If you want a portable desktop that you can hack and have stuff easily portable from existing desktop code, you want to take a look at the IPAQ or Agenda. I've got an agenda, and it's cool as technology in and of itself (remote display and Apache on an organizer, how cool it that?). It has a consumer IR feature, which alone justifies buying the hardware. But cool is really all it is; it wasn't designed to be usable. Buttons are located in weird places, it is very slow, and some UI design decisions are absolutely attrocious. Agenda can't really decide whether they are targeting the non technical-user who is largely interested in PIM or the linux geek who wants a cool and snazzy portable linux box.
If you want a mission-critical, easy-to-use organizer where UI (both hardware-wise and software-wise) is not an afterthought, the only solution is palm. The palm has had a lot of mac influence in the UI, and MacOS has had a far better track record on user interface issues than microsoft or the linux community. Also, PalmOS by design is far more responsive interface-wise than linux is. PalmOS gives special priority to handling UI events which is something that linux simply just doesn't do. If anyone thinks this explanation is BS, then why is my 8-16mhz palm far more responsive than my 66mhz Agenda? While PalmOS doesn't really multi-task, for what most people use it for (dates, phone numbers, etc) multi-tasking is a non-issue. The design of the palm is well thought out; it was modelled after a block of wood a guy carried around in his pocket for a month. The other PDA's (both Linux and Wince) were modelled after that clunky thing sitting on your desk. The question of which design decision makes more sense I leave up to you.
Not that there's anything wrong with either group of people, but both have radically different needs and radically different definitions of what failure truly is. For a geek, failure is something not running optimally, or some cool feature getting disabled, or something that comprimises security. For an end user, the definition of failure is not bloat. Nor is it crashing. The greatest failure for a desktop, end-user is something not working. The cost of something not working far exceeds any other cost, whether that cost be the cost of more RAM, disk space, performance, or really anything else. End users want their programs to "simply just work". And they have the constant, gnawing fear that virtually anything they do will screw up their computer so badly that it won't be able to do the valuable work they need it to do. For the end user, a dynamically linked AbiWord or Gnumeric going tits up two hours before they have to hand a report to the boss is far, far worse than statically linked AbiWord or Gnumeric using lots of RAM in an unefficient manner.
Comparing dynamic linking to static linking is like comparing a Ferrari to an M1 tank. They both have their advantages, but guess which one you want on the battlefield of the desktop?
Okay, so it's sounds a little crazy. But why not teach elisp and emacs? I think that too often, CS students who are not complete geeks like ourselves go into CS not really having any decent tools that they can use to expedite drudgerous tasks. They're given assignments to create things that will be of little or no value to them once they're done with the class (unless they can get hours of amusement out of playing cheesy simple tic-tac-toe games). By teaching an editor that has a very good scripting language (one could even teach a scriptable editor other than emacs/elisp, if it's really against their religion), you can show students that they can use their programming skills to create useful tools that they can use to write more code faster and better, and with less drudgery. If I knew how to effectively use elisp/emacs when I first became a CS student, my grades in those first few classes would have been far higher.
While I do use linux quite a lot (which sort of qualifies me as a linux geek), I think that most linux geeks think of a GUI only as a cool feature, not as a tool for helping people less obsessed with technology to simply just do their work. Every time I mention some sort of usabililty principle around a linux geek, I get the response of "That's what you want. That's not what I want. It's a matter of opinion" even though this UI principle has been proven effective in usability labs to allow the user greater, more effective use of their computer. I recently met this one guy who's well known throughout the GNOME community who justified some very bad and confusing UI design he did with the sentance "because I like it". When I mentioned some usability problems with this piece of software he created, this person couldn'lt understand what problem was. "It wasn't pretty enough?" he asked. Most of GNOME (and for that matter, KDE) is really the same way. I'm not saying that just the linux world is soley at fault, because most of the industry (including M$ and most other Windoze developers) are really the same way. The main difference is the windows world just cares about money and usability doesn't matter, whereas the linux world cares about being geeky and usability doesn't matter. Usability is simply not a priority despite everything these two groups of people say. I have been thinking more and more that it is time for UI designers and other people who want to create quality user interfaces to start a rebellion and design their own OS and desktop environment.
