Again, neither Xerox nor anyone else had pull-down menus nor anything like it. Xerox used buttons for commands. Either physical buttons on the custom keyboard, or screen buttons rather like a text button version of a modern day toolbar. Nothing like pull-down menus.
So, what you call "pull down menus" was a minor graphical variation on existing practice at the time.
There's nothing minor about it. The two dimensional menus within a menu concept was novel, new and is a central ingredient of most GUI OSs to this day.
Whether or not it's attached to the screen or the app window *IS* a minor variation, yet that's something you bring up in the hope of changing this from a discussion of fact, to one of preference.
I'm no fan of Bill Gates, but he did write the original Microsoft BASIC back in the mid 1970s, and fit it in 4K, the first person do do such a thing. Now, lots of people could do it, but then, with the tools and knowledge of the day it was quite a feat. He's certainly a software engineer, and a notable one at that.
I like to make fun of web app developers too. But in reality it is real software engineering, often with a greater variety of skills needed than classic programming. Not for the simplest web sites, but certainly for something like a social app.
I agree they are scumbags, but they are successful company founding software engineer scumbags.
I'm not going to bring up a list of every Silicon Valley company that isn't Apple, Microsoft, or Google just to find MBAs who do a good job of running their companies.
The fact that you'd have to scan a list to find some MBAs and I just listed the founders of the top tech companies says it all.
OK, I see what you mean. But even there, some icons are irreplaceable: 1) Close, Minimise and Maximise at the corner of every app window. How much more ugly and less usable they would be if they were words instead of icons? 2) What about arrows on the scroll bar ends? You can do scroll bars without them now, but back in 1995, many people were new to computers and needed the clue as to what that strip at the right of the window did. 3) In a file manager list, how are you going to distinguish between a directory and a file? In DOS, they were distinguished with a column with either
or blank. In what way is the icon of a folder worse than
? 4) What about a Win 95 choice field? What how would you indicate it opens up to give a selection without the down arrow icon?
I didn't say anything about software engineers. Saying that MBAs are bad isn't the same as saying software engineers are good.
I wouldn't have included Steve Jobs on the list if I'd been making a point about software engineers.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg obviously are software engineers though, unless you're discounting them for dropping out to create companies rather than finish their studies. Which would be pretty silly because dropping out of college to create a company is an even bigger pointer to success than not being an MBA.
Thanks for bringing up Eric Schmidt. He too is a software engineer, not an MBA.
You're missing what is in common with the names I mentioned. What percentage of people who CREATED successful companies are MBAs. How close to 0%?
Sure once the founders retire or die, the companies find new people to run them. At that stage MBAs seem like the right qualification. But those MBAs are invariably far less successful than the founders.
What are you talking about? iOS switches nether look nor behave how you're describing. Below you can see no end of examples of iOS switches. And if you actually use one you'd find that you can indeed slide them.
getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell
Yeah, right. "Stripping". By adding things like pull down menus and drag and drop. Things that didn't exist on the Xerox system. Things that didn't exist at all till Apple invented them.
When the batteries fail on them, they will end up scrapped, no one will want a crappy economy car with a dead battery that doesn't even get good gas mileage anymore.
Early Priuses are now more than 10 years old and the batteries have hardly degraded. Looks like they don't need to be changed any more often than an engine in an internal combustion engine car.
What about the battery pack that needs to be replaced every 1-2 year? What about the limited mileage per charge?
Bullshit.
Consumer reports tested a Prius after 10 years, and compared it with a test of a similar model when it was new. In 10 years and 200,000 miles, the battery performance had hardly degraded at all.
Pretty stupid t comment without clicking on the link. The paper is actually a debunking of some stupid claims in the rightwing echo-chamber that a Hummer was more environmentally friendly in a dust-to-dust comparison than a Prius.
What fucking retards righwingers are to believe such shit in the first place.
