An interface my parents can use must be simple enough for them to pick it up in a few minutes and flexible enough for them to expand its capabilities and uncover more options as their skills grow.
When I gave my parents an old Macintosh to connect to the web they found the Mac OS Finder confusing until I reduced the choices on the screen to buttons for each of the applications they wanted to use. A glorified program launcher, if you will. Anything more complicated tends to scare the computer neophyte away rather than inviting him or her in to learn more.
- Nice to see The Lone Gunmen, as always. But a little disappointed to realize that they were partly there to protect their investment. Are they starting to sell out?
- I enjoyed the conversation between Mulder and Scully about video games, and especially Mulder's assertion that she was being a bit sexist (she was).
- The revelation that the game could be deactivated or unplugged could have been introduced after a half an hour with no loss of plot. Better yet, the extra time could have been used to give the digital maven some *depth*. She didn't even have a line, did she? Shades of Darth Maul all over again.
- Was it just me, or did Scully's prolonged target practice near the end of the episode seem especially pointless? No dialog, witty comebacks, Arnold-type lines. That scene was a lost opportunity for either some Mulder-Scully "I told you so!" bickering or some snappy insults by Scully towards the girl who Would Not Die.
- And finally, I wonder how Thresh feels about that guy who went in to end the crisis but found himself... er, over his head.:-) I enjoyed the inside joke.
Here is some more intelligent commentary on Aqua's interface features, both good and bad. I hope someone at Apple reads Every's take on the Aqua's Dock in part three.
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekmon.htm l http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeektues.ht ml http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekwed.htm l http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekthurs.h tml
Who said anything about floppies? An internal zip drive would have been a nice touch, although it would have raised the price of the iMac by $100.
I agree wholeheartedly, 1.4MB floppies are much too small for almost anything these days. I'm probably going to get a FireWire HD to store backups as soon as some company releases one that's affordable...
Two things immediately come to mind after reading reports of the keynote speech yesterday.
1. I like most of the interface changes and eye candy in OS X, as long as the operating system is fast enough to implement them smoothly. From what I hear, this is the first Apple product to fully take advatange of the PowerPC chips inside almost all Macintoshes so that shouldn't be a problem.
But what happens if we're all overexposed to the "make everything translucent and multicolored" fad during the next few years? Will Aqua (Apple's name for the new interface style) suddenly seem dated or too cute? I sincerely hope Apple has added some hooks to Aqua's API to make the style customizable.
2. What a shrewd move Apple made by giving all Mac users 20MB of web space on their servers. (See http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmainpc.html or http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmain.html if you're on a Mac.) Suddenly, the iMac's galling lack of external storage doesn't seem as important anymore. I still need a way to make backups, but some people may be happy with the small amount of public space that lets them store and share stuff.
So get a two or three button mouse. Logitech makes a nice USB wheel mouse for Windows and Mac OS machines (http://www.logitech.com/us/mice/mc15_100.html which makes it very easy for me to play Quake III on my iMac.
I agree with you that Apple should stop forcing users to use the option key to see contextual menus. A two button mouse and professional full-sized keyboard would go a long way towards making the otherwise excellent G3 and G4 computers look attractive.
And if you believe some of the rumors floating around the web, Apple may finally be ready to retire the hockey puck mouse and do just that sometime in the next half year.
Stay tuned, the Mac platform is about to get a whole lot more interesting...
This comment is being widely misinterpreted around the web. I believe he meant that Id's next game will appear on many platforms such as Linux and Win32, and on the Mac side it be written for Mac OS X only, not the legacy Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 versions.
He has been waiting for a stable Mac development platform for quite some time and I'm sure he will use his position to jettison support for the old versions of the operating system as soon as possible. A side benefit is that because Id's games are so popular this move will help speed acceptance of the platform among gamers.
That was a fairly accurate report of the expo keynote with the exception of the open source bit. Jobs merely reiterated that the core of the operating system, aka Darwin, is fully open-source. There lies the confusion, and underscores the need to double-check facts before posting a story here.
This man is 100% responsible for the actions that he took. I don't care if he is an addict, juvenile, legally insane or just a plain idiot. Our society will not last if continue to allow every moron with a lawyer and an excuse to dodge the consequences of his actions.
I'll all for trying new interfaces to make computing more intuitive. And I have to admit that the ability to view ordinary desktops and applications in three dimensions *is* pretty cool.
But how can a third dimension make using a computer easier or more useful? The only thing I can think of right now is a different way to list inactive applications. Instead of listing them on a taskbar or a dock, it might be easier for people to remember the "location" of the app in virtual 3D space and go to it by "walking" there, the same way we do in real life.
I suspect that the fundamental way we view applications will have to change before a 3D interface starts to make sense.