Jakob Nielsen, Mr. web usability guru, has some interesting views on smart tags other than "smart tags are evil" (though he does point out they can be abused). Apparently, smart tags are a legitimate part of hypertext theory. I did not know that.
The debate over whether electromagnetic fields cause cancer has been debated for quite some time. Most often cited as examples of this connection between electromagnetic waves and cancer are power lines and people who live next to them who get disproportionately more weird cancers than the rest of the population. One theory that's popped up recently to explain this is that it's not the EM radiation from that power lines directly causing the cancer, but that the electric lines ionize the nasty pollution in the air, thus allowing the harmful particles to stick to human body parts like lungs far easier than they otherwise could in an unionized state. A few studies done supporting this theory showed that people who lived downwind from the power lines were more likely than average to get cancer. Could it be possible that it's not the EM radiation from cell phones that's directly causing cancer, but instead indirectly causing it through manipulation of environmental carcinogens?
>Argument for Windows 2000
>Matt: The year: 1995. The operating system:
>Windows 95. The interface: a taskbar along the
>bottom of the screen, containing a button called
>Start and a series of little buttons
>representing each open program. At the left of
>the bar, a clock and a few little icons for
>launching background programs (the kind of >things Mac folk would probably call plug-ins).
Unfortunately the user is given no choice as whether to have those plug-ins in that corner. Those buttons appear pretty much without rhyme or reason (in other words, at the whim of the developer). The user does not have the option to add stuff to that corner (called the system tray). The icons are almost too small to be discerable. And their smallness presents a drawback I explain in the next paragraph
>If you were unsure about anything on the screen, >you could right-click it, and a menu would
>appear with loads of options, usually including
>a Properties box that explained everything.
If the user will be unsure of what something does, you are supposed to label it. The user should never have right click on something to find out what it does. You don't have to write the entire contents of war and peace in the label, but the label should clearly announce what action the button performs. The icon such as those in the system tray should also be made bigger, because a larger icon will have more detail that will betray the true purpose of the button. OSX doesn't use labels for items in the dock like it should, but at least Apple made the dock icons large enough that the user is able to understand what the icons do. Why make buttons larger by labelling them and giving them big icons? It has to do with something called fitt's law, which states that the time to access a visual target (e.g. a button) is due to the distance to that target and it's size. This link gives a good explanation of the phenommenon. http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html If one studies a user's habits, one often observes that users will click large, labelled buttons far more than the small, unlabelled buttons because on an unconscious level, the user understands that these buttons are faster to access. Compare the large, labelled buttons with big icons that you tend to find in browsers with the tiny, unlabelled icons you find in Microsoft office, and you'll notice that users will tend to use the browser buttons but will avoid using most of the MS Office buttons. The OSX dock has much larger buttons than the system tray, so users will most likely end up using them more and with greater efficiency. Really, one of the biggest weaknesses of the entire windows development world are the small, cryptic toolbar buttons. They are neither fast to access nor useful in graphically explaining most features. Their only purpose is to be mysterious and unusable and intimidate the user by cluttering their environment with even more stuff they won't understand.
>Fast-forward to Windows 2000 and you don't see
>too many changes. Certainly, a few evolutionary
>tweaks have shown up along the way. A toolbar
>appeared next to the Start button that launches >new programs with a single mouse click. Then
>there's bubble help: rest your mouse near an
>item for long enough, and Windows 2000 pops up a
>cartoon bubble explaining what to do (a nice
>feature that, yes, first showed up Mac-side).
>And Windows 2000 sports an adaptive menu feature
>as well, which drops infrequently used items
>from the Start menu to make it easier to launch
> commonly used items.
Many user interface designers have thoroughly bashed Microsoft for the adaptive menu "feature" in office 2000. The same really applies to Windows 2000 as well. The interface should never decide to rearrange itself without the users explicit permission. And just because a user does not often use something does not mean that they won't want to be able to find it when they *do* need it. I don't ordinarily use the fire extinguisher in my kitchen, but that doesn't mean I don't want it in plain sight when I need it.
>Now, some might call this interface dull. In
>fact, it is dull--as dull as having the gas on
>the right and the brake on the left.
