The iPod is just really, really popular. That doesn't make it a monopoly.
It's not that black and white, is it? I mean, Microsoft is a 'convicted monopolist', but there are plenty of alternatives to Windows. It's certainly not like the phone company monopoly you describe.
If you've used the general class of application mentioned (say, spreadsheet), then it shouldn't take you more than a day to find your way around a specific implementation (e.g. Excel).
If I remember correctly (and I probably don't) the Mac OS error numbers came about because Steve Jobs was fed up with how long the original Macs took to boot, and loading the table of error numbers -> error messages was one of the things that got taken out to streamline the boot process. I guess it's just stuck.
I seem to remember the slow booting thing was the cause of the infamous 'throwing the prototype Mac down the stairs' Steve incident, although it's even more likely that I'm wrong on that one.
I think the point you're missing is that just because something is different doesn't mean it's hard. It can be different and better.
No, but if it's hard, then it's hard. If you flout a UI convention, that makes it harder for most people to use. Apple mention this quite a lot in their UI/HCI guidelines documentation the last time I read it.
And how does it make it better anyway? It just means that when I click on play/pause/next track buttons in iTunes, or I double click a tune to play it, or I click on a playlist to see it, etc, it doesn't work.
We think iTunes is different and better.
"We"?
Ok, now you're scaring me. How many of you are in your head? Are you the Mac collective?
it's dumb to criticize iTunes solely on the basis that it's different.
I'm not criticising iTunes because it's different. I'm criticising it because it's annoying. The main reason it's annoying happens to be that it's different.
You seem to think that my finding fault with iTunes means I hate it, or think it's all terrible. I don't. I just wish it would act nice when it's in my home.
I think the point you're missing is that by assuming that it can break the standard for its mp3 player application, Apple consistently makes it harder for me (and anyone else used to the normal Windows application behaviour) to use it.
If that's what doing something well means, then I'd rather they stuck to the standard.
Thanks, but I don't like focus-follows-mouse either:-).
I have a habit of knocking the mouse out of the way when the pointer is over where I want to type, and that's not very compatible with focus-follows-mouse...
That's exactly it. For the record, I don't mind the Mac OS focus model (and I understand the rationale behind it). It's just that I mostly use Windows, so I'm used to it.
If I used a Mac most of the time, I'd adjust, and the Windows model would eventually annoy me, because it's different.
I'm ok with this happening on different platforms - but like you, when it happens within the same desktop, I find it pretty annoying. And (as a Mac user) you get the worst deal, because as you say, you're expecting no action, and you get a (possibly destructive) action.
You're only confused in that you chose an MS Office app to check standard behaviour:-).
MS Office apps always seem to do their own thing wrt UI - I don't know why, I don't like it, but there it is. I can understand your confusion. I seem to remember they don't even use standard menus, ffs.
Try the standard file explorer in Windows to see 'normal' behaviour. Or MSIE, etc.
Out of Office, I only really use Word, and to be fair, I've only just noticed that it eats clicks. I guess iTunes bugs me because it's basically a Window full of clickable widgets, and none of them respond to the first click. Word is a window full of text, and I generally alt-tab to it and start typing.
Excel is, of course, even worse than Word for standard behaviour - just try copy and paste, for a start. Or try to view two spreadsheets on two different monitors. And so on.
I didn't say the Office group were any better (in fact, Office are notorious for not using standard controls/dialogs), just that Apple's non-conformance bugs me, especially when they bang on about how good they are at user interface.
Now I think about it, it is because iTunes is full of things I should be able to click on, but can't. And many of them are things I will click/double click on once, and then go back to another app. I think that's why it's (so) annoying.
To be fair to iTunes, it does some good stuff, but I have two problems:
[1] It's slow. [2] It has non-standard UI.