My only reaction to this story was, "Big deal." Every person has their idiosyncrasies and it doesn't change my opinion about Mr. Sagan one bit. There are more important things to argue about.
Re:How long can a company guard a product's featur
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
·
· Score: 1
I agree with you there. I never said there was anything innovative or original about the design of the iMac. Non-beige computers aren't new, nor are all-in-one designs. But aside from the new PC clone, there aren't any computers that look like the iMac. And that's why Apple is suing Future Power... Future Power's computer looks almost *exactly* like an iMac.
What are these differences that someone has mentioned? A regular mouse? A PC Keyboard? Windows running on the machine instead of the Mac OS? I can't believe any of these "differences" will be apparent to the grandmother who walks into a computer store and buys one machine for her grandson when she meant to buy the other.
Hmmm... that may not be the best example. A computer is quite an expensive present coming from a grandparent. But you know what I mean.:-)
Mike
How long can a company guard a product's features?
on
iMac Clone Gets Sued
·
· Score: 2
I wonder where the line can be drawn when it comes to copyright infringement. I'm on Apple's side on this one... that new PC is a blatant rip-off of a currently unique product and Future Power shouldn't be allowed to sell something that's almost an exact cosmetic duplicate of the iMac.
But I probably would not feel the same way in a year or two if Apple ever decided to levy a similar lawsuit after more PC manufacturers had deviated from the standard "beige" PC cases and come out with unique designs of their own, some of which would undoubtedly incorporate a few elements of the iMac without copying the appearance verbatim.
So where do you draw the line? How long can a product be considered unique until some of the product's features become common across the industry?
For years this has been the only part of the Microsoft monopoly that has bothered me. If consumers can truly choose between operating systems when purchasing a computer and they freely choose Windows "en masse" then I have no problem ceding the desktop operating system market to Microsoft.
But consumers have no such choice and the current arrangement should have been declared illegal long ago because Microsoft isn't simply supplying the OS as part of their own Microsoft brand computer. Another company makes the box and forcing a consumer to purchase a third party product is like forcing me to buy and use Sharp food products with my Sharp microwave. That's criminal.
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An interface my parents can use must be simple enough for them to pick it up in a few minutes and flexible enough for them to expand its capabilities and uncover more options as their skills grow.
When I gave my parents an old Macintosh to connect to the web they found the Mac OS Finder confusing until I reduced the choices on the screen to buttons for each of the applications they wanted to use. A glorified program launcher, if you will. Anything more complicated tends to scare the computer neophyte away rather than inviting him or her in to learn more.
Mike
My impressions of the episode:
:-) I enjoyed the inside joke.
- Nice to see The Lone Gunmen, as always. But a little disappointed to realize that they were partly there to protect their investment. Are they starting to sell out?
- I enjoyed the conversation between Mulder and Scully about video games, and especially Mulder's assertion that she was being a bit sexist (she was).
- The revelation that the game could be deactivated or unplugged could have been introduced after a half an hour with no loss of plot. Better yet, the extra time could have been used to give the digital maven some *depth*. She didn't even have a line, did she? Shades of Darth Maul all over again.
- Was it just me, or did Scully's prolonged target practice near the end of the episode seem especially pointless? No dialog, witty comebacks, Arnold-type lines. That scene was a lost opportunity for either some Mulder-Scully "I told you so!" bickering or some snappy insults by Scully towards the girl who Would Not Die.
- And finally, I wonder how Thresh feels about that guy who went in to end the crisis but found himself... er, over his head.
Here is some more intelligent commentary on Aqua's interface features, both good and bad. I hope someone at Apple reads Every's take on the Aqua's Dock in part three.
m l t ml m l h tml
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekmon.ht
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeektues.h
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekwed.ht
http://macweek.zdnet.com/2000/01/23/igeekthurs.
Here's a good resource for anyone looking for the most popular Sci-Fi, determined by weekly voting.
1 00.html
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Cavern/6113/top
Hey, pretty cool. A Kenny Nebula.
. awakes/eskimo.large.jpg
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/01/24/hubble
I wonder if they'll scrap plans to name the company AOL Time Warner (boring) and call it something like America On Time.
Nah...
Who said anything about floppies? An internal zip drive would have been a nice touch, although it would have raised the price of the iMac by $100.
I agree wholeheartedly, 1.4MB floppies are much too small for almost anything these days. I'm probably going to get a FireWire HD to store backups as soon as some company releases one that's affordable...
Two things immediately come to mind after reading reports of the keynote speech yesterday.
1. I like most of the interface changes and eye candy in OS X, as long as the operating system is fast enough to implement them smoothly. From what I hear, this is the first Apple product to fully take advatange of the PowerPC chips inside almost all Macintoshes so that shouldn't be a problem.