Actually, Microsoft tends to do the opposite. They put the break on the right and the gas on the left. I'm referring of course to their ordering of dialog buttons, which puts the affirmative/"go ahead" button (typically "OK) on the left, and then negative/"go back" button on the right. This contrasts with the way that Western culture (as well as the mac) does it. In a car, the left pedal stops the car, the right pedal goes ahead. On an analogue clock, to go back in time, a hand goes to the left; to go ahead, the hand goes to the right. To go back in a book, you go left; when you go ahead in a book, you go right. In web browsers, the arrow button pointing left goes back, and the arrow button point right goes forward. Apple was smart enough to understand this; Microsoft wasn't.
>Not everyone drives a car, of course, and
>likewise, not everyone knows Windows' interface
>(ha!). But at least Windows 2000 is predictable,
>and any enhancements come so naturally that you
> may not even notice that they're there. For an
>operating system, that's a pretty good thing.
Microsoft has shown a complete unwillingness to correct bad interface decisions made in a previous version of their software with improvements made in the next one. Probably because of this "predictability" (not to be confused with consistancy, which *is* a good thing in a UI). How long did it take before microsoft killed the "window-within-window" MDI in Office? Then there's clippy, the talking paperclip. This idea was ill conceived from the start, but it took Microsoft 4 years too long to him. These were ideas that any UI designer 10 years ago would tell you are stupid, but that didn't matter to Microsoft. I've heard microsoft has their own usability people and supposedly there are well funded usability labs, but they are either completely incompetant or the programmers don't take any of their advice or apply any of their data.
As for arguments with CNET's conclusion, Windows 2000 does make far better use of contextual menus, which are UI elements with the fastest access time of all (as they appear right under the user's pointer). Apple should add a second mouse button and improve contextual menu support. However, Windows 2000 has weakness of having pull-down menus attached to each window instead of a menubar at the top of the screen. Menus that are attached to each window are far slower to access than menus on a menubar at the top of the screen because it the user has to spend extra time making sure that the mouse doesn't vertically overshoot the menus attached to the windows. Menus at the top of the screen are impossible to overshoot because they sit right on a border. Such menus are up to five times faster to access than menus attached to windows. Again, this is due to fitts' law.
If CNET took these serious interface factors into account, I seriously doubt Windows 2000 would have won.
Once Microsoft has another $10-20 billion in cash, Bill Gates will finally be able to buy himself a decent haircut.
GIMP will have to cater to mac users
on
GIMP And OS X
·
· Score: 2
Two issues I see for a GIMP port to OS X
1. If GIMP is expected to win people over from Photoshop, one thing the developers will have to do (eventually) is to optimize stuff for the G4's Altivec vector processing unit. Photoshop currently supports Altivec (half the reason Altivec exists *is* photoshop) and GIMP will have to support it as well if it is expected to be taken seriously
2. The interface has to be made consistent with the mac user interface. Many mac users (me included) do not like having a UI that stinks of Windows (e.g. main menus on windows instead of menubar, underline accelerators, Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, etc) and at some point somebody is going to have to do a mac implementation of the GIMP UI.
Microsoft CEO's Warning: studies indicate that this product may cause increased security, greater stability, and may contribute to competition. System Administrators who wish to remain insane are suggested to avoid using this product.
The next bill up for decision will involve a proposed 5 day waiting period for a nerf gun. You can bet that lobbyists for ThinkGeek will be crawling all over the state capital.
History has shown that when there is stuff people get rid of in mass quantities, the few items that survive the great purge eventually become incredibly valuable antiques. I would not be the least bit surpised if 150 years from now that Dell 486 in your basement would fetch a small fortune. Maybe one day my great-grandchildren will be on the Geek Antique Road Show showing off great-grandpa's inspiron that ran linux as well as some other weird proprietary OS that everyone forget about.
In days of old when knights were bold and powerbooks were yet invented, the keyboard of laptops hung right at the edge of the laptop. There was no place to rest your wrists. One of the great innovations of Apple that everyone else has since had copied (thank god) was one of the things that made the powerbook revolutionary: it added plenty of space below the keyboard where your tired tendons could take a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Billy, and Craig
If you want a portable desktop that you can hack and have stuff easily portable from existing desktop code, you want to take a look at the IPAQ or Agenda. I've got an agenda, and it's cool as technology in and of itself (remote display and Apache on an organizer, how cool it that?). It has a consumer IR feature, which alone justifies buying the hardware. But cool is really all it is; it wasn't designed to be usable. Buttons are located in weird places, it is very slow, and some UI design decisions are absolutely attrocious. Agenda can't really decide whether they are targeting the non technical-user who is largely interested in PIM or the linux geek who wants a cool and snazzy portable linux box.