According to your own link, that phone wasn't sold in Feb 2007, it was only announced then. It wasn't sold until Nov 2007. For the iPhone, the equivalent dates are Jan 2007 and Jun 2007. So no, it certainly does not predate the iPhone, either for announcement or shipping. Though the closeness of the timing indicates they overlapped in development periods.
As to similarity, the phone is a black rounded rectangle, but that's where the similarity stops. The UI is nothing like the iPhone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c1fc8120hA It's interesting to watch actually because this was designed to be a cutting edge UI, and would have been accepted as such, had the iPhone not come out. The iPhone UI was so much better - a generation ahead.
The standard OSX shortcut for open is Cmd-O. That's the one listed in the menu. Cmd-Down (not Ctrl-Down) also works as it's works together with Cmd-Up for moving up up and down the directory hierarchy.
There's nothing wrong with using Enter for open, but there's nothing wrong with using Cmd-O for it either.
However there's everything wrong with using F2 for rename - of the things you mention, that is the one that is clearly arbitrary and illogical.
So we should all be using Xerox and CP/M shortcuts because they came first?
I'm not the one suggesting copying. I'm simply pointing out that most of Windows keystrokes are what they are because they were copied. And not just from Apple either - the Alt+ combinations for accessing menu command were copied from someone else - I think IBM.
I'm not bothered because Apple thinks that some shortcuts might work better, but for fuck's sake... offer an option to change them.
There are options to change them, globally or within any app. Last I looked that was more than Windows can do.
The marketshare of Windows says otherwise for the rest of the world.
There were a number of reasons for Windows' one time monopoly. Quality was never one of them. Now as the world has become more sophisticated in it's demands for computing devices, Windows is losing marketshare. They no longer qualify as a monopoly. Windows PCs are declining year-on-year. Macs are growing 21%.
And it would be all fine and dandy if that browser was always IE, providing it was Microsoft selling to end users, as they do via shrink-wrap, or hypothetically if they sold the PC itself, as Apple does.
The problem is that for the most part Windows is sold to OEMs as nothing more than a component of a PC package. That being the case, those OEMs should be free to install a different browser as well as or instead of IE. Yet Microsoft were using anti-competitive practices to force OEMs to use IE, using their power as monopoly supplier of OSs. You aren't allowed to leverage dominance in one market (OSs) to create a monopoly in another market (browsers). And in the late 90s, that's exactly what Microsoft was doing.
Now it all looks a bit ridiculous because Microsoft no longer has the power it has in the late 1990s. Their efforts at browser monopoly were thwarted by the legal actions, and now Windows has less than 90% of the market (as opposed to 95% then) and Windows market share is shrinking. They are no longer threat they were, not because they suddenly developed some morals, but because Gates had been the man behind their success, and he left the company to the donkey they call Ballmer.
And yet people are switching. The PC market is in slight decline. Macs are growing 21% per annum. Here's the thing - when people switch it's because they are dissatisfied with the way Windows works. So making OSX more Windows like is the last thing Apple should do.
And what confusion they would cause expecting existing Mac users to change what they are used to !!!
I don't see anyone else selling pitted aluminum laptops
In much the same way that you don't see many car companies selling cars with aluminium or carbon fibre body shells. Apple's unibody aluminium laptop bodies are years ahead of the competition.
or fractured glass backed phones. I do see companies selling Gorilla Glass displays though, it's actually quite sturdy.
The glass on the back of the iPhone IS Gorilla glass.
As for 'hard to use', there's a balance between 'what I want to do' and 'remove everything that isn't absurdly trivial'. Apple leans towards the latter.
There is a balance, and Apple is the best in the industry at making that balance.
Hidden files are hidden for a reason. They are hidden because users don't need to interact with them, and indeed would likely cause bad things to happen if they moved or deleted them. Developers need to be able to see them, and they know the terminal command to change the option. But it shouldn't be a user accessible option.
configuring finder, services, figuring out how to un-break dashboard once it goes to break-loop since they removed rosetta in lion etc. all that does take time, as does just coping with itunes and icloud popups and removing them from view. maybe you haven't had to do that in 10 years
No, in 10 years I don't recognise any of those experiences. iTunes and iCloud pop-ups only when installing upgrading. Perhaps you've been fucking about with those hidden files you don't understand.