But what happens if we're all overexposed to the "make everything translucent and multicolored" fad during the next few years? Will Aqua (Apple's name for the new interface style) suddenly seem dated or too cute? I sincerely hope Apple has added some hooks to Aqua's API to make the style customizable.
2. What a shrewd move Apple made by giving all Mac users 20MB of web space on their servers. (See http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmainpc.html or http://itools.mac.com/itoolsmain.html if you're on a Mac.) Suddenly, the iMac's galling lack of external storage doesn't seem as important anymore. I still need a way to make backups, but some people may be happy with the small amount of public space that lets them store and share stuff.
Mike
So get a two or three button mouse. Logitech makes a nice USB wheel mouse for Windows and Mac OS machines (http://www.logitech.com/us/mice/mc15_100.html which makes it very easy for me to play Quake III on my iMac.
I agree with you that Apple should stop forcing users to use the option key to see contextual menus. A two button mouse and professional full-sized keyboard would go a long way towards making the otherwise excellent G3 and G4 computers look attractive.
And if you believe some of the rumors floating around the web, Apple may finally be ready to retire the hockey puck mouse and do just that sometime in the next half year.
Stay tuned, the Mac platform is about to get a whole lot more interesting...
This comment is being widely misinterpreted around the web. I believe he meant that Id's next game will appear on many platforms such as Linux and Win32, and on the Mac side it be written for Mac OS X only, not the legacy Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 versions.
He has been waiting for a stable Mac development platform for quite some time and I'm sure he will use his position to jettison support for the old versions of the operating system as soon as possible. A side benefit is that because Id's games are so popular this move will help speed acceptance of the platform among gamers.
That was a fairly accurate report of the expo keynote with the exception of the open source bit. Jobs merely reiterated that the core of the operating system, aka Darwin, is fully open-source. There lies the confusion, and underscores the need to double-check facts before posting a story here.
This man is 100% responsible for the actions that he took. I don't care if he is an addict, juvenile, legally insane or just a plain idiot. Our society will not last if continue to allow every moron with a lawyer and an excuse to dodge the consequences of his actions.
This research confirms my observation that people who talk on cell phones forget how to drive.
I'll all for trying new interfaces to make computing more intuitive. And I have to admit that the ability to view ordinary desktops and applications in three dimensions *is* pretty cool.
But how can a third dimension make using a computer easier or more useful? The only thing I can think of right now is a different way to list inactive applications. Instead of listing them on a taskbar or a dock, it might be easier for people to remember the "location" of the app in virtual 3D space and go to it by "walking" there, the same way we do in real life.
I suspect that the fundamental way we view applications will have to change before a 3D interface starts to make sense.
My only reaction to this story was, "Big deal." Every person has their idiosyncrasies and it doesn't change my opinion about Mr. Sagan one bit. There are more important things to argue about.
I agree with you there. I never said there was anything innovative or original about the design of the iMac. Non-beige computers aren't new, nor are all-in-one designs. But aside from the new PC clone, there aren't any computers that look like the iMac. And that's why Apple is suing Future Power... Future Power's computer looks almost *exactly* like an iMac.
:-)
What are these differences that someone has mentioned? A regular mouse? A PC Keyboard? Windows running on the machine instead of the Mac OS? I can't believe any of these "differences" will be apparent to the grandmother who walks into a computer store and buys one machine for her grandson when she meant to buy the other.
Hmmm... that may not be the best example. A computer is quite an expensive present coming from a grandparent. But you know what I mean.
Mike
I wonder where the line can be drawn when it comes to copyright infringement. I'm on Apple's side on this one... that new PC is a blatant rip-off of a currently unique product and Future Power shouldn't be allowed to sell something that's almost an exact cosmetic duplicate of the iMac.
But I probably would not feel the same way in a year or two if Apple ever decided to levy a similar lawsuit after more PC manufacturers had deviated from the standard "beige" PC cases and come out with unique designs of their own, some of which would undoubtedly incorporate a few elements of the iMac without copying the appearance verbatim.
So where do you draw the line? How long can a product be considered unique until some of the product's features become common across the industry?
Mike
For years this has been the only part of the Microsoft monopoly that has
bothered me. If consumers can truly choose between operating systems when
purchasing a computer and they freely choose Windows "en masse" then I have no
problem ceding the desktop operating system market to Microsoft.
But consumers have no such choice and the current arrangement should have been
declared illegal long ago because Microsoft isn't simply supplying the OS as
part of their own Microsoft brand computer. Another company makes the box and
forcing a consumer to purchase a third party product is like forcing me to buy
and use Sharp food products with my Sharp microwave. That's criminal.