If you want a mission-critical, easy-to-use organizer where UI (both hardware-wise and software-wise) is not an afterthought, the only solution is palm. The palm has had a lot of mac influence in the UI, and MacOS has had a far better track record on user interface issues than microsoft or the linux community. Also, PalmOS by design is far more responsive interface-wise than linux is. PalmOS gives special priority to handling UI events which is something that linux simply just doesn't do. If anyone thinks this explanation is BS, then why is my 8-16mhz palm far more responsive than my 66mhz Agenda? While PalmOS doesn't really multi-task, for what most people use it for (dates, phone numbers, etc) multi-tasking is a non-issue. The design of the palm is well thought out; it was modelled after a block of wood a guy carried around in his pocket for a month. The other PDA's (both Linux and Wince) were modelled after that clunky thing sitting on your desk. The question of which design decision makes more sense I leave up to you.
Oh yeah! She can ride my rocket any day of the week.
Snow White and the Seven Devils of Kimon, coming to a theatre near you.
Not that there's anything wrong with either group of people, but both have radically different needs and radically different definitions of what failure truly is. For a geek, failure is something not running optimally, or some cool feature getting disabled, or something that comprimises security. For an end user, the definition of failure is not bloat. Nor is it crashing. The greatest failure for a desktop, end-user is something not working. The cost of something not working far exceeds any other cost, whether that cost be the cost of more RAM, disk space, performance, or really anything else. End users want their programs to "simply just work". And they have the constant, gnawing fear that virtually anything they do will screw up their computer so badly that it won't be able to do the valuable work they need it to do. For the end user, a dynamically linked AbiWord or Gnumeric going tits up two hours before they have to hand a report to the boss is far, far worse than statically linked AbiWord or Gnumeric using lots of RAM in an unefficient manner.
Comparing dynamic linking to static linking is like comparing a Ferrari to an M1 tank. They both have their advantages, but guess which one you want on the battlefield of the desktop?
http://www.animalvoice.com/carnivore_preservation_ trust.htm
The phrase "zero knowledge" will no longer be associated in any way with the Linux community. So, what's the problem?
Okay, so it's sounds a little crazy. But why not teach elisp and emacs? I think that too often, CS students who are not complete geeks like ourselves go into CS not really having any decent tools that they can use to expedite drudgerous tasks. They're given assignments to create things that will be of little or no value to them once they're done with the class (unless they can get hours of amusement out of playing cheesy simple tic-tac-toe games). By teaching an editor that has a very good scripting language (one could even teach a scriptable editor other than emacs/elisp, if it's really against their religion), you can show students that they can use their programming skills to create useful tools that they can use to write more code faster and better, and with less drudgery. If I knew how to effectively use elisp/emacs when I first became a CS student, my grades in those first few classes would have been far higher.
They sell all the crack they own at fire sale prices to buy more audio equipment
While I do use linux quite a lot (which sort of qualifies me as a linux geek), I think that most linux geeks think of a GUI only as a cool feature, not as a tool for helping people less obsessed with technology to simply just do their work. Every time I mention some sort of usabililty principle around a linux geek, I get the response of "That's what you want. That's not what I want. It's a matter of opinion" even though this UI principle has been proven effective in usability labs to allow the user greater, more effective use of their computer. I recently met this one guy who's well known throughout the GNOME community who justified some very bad and confusing UI design he did with the sentance "because I like it". When I mentioned some usability problems with this piece of software he created, this person couldn'lt understand what problem was. "It wasn't pretty enough?" he asked. Most of GNOME (and for that matter, KDE) is really the same way. I'm not saying that just the linux world is soley at fault, because most of the industry (including M$ and most other Windoze developers) are really the same way. The main difference is the windows world just cares about money and usability doesn't matter, whereas the linux world cares about being geeky and usability doesn't matter. Usability is simply not a priority despite everything these two groups of people say. I have been thinking more and more that it is time for UI designers and other people who want to create quality user interfaces to start a rebellion and design their own OS and desktop environment.
Jakob Nielsen, Mr. web usability guru, has some interesting views on smart tags other than "smart tags are evil" (though he does point out they can be abused). Apparently, smart tags are a legitimate part of hypertext theory. I did not know that.