And for someone who's preferred OS seems to be Windows to be complaining about unwanted pop-ups is the most ironic thing I've heard all week.
The DPI issue is a valid criticism though. Though it's not hit me personally because I've not got a HiDef monitor.
But no OS is perfect. When I switched from Windows 10 years ago I did so because the list of things that were awful was as long as my arm. The Windows UI was so bad it made me angry. If I were to sit down in front of a Windows PC now, I could create you a long list of things that are awful. But I have no desire to subject myself to that, even if there were a PC handy. But to give you two fundamentally broken things that I know are still in Windows - The Registry, which fills up with crap over time and slows the system down till eventually a clean reinstall is required. And file systems that need defragging from time to time.
Your post just confirms what I assumed in the earlier post. By "sane" you mean "like Windows".
The idea that Windows keyboard shortcuts are correct and Mac OS ones are wrong is just moronic. Neither is wrong or right - they're just different. Note that Mac OS keystrokes came first. Most of the Windows ones are the same, but with using the CTRL key, because Microsoft copied them yet didn't have an Apple Command key.
Just to tackle a couple in particular: What you say about Play/pause always starting iTunes is just false. If for example I have VLC open, then the play/pause key operates that. It'll operate whichever AV program is nearest the foreground at any one time. If there is no AV app open, then pressing play will indeed open iTunes. That's the most sensible way the computer can respond to the request. The only possible reason for you not liking it is if Windows lacks that functionality.
As to defrag, again that's your preconceived Windows idea. Windows has a crap file system that degraded if you don't defrag it. The Mac OS disk format effectively defrags as it goes. Mac OS doesn't have a separate defrag app because it doesn't need one. For sure, for people like you who believe that Windows defects must be defects in Mac OS too, there are of course companies who will take your money for a program that shifts files around the drive. As PT Barnum said: there's one born every minute.
Your comment about the number of options also betrays flawed thinking - that more options is always better. Some options are essential - for example setting a default paper size in a document app. But many options in badly written software - usually on Windows - are there purely because the developer couldn't make sensible choices and defers the choice to the user. Take Vuze as an example - under its original identity as Azureus, it had something like 50 pages of options. So many options pages it had to have a hierarchical tree of options pages.
Few of the options make any sense to users, and changing many of them will result in you not being able to download torrents any more, without any clue as to why. It was such a big fuck-up that when they changed the name to Vuze, they shipped a new default UI without most of the options - but ironically with an option to switch back to the old UI. Good software had options for those things that are really needed, and avoids having unnecessary and confusing options.
Mac OS isn't perfect, but it's so much better than Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, neither Xerox nor anyone else had pull-down menus nor anything like it. Xerox used buttons for commands. Either physical buttons on the custom keyboard, or screen buttons rather like a text button version of a modern day toolbar. Nothing like pull-down menus.
So, what you call "pull down menus" was a minor graphical variation on existing practice at the time.
There's nothing minor about it. The two dimensional menus within a menu concept was novel, new and is a central ingredient of most GUI OSs to this day.
Whether or not it's attached to the screen or the app window *IS* a minor variation, yet that's something you bring up in the hope of changing this from a discussion of fact, to one of preference.
I'm no fan of Bill Gates, but he did write the original Microsoft BASIC back in the mid 1970s, and fit it in 4K, the first person do do such a thing. Now, lots of people could do it, but then, with the tools and knowledge of the day it was quite a feat. He's certainly a software engineer, and a notable one at that.
I like to make fun of web app developers too. But in reality it is real software engineering, often with a greater variety of skills needed than classic programming. Not for the simplest web sites, but certainly for something like a social app.
