a lot more confused, frustrated, and angry end users.
Sadly, such findings would probably not be regarded as indicative of usability problems that need to be fixed, but rather evidence of Microsoft's "brainwashing of the masses" with some evil FUD campaign.
Slashdot Mirror
Once GNU will comes out with a free software Hava clone called "gnagila" we can do circle dances.
If "friendly AI, please don't walk directly in front of my gun when I'm shooting at someone" is really that hard to code, then humanity never had any business writing anything more complicated than Pong.
Or to look at it another way, they're making sure that the problem of people using their own personal messy indentation style stays fixed.
For python to be healthy in the future, it needs to cut out all the added syntactic sugar bloating the syntax since 2.2 and substitute it with complex XML support.
Even when the ultra-intelligent machines take over, they will still need humans for Geico commercials.
I have to PPP.
Informative titles are one of the most basic usability principles. Any programmer who can't grasp something this basic is probably going to have a lot of other usability issues with their software.
Case in point, we have a product named "Joomla". The Joomla administration has links to sections ambigously titled "Modules" and "Components". What's the difference between the two? Don't they refer to the same thing? And "mambots"--need I say more?
I've actually found all those years of posting to Slashdot and newsgroups quite useful in an educational setting. By posting to forums frequently, one gets a lot of practice at using writing to argue for a particular point of view. The same skills required to get a +5 insightful are also essential in writing a good term paper.
When do you become too 'mature' for Super Mario Brothers, exactly?
The moment that you start wondering what Mario Kart would be like if Mario could do drive-by's and pick up hookers.
One or two unorganized anti-government rednecks with a truck and some fertilizer where able to cause plenty of devastation in Oklahoma.
The only resource really required to commit mass murder is a lack of respect for human life.
I would argue with the statement that XCode is more intuitive than Visual Basic.
To write very basic mac software using XCode/Cocoa, you basically have to learn MVC design patterns. While this is probably a good thing in that it teaches you how to write more flexible and extensible desktop software, it takes a while to wrap your mind around why you can't just call [nsTableView addColumn:whatever] and instead add the column to a representitive data structure and then call reload.
Then you've got stuff like Cocoa bindings and Core Data, which add completely new and different syntaxes and ways of doing things that are in some cases totally alien to the MVC stuff you've just learned. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the nuances of KVO/KVC, array operators, indexed accessors, predicates, etc. Again, these tools are important for every mac developer to learn, as they can dramatically speed up development time and add flexibility. However, you'll spend a lot of time learning.
What we really need, besides XCode, is a replacement for Hypercard that brings application development down to the level of mere mortals.
Compare and Constrast
Definitely a Wookey connection somewhere...
The first image that was displayed on the very first macintosh at Apple was one of Scrooge McDuck.
I've found that geeks (especially OSS ones) are often unable to understand the concept of an engineering tradeoff that makes a sacrifice in program's technical elegance and efficiency to gain a better and more robust experience for end users. That's what the app bundle system basically is, an engineering tradeoff that Apple made to benefit users that placed a higher priority on usability robustness and consistency than efficiency and elegance of design.
I liken witnessing OSS developers attack the app bundle system to watching people who design economy cars for a living yell and scream about how a tank has really lousy fuel efficiency because of all of the bloat of that uneeded heavy armor.
Tonight I wrote a large portion of an experimental RSS program in 45 minutes using only my mouse and XCode's CoreData modeling tool.
What was the question again?
n.
Volunteer
n.
A term used to describe a Free Software Developer, often employed in a lame attempt to silence legitimate criticism of a severe and often usability-related flaws of the supposedly superior software: "John Devorak should stop whining incessantly about how OpenOffice is cluttered and maligning the work of people who have given him a gift. He has no right to complain about the work of volunteers".
self-defeating
adj.
A Guide for Mac Users
Then your Aunte shouldn't use a computer, or should only operate, and have a sysadmin to administrate it. A computer is NOT a toy, and the companys that try to turn it into one just so they can also profit from the iliterate masses are just giving knifes to monkeys.
I think that about covers it.
The problem is that many interaction designers who might have contributed to OSS become alienated from that process when they propose necessities like designing UI before code and get told by the OSS community "go code it yourself", "that's not the unix way", "that's just the opinion of so-called 'usability experts'" etc.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that the hacker culture that dominates OSS is refusing to admit that this is happening and is attributing the lack of interaction designer participation to interaction designers "not knowing that Open Source exists".
I think it's pretty much safe to say that as long as OSS refuses to own up to its mistakes, to make the many needed policy and cultural changes it needs to make, and to renounce their backwards Unix Cultural Bigotry (tm), there will be few interaction designers participating in OSS in the near future.
You only get the Paris Hilton porn if you have the BlueTooth sniper rifle and pick up a quad-damage modifier. Otherwise, you get past episodes of "The Simple Life".
I don't think it's a matter of them having taken over the OSS movement. I think that these people comprised the bulk of the OSS movement from the beginning. This "choice" belief is basically a unix value, and guess who founded the OSS movement?
I think it's really more of an issue of the whole "matter-of-choice" thing having previously worked in places like server closets and in geek basements where consistency didn't matter, and then the unix people who founded OSS getting a real rude awakening when they try to apply their precious unix methodologies and philosophies to areas like end-user computing where multiple inconsistent choices fail miserably.
The Unix people will never, ever try to understand that the desktop is a radically different environment from the server, with a radically different way of doing things and a radically different definition of what failure really is. This is why there needs to be a movement to permanently divorce Unix from the concept of Open Source.
For 12 years I was a slave in the land of DOS, unable to do anything with my computer, constantly living in fear of it, constantly limited in my ability to do anything I wanted to because I couldn't deal with cryptic, ridiculous commands. Until the macintosh set me free.
Jef, you are the original Free Software pioneer. While others like Stallman may have promoted freedom for the programmer to modify code, you promoted freedom for the everyday person to use their computer.
While you may have LEAPed beyond this existence familiar to us all, and for some things there is no undo, others will carry on your work and fight for that which you held dear.
I feel your pain, brother.
CoreAudio and the Quicktime are quite possibly the two most worst-documented sets of Apple technologies out there. I don't understand how a company that builds nearly its entire bottom line on being a multimedia powerhouse can afford to make development of multimedia applications so problematic for some many people. If you want to write a simple application that records audio or lets you playback video in a custom way, you are so totally screwed.
You just don't know how bad it is until you're up at 3AM at your wits' end looking at a PDF of a 1997 edition of "Inside Macintosh" where all the sample code is in pascal.
"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy's first law of Equivalent Exchange."
I think it's more that most unix geeks aren't trained to evaluate user interaction, and typically their ill-informed evaluation of a person using a piece of desktop software only lasts for the first minute and a half after they've installed in on that person's machine. After which time they happily go back to watching star trek, coding something in vi, or playing nethack and not giving a damn about the experience of the person they've just "migrated".
I'd suspect that if we had an honest, long-term evaluation of OpenOffice by people who actually knew what we were doing (as opposed to Unix geeks), we'd probably see a lot more documents getting lost, a lot more mistakes being made, and a lot more confused, frustrated, and angry end users.
Sadly, such findings would probably not be regarded as indicative of usability problems that need to be fixed, but rather evidence of Microsoft's "brainwashing of the masses" with some evil FUD campaign.