You can find it at http://www.useit.com/
The debate over whether electromagnetic fields cause cancer has been debated for quite some time. Most often cited as examples of this connection between electromagnetic waves and cancer are power lines and people who live next to them who get disproportionately more weird cancers than the rest of the population. One theory that's popped up recently to explain this is that it's not the EM radiation from that power lines directly causing the cancer, but that the electric lines ionize the nasty pollution in the air, thus allowing the harmful particles to stick to human body parts like lungs far easier than they otherwise could in an unionized state. A few studies done supporting this theory showed that people who lived downwind from the power lines were more likely than average to get cancer. Could it be possible that it's not the EM radiation from cell phones that's directly causing cancer, but instead indirectly causing it through manipulation of environmental carcinogens?
Now instead of using crowbars are molotov cocktails, the thieves and anarchists will use ICBM's.
If one of those airships crashes, the entire population of Charlotte will be talking like mickey mouse.
>Argument for Windows 2000
t ts.html If one studies a user's habits, one often observes that users will click large, labelled buttons far more than the small, unlabelled buttons because on an unconscious level, the user understands that these buttons are faster to access. Compare the large, labelled buttons with big icons that you tend to find in browsers with the tiny, unlabelled icons you find in Microsoft office, and you'll notice that users will tend to use the browser buttons but will avoid using most of the MS Office buttons. The OSX dock has much larger buttons than the system tray, so users will most likely end up using them more and with greater efficiency. Really, one of the biggest weaknesses of the entire windows development world are the small, cryptic toolbar buttons. They are neither fast to access nor useful in graphically explaining most features. Their only purpose is to be mysterious and unusable and intimidate the user by cluttering their environment with even more stuff they won't understand.
>Matt: The year: 1995. The operating system:
>Windows 95. The interface: a taskbar along the
>bottom of the screen, containing a button called
>Start and a series of little buttons
>representing each open program. At the left of
>the bar, a clock and a few little icons for
>launching background programs (the kind of >things Mac folk would probably call plug-ins).
Unfortunately the user is given no choice as whether to have those plug-ins in that corner. Those buttons appear pretty much without rhyme or reason (in other words, at the whim of the developer). The user does not have the option to add stuff to that corner (called the system tray). The icons are almost too small to be discerable. And their smallness presents a drawback I explain in the next paragraph
>If you were unsure about anything on the screen, >you could right-click it, and a menu would
>appear with loads of options, usually including
>a Properties box that explained everything.
If the user will be unsure of what something does, you are supposed to label it. The user should never have right click on something to find out what it does. You don't have to write the entire contents of war and peace in the label, but the label should clearly announce what action the button performs. The icon such as those in the system tray should also be made bigger, because a larger icon will have more detail that will betray the true purpose of the button. OSX doesn't use labels for items in the dock like it should, but at least Apple made the dock icons large enough that the user is able to understand what the icons do. Why make buttons larger by labelling them and giving them big icons? It has to do with something called fitt's law, which states that the time to access a visual target (e.g. a button) is due to the distance to that target and it's size. This link gives a good explanation of the phenommenon. http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFi
>Fast-forward to Windows 2000 and you don't see
>too many changes. Certainly, a few evolutionary
>tweaks have shown up along the way. A toolbar
>appeared next to the Start button that launches >new programs with a single mouse click. Then
>there's bubble help: rest your mouse near an
>item for long enough, and Windows 2000 pops up a
>cartoon bubble explaining what to do (a nice
>feature that, yes, first showed up Mac-side).
>And Windows 2000 sports an adaptive menu feature
>as well, which drops infrequently used items
>from the Start menu to make it easier to launch
> commonly used items.
Many user interface designers have thoroughly bashed Microsoft for the adaptive menu "feature" in office 2000. The same really applies to Windows 2000 as well. The interface should never decide to rearrange itself without the users explicit permission. And just because a user does not often use something does not mean that they won't want to be able to find it when they *do* need it. I don't ordinarily use the fire extinguisher in my kitchen, but that doesn't mean I don't want it in plain sight when I need it.
>Now, some might call this interface dull. In
>fact, it is dull--as dull as having the gas on
>the right and the brake on the left.