I agree they are scumbags, but they are successful company founding software engineer scumbags.
I'm not going to bring up a list of every Silicon Valley company that isn't Apple, Microsoft, or Google just to find MBAs who do a good job of running their companies.
The fact that you'd have to scan a list to find some MBAs and I just listed the founders of the top tech companies says it all.
Linking a page with over hundred iPhone images is no help either ;D
It serves very well to show that the switch you described is not and has never existed on iOS.
Well, on my GFs IPhone you can not slide the "switches".
Given that real iPhone switches neither look nor work how you're describing, Clearly it's not an iPhone. Do you even have a GF?
OK, I see what you mean. But even there, some icons are irreplaceable:
1) Close, Minimise and Maximise at the corner of every app window. How much more ugly and less usable they would be if they were words instead of icons?
2) What about arrows on the scroll bar ends? You can do scroll bars without them now, but back in 1995, many people were new to computers and needed the clue as to what that strip at the right of the window did.
3) In a file manager list, how are you going to distinguish between a directory and a file? In DOS, they were distinguished with a column with either
4) What about a Win 95 choice field? What how would you indicate it opens up to give a selection without the down arrow icon?
Bullshit. Pulldown menus existed in many software products.
Name a single one that preceded the Lisa. You can't because Apple did indeed invent the pull down menu.
Wikipedia even mentions it. Though they erroneously call them drop-down menus (which was a Microsoft variant) rather than pull down menus as Apple called them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface
I recognise your user name as someone who is very often wrong. I suggest you should do a little research before posting in future.
I didn't say anything about software engineers. Saying that MBAs are bad isn't the same as saying software engineers are good.
I wouldn't have included Steve Jobs on the list if I'd been making a point about software engineers.
Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg obviously are software engineers though, unless you're discounting them for dropping out to create companies rather than finish their studies. Which would be pretty silly because dropping out of college to create a company is an even bigger pointer to success than not being an MBA.
Thanks for bringing up Eric Schmidt. He too is a software engineer, not an MBA.
You're missing what is in common with the names I mentioned. What percentage of people who CREATED successful companies are MBAs. How close to 0%?
Sure once the founders retire or die, the companies find new people to run them. At that stage MBAs seem like the right qualification. But those MBAs are invariably far less successful than the founders.
What are you talking about? iOS switches nether look nor behave how you're describing. Below you can see no end of examples of iOS switches. And if you actually use one you'd find that you can indeed slide them.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=uiswitch&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=imvns&source=lnms&tbm=isch&ei=pujOTsrBHIWf8gP9uezsCQ&sa=X&oi=mode_link&ct=mode&cd=2&ved=0CA8Q_AUoAQ&biw=1199&bih=668#hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=uiswitch&oq=uiswitch&aq=f&aqi=g1g-m1g-S6g-sS1g-S1&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=38918l39617l2l40348l8l3l0l0l0l1l242l486l1.1.1l3l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.,cf.osb&fp=d8d6bd19e1503ed0&biw=1199&bih=668
Your complaints only apply to badly designed icons. ...other than your complaint about icons on the desktop. I'd agree that they are a waste of time.
getting rid of pretty much all the software infrastructure of the Xerox devices, stripping them down to a mere shell
Yeah, right. "Stripping". By adding things like pull down menus and drag and drop. Things that didn't exist on the Xerox system. Things that didn't exist at all till Apple invented them.
What's your idea of good computer design? Let me guess... a teletype emulation?
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergy Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg... Not an MBA amongst them. Where are these MBAs that know how to run companies?
Yes, it's more expensive, does more, does it better, and has 90% of the market.
When the batteries fail on them, they will end up scrapped, no one will want a crappy economy car with a dead battery that doesn't even get good gas mileage anymore.
Early Priuses are now more than 10 years old and the batteries have hardly degraded. Looks like they don't need to be changed any more often than an engine in an internal combustion engine car.
http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/02/200000-mile-toyota-prius-still-performs.html
Note the average life of a car is about 13 years. The very first production Priuses are already older than that.