[1] has been fixed by accident because I got a new PC. I've been providing iTunes 'feedback' to Apple in the hope that they'll fix [2] soon. I can but hope - the first iTunes for Windows didn't respond to double clicks on the title bar, and now it does. You never know, they might fix all this stuff eventually.:)
Goddamn it. I just moved my mouse over and double-clicked a track in iTunes to listen to some music, and it started renaming the track (and didn't play it, of course). Arrgghhh!
With the advent of better graphics, this UI uglification has gone through the roof. Apple's stuff on Windows is equally bad. The old UI standards were good. Why did everyone abandon them? Usability? Hardly, apps are harder to use now that it's hard to tell what's a control and what's just chrome.
The thing about Apple's UI that annoys me (well, apart from the whole chrome thing, which is just a bit nasty because it's inconsistent) is the way they bark at Windows developers like they're small children when they port their apps to Mac OS and don't conform to every Mac OS UI convention...but when Apple port their apps to Windows? Well, screw the standard UI furniture and behaviour! We're Apple!
Case in point: focus behaviour. Windows and Mac OS deal with focus switching differently. In Mac OS, you click on a window that does not have focus, it switches focus to it, and that's it. It doesn't matter where you click, a Mac window will eat the click. Whereas in Windows, all controls are 'live' even if the window does not have focus. So if you click on a button in a window that does not have focus, the button receives the click (as well as the window receiving focus).
Now, you can argue about which is best all you like, but the important thing is: Windows does it one way, Mac OS does it the other, and users on both platforms are used to that.
Until iTunes for Windows comes along, and it uses the Mac OS focus model. I've only started using iTunes again for a week recently, and I've already lost count of the number of times I've had to double/triple/quadruple click because the first click was eaten etc, and then my intentions were misunderstood by iTunes, and it's let me rename a track instead of playing it as I want to, etc.
It's either ignorance or sheer arrogance, and either way it's annoying. Don't screw with platform standards, just because you think you're so great that you can. iTunes is the only app I run on Windows that behaves like this. Great. Just great.
And don't get me started on why the fsck it uses Aqua scroll bars on Windows. What the hell were they thinking?
Answers like "it's branding" don't wash. To most people, that argument plays in their heads like this: "We don't give a fsck about the users."
Raymond Chen covered this a while back actually - it's basically when the USB device mfer doesn't bother to put a serial number in the device.
I get this with my printer if I plug it into another port...but Windows just reinstalls the driver - I don't have to reboot. That is sort of odd.
Also I like this from the page I linked:
I remember that one major manufacturer of USB devices didn't quite understand how serial numbers worked. They gave all of their devices serial numbers, that's great, but they all got the same serial number. Exciting things happened if you plugged two of their devices into a computer at the same time.
He noodled around with the plot for aver ten years before finding a way to re-use it without it being *too* damn obvious.
I hear this now and again, and wonder what the big problem with Douglas re-using these ideas is. Shada was never made. What was he supposed to do? Sigh, and think "Oh well, BBC strikes put paid to that story with all those nice ideas so nobody ever saw it, I'd better just come up with another idea instead."
If you're a writer and you come up with some good ideas/writing that doesn't get used in the end, I can't see the problem in re-using it elsewhere where it's appropriate, or if you really like the story/ideas you came up with.
Similarly, Life the Universe and Everything. Try googling for "Dr Who and the Krikkitmen" (but you probably knew that anyway, you Dr Who freak:-)
We have this thing on Earth, called tact.
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It's not that black and white, is it? I mean, Microsoft is a 'convicted monopolist', but there are plenty of alternatives to Windows. It's certainly not like the phone company monopoly you describe.
I'd recommend "Yes" instead.
If you've used the general class of application mentioned (say, spreadsheet), then it shouldn't take you more than a day to find your way around a specific implementation (e.g. Excel).
Well, I'd hope so, anyway.
Well, let's hope so anyway.
Well, they added NT-style ACL permissions in Tiger, so that's probably to blame for this.
I kid, I kid!
And there was me thinking the election campaigns were run by politicians, not the voters. Maybe I'm not the only one not paying attention.