Actually, Microsoft tends to do the opposite. They put the break on the right and the gas on the left. I'm referring of course to their ordering of dialog buttons, which puts the affirmative/"go ahead" button (typically "OK) on the left, and then negative/"go back" button on the right. This contrasts with the way that Western culture (as well as the mac) does it. In a car, the left pedal stops the car, the right pedal goes ahead. On an analogue clock, to go back in time, a hand goes to the left; to go ahead, the hand goes to the right. To go back in a book, you go left; when you go ahead in a book, you go right. In web browsers, the arrow button pointing left goes back, and the arrow button point right goes forward. Apple was smart enough to understand this; Microsoft wasn't.
>Not everyone drives a car, of course, and
>likewise, not everyone knows Windows' interface
>(ha!). But at least Windows 2000 is predictable,
>and any enhancements come so naturally that you
> may not even notice that they're there. For an
>operating system, that's a pretty good thing.
Microsoft has shown a complete unwillingness to correct bad interface decisions made in a previous version of their software with improvements made in the next one. Probably because of this "predictability" (not to be confused with consistancy, which *is* a good thing in a UI). How long did it take before microsoft killed the "window-within-window" MDI in Office? Then there's clippy, the talking paperclip. This idea was ill conceived from the start, but it took Microsoft 4 years too long to him. These were ideas that any UI designer 10 years ago would tell you are stupid, but that didn't matter to Microsoft. I've heard microsoft has their own usability people and supposedly there are well funded usability labs, but they are either completely incompetant or the programmers don't take any of their advice or apply any of their data.
As for arguments with CNET's conclusion, Windows 2000 does make far better use of contextual menus, which are UI elements with the fastest access time of all (as they appear right under the user's pointer). Apple should add a second mouse button and improve contextual menu support. However, Windows 2000 has weakness of having pull-down menus attached to each window instead of a menubar at the top of the screen. Menus that are attached to each window are far slower to access than menus on a menubar at the top of the screen because it the user has to spend extra time making sure that the mouse doesn't vertically overshoot the menus attached to the windows. Menus at the top of the screen are impossible to overshoot because they sit right on a border. Such menus are up to five times faster to access than menus attached to windows. Again, this is due to fitts' law.
If CNET took these serious interface factors into account, I seriously doubt Windows 2000 would have won.
Once Microsoft has another $10-20 billion in cash, Bill Gates will finally be able to buy himself a decent haircut.
Two issues I see for a GIMP port to OS X
1. If GIMP is expected to win people over from Photoshop, one thing the developers will have to do (eventually) is to optimize stuff for the G4's Altivec vector processing unit. Photoshop currently supports Altivec (half the reason Altivec exists *is* photoshop) and GIMP will have to support it as well if it is expected to be taken seriously
2. The interface has to be made consistent with the mac user interface. Many mac users (me included) do not like having a UI that stinks of Windows (e.g. main menus on windows instead of menubar, underline accelerators, Ctrl keyboard shortcuts, etc) and at some point somebody is going to have to do a mac implementation of the GIMP UI.
Britney spears will sue Mattel because they did not ask her permission before creating a woman with fantastically large plastic breasts.
Microsoft CEO's Warning: studies indicate that this product may cause increased security, greater stability, and may contribute to competition. System Administrators who wish to remain insane are suggested to avoid using this product.
And I'm not talking about the CD-ROM. You can't fight wars or put down riots without your caffeine.
The next bill up for decision will involve a proposed 5 day waiting period for a nerf gun. You can bet that lobbyists for ThinkGeek will be crawling all over the state capital.
History has shown that when there is stuff people get rid of in mass quantities, the few items that survive the great purge eventually become incredibly valuable antiques. I would not be the least bit surpised if 150 years from now that Dell 486 in your basement would fetch a small fortune. Maybe one day my great-grandchildren will be on the Geek Antique Road Show showing off great-grandpa's inspiron that ran linux as well as some other weird proprietary OS that everyone forget about.
If I'm watching TV and I see a Mandrake commercial with Sally Struthers, I'm immediately switching to debian
In days of old when knights were bold and powerbooks were yet invented, the keyboard of laptops hung right at the edge of the laptop. There was no place to rest your wrists. One of the great innovations of Apple that everyone else has since had copied (thank god) was one of the things that made the powerbook revolutionary: it added plenty of space below the keyboard where your tired tendons could take a break.
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html