What about the battery pack that needs to be replaced every 1-2 year? What about the limited mileage per charge?
Bullshit.
Consumer reports tested a Prius after 10 years, and compared it with a test of a similar model when it was new. In 10 years and 200,000 miles, the battery performance had hardly degraded at all.
http://news.consumerreports.org/cars/2011/02/200000-mile-toyota-prius-still-performs.html
Pretty stupid t comment without clicking on the link. The paper is actually a debunking of some stupid claims in the rightwing echo-chamber that a Hummer was more environmentally friendly in a dust-to-dust comparison than a Prius.
What fucking retards righwingers are to believe such shit in the first place.
Wired mice have a big advantage on an untidy desk. You never lose the mouse. As long as it's not so untidy you lose the computer it's plugged in to...
According to your own link, that phone wasn't sold in Feb 2007, it was only announced then. It wasn't sold until Nov 2007. For the iPhone, the equivalent dates are Jan 2007 and Jun 2007. So no, it certainly does not predate the iPhone, either for announcement or shipping. Though the closeness of the timing indicates they overlapped in development periods.
As to similarity, the phone is a black rounded rectangle, but that's where the similarity stops. The UI is nothing like the iPhone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c1fc8120hA
It's interesting to watch actually because this was designed to be a cutting edge UI, and would have been accepted as such, had the iPhone not come out. The iPhone UI was so much better - a generation ahead.
Which one sounds sane: Ctrl+Down to open
The standard OSX shortcut for open is Cmd-O. That's the one listed in the menu. Cmd-Down (not Ctrl-Down) also works as it's works together with Cmd-Up for moving up up and down the directory hierarchy.
There's nothing wrong with using Enter for open, but there's nothing wrong with using Cmd-O for it either.
However there's everything wrong with using F2 for rename - of the things you mention, that is the one that is clearly arbitrary and illogical.
So we should all be using Xerox and CP/M shortcuts because they came first?
I'm not the one suggesting copying. I'm simply pointing out that most of Windows keystrokes are what they are because they were copied. And not just from Apple either - the Alt+ combinations for accessing menu command were copied from someone else - I think IBM.
I'm not bothered because Apple thinks that some shortcuts might work better, but for fuck's sake ... offer an option to change them.
There are options to change them, globally or within any app. Last I looked that was more than Windows can do.
The marketshare of Windows says otherwise for the rest of the world.
There were a number of reasons for Windows' one time monopoly. Quality was never one of them. Now as the world has become more sophisticated in it's demands for computing devices, Windows is losing marketshare. They no longer qualify as a monopoly. Windows PCs are declining year-on-year. Macs are growing 21%.
First off you need a browser on OS install
And it would be all fine and dandy if that browser was always IE, providing it was Microsoft selling to end users, as they do via shrink-wrap, or hypothetically if they sold the PC itself, as Apple does.
The problem is that for the most part Windows is sold to OEMs as nothing more than a component of a PC package. That being the case, those OEMs should be free to install a different browser as well as or instead of IE. Yet Microsoft were using anti-competitive practices to force OEMs to use IE, using their power as monopoly supplier of OSs. You aren't allowed to leverage dominance in one market (OSs) to create a monopoly in another market (browsers). And in the late 90s, that's exactly what Microsoft was doing.
Now it all looks a bit ridiculous because Microsoft no longer has the power it has in the late 1990s. Their efforts at browser monopoly were thwarted by the legal actions, and now Windows has less than 90% of the market (as opposed to 95% then) and Windows market share is shrinking. They are no longer threat they were, not because they suddenly developed some morals, but because Gates had been the man behind their success, and he left the company to the donkey they call Ballmer.
And yet people are switching. The PC market is in slight decline. Macs are growing 21% per annum. Here's the thing - when people switch it's because they are dissatisfied with the way Windows works. So making OSX more Windows like is the last thing Apple should do.
And what confusion they would cause expecting existing Mac users to change what they are used to !!!
I don't see anyone else selling pitted aluminum laptops
In much the same way that you don't see many car companies selling cars with aluminium or carbon fibre body shells. Apple's unibody aluminium laptop bodies are years ahead of the competition.
or fractured glass backed phones. I do see companies selling Gorilla Glass displays though, it's actually quite sturdy.
The glass on the back of the iPhone IS Gorilla glass.
As for 'hard to use', there's a balance between 'what I want to do' and 'remove everything that isn't absurdly trivial'. Apple leans towards the latter.
There is a balance, and Apple is the best in the industry at making that balance.
Hidden files are hidden for a reason. They are hidden because users don't need to interact with them, and indeed would likely cause bad things to happen if they moved or deleted them. Developers need to be able to see them, and they know the terminal command to change the option. But it shouldn't be a user accessible option.
configuring finder, services, figuring out how to un-break dashboard once it goes to break-loop since they removed rosetta in lion etc. all that does take time, as does just coping with itunes and icloud popups and removing them from view. maybe you haven't had to do that in 10 years
No, in 10 years I don't recognise any of those experiences. iTunes and iCloud pop-ups only when installing upgrading. Perhaps you've been fucking about with those hidden files you don't understand.
And for someone who's preferred OS seems to be Windows to be complaining about unwanted pop-ups is the most ironic thing I've heard all week.
The DPI issue is a valid criticism though. Though it's not hit me personally because I've not got a HiDef monitor.
But no OS is perfect. When I switched from Windows 10 years ago I did so because the list of things that were awful was as long as my arm. The Windows UI was so bad it made me angry. If I were to sit down in front of a Windows PC now, I could create you a long list of things that are awful. But I have no desire to subject myself to that, even if there were a PC handy. But to give you two fundamentally broken things that I know are still in Windows - The Registry, which fills up with crap over time and slows the system down till eventually a clean reinstall is required. And file systems that need defragging from time to time.
Your post just confirms what I assumed in the earlier post. By "sane" you mean "like Windows".
The idea that Windows keyboard shortcuts are correct and Mac OS ones are wrong is just moronic. Neither is wrong or right - they're just different. Note that Mac OS keystrokes came first. Most of the Windows ones are the same, but with using the CTRL key, because Microsoft copied them yet didn't have an Apple Command key.
Just to tackle a couple in particular: What you say about Play/pause always starting iTunes is just false. If for example I have VLC open, then the play/pause key operates that. It'll operate whichever AV program is nearest the foreground at any one time. If there is no AV app open, then pressing play will indeed open iTunes. That's the most sensible way the computer can respond to the request. The only possible reason for you not liking it is if Windows lacks that functionality.
As to defrag, again that's your preconceived Windows idea. Windows has a crap file system that degraded if you don't defrag it. The Mac OS disk format effectively defrags as it goes. Mac OS doesn't have a separate defrag app because it doesn't need one. For sure, for people like you who believe that Windows defects must be defects in Mac OS too, there are of course companies who will take your money for a program that shifts files around the drive. As PT Barnum said: there's one born every minute.
Your comment about the number of options also betrays flawed thinking - that more options is always better. Some options are essential - for example setting a default paper size in a document app. But many options in badly written software - usually on Windows - are there purely because the developer couldn't make sensible choices and defers the choice to the user. Take Vuze as an example - under its original identity as Azureus, it had something like 50 pages of options. So many options pages it had to have a hierarchical tree of options pages.
Few of the options make any sense to users, and changing many of them will result in you not being able to download torrents any more, without any clue as to why. It was such a big fuck-up that when they changed the name to Vuze, they shipped a new default UI without most of the options - but ironically with an option to switch back to the old UI. Good software had options for those things that are really needed, and avoids having unnecessary and confusing options.
Mac OS isn't perfect, but it's so much better than Windows.