Wow, I must have missed the box on the polling form that said "Reasons for voting".
If I remember correctly (and I probably don't) the Mac OS error numbers came about because Steve Jobs was fed up with how long the original Macs took to boot, and loading the table of error numbers -> error messages was one of the things that got taken out to streamline the boot process. I guess it's just stuck.
I seem to remember the slow booting thing was the cause of the infamous 'throwing the prototype Mac down the stairs' Steve incident, although it's even more likely that I'm wrong on that one.
Wow, I can see the adverts now...
"Our software annoys you? Like we give a fuck!"
No, but if it's hard, then it's hard. If you flout a UI convention, that makes it harder for most people to use. Apple mention this quite a lot in their UI/HCI guidelines documentation the last time I read it.
And how does it make it better anyway? It just means that when I click on play/pause/next track buttons in iTunes, or I double click a tune to play it, or I click on a playlist to see it, etc, it doesn't work.
"We"?
Ok, now you're scaring me. How many of you are in your head? Are you the Mac collective?
I'm not criticising iTunes because it's different. I'm criticising it because it's annoying. The main reason it's annoying happens to be that it's different.
You seem to think that my finding fault with iTunes means I hate it, or think it's all terrible. I don't. I just wish it would act nice when it's in my home.
I think the point you're missing is that by assuming that it can break the standard for its mp3 player application, Apple consistently makes it harder for me (and anyone else used to the normal Windows application behaviour) to use it.
If that's what doing something well means, then I'd rather they stuck to the standard.
Thanks, but I don't like focus-follows-mouse either :-).
I have a habit of knocking the mouse out of the way when the pointer is over where I want to type, and that's not very compatible with focus-follows-mouse...
And the best way to show people what they can do is to make a substandard app, of course.
Sorry, I meant cut and paste.
That's exactly it. For the record, I don't mind the Mac OS focus model (and I understand the rationale behind it). It's just that I mostly use Windows, so I'm used to it.
If I used a Mac most of the time, I'd adjust, and the Windows model would eventually annoy me, because it's different.
I'm ok with this happening on different platforms - but like you, when it happens within the same desktop, I find it pretty annoying. And (as a Mac user) you get the worst deal, because as you say, you're expecting no action, and you get a (possibly destructive) action.
You're only confused in that you chose an MS Office app to check standard behaviour :-).
:)
MS Office apps always seem to do their own thing wrt UI - I don't know why, I don't like it, but there it is. I can understand your confusion. I seem to remember they don't even use standard menus, ffs.
Try the standard file explorer in Windows to see 'normal' behaviour. Or MSIE, etc.
Out of Office, I only really use Word, and to be fair, I've only just noticed that it eats clicks. I guess iTunes bugs me because it's basically a Window full of clickable widgets, and none of them respond to the first click. Word is a window full of text, and I generally alt-tab to it and start typing.
Excel is, of course, even worse than Word for standard behaviour - just try copy and paste, for a start. Or try to view two spreadsheets on two different monitors. And so on.
I didn't say the Office group were any better (in fact, Office are notorious for not using standard controls/dialogs), just that Apple's non-conformance bugs me, especially when they bang on about how good they are at user interface.
Now I think about it, it is because iTunes is full of things I should be able to click on, but can't. And many of them are things I will click/double click on once, and then go back to another app. I think that's why it's (so) annoying.
To be fair to iTunes, it does some good stuff, but I have two problems:
[1] It's slow.
[2] It has non-standard UI.
[1] has been fixed by accident because I got a new PC. I've been providing iTunes 'feedback' to Apple in the hope that they'll fix [2] soon. I can but hope - the first iTunes for Windows didn't respond to double clicks on the title bar, and now it does. You never know, they might fix all this stuff eventually.
Goddamn it. I just moved my mouse over and double-clicked a track in iTunes to listen to some music, and it started renaming the track (and didn't play it, of course). Arrgghhh!
The thing about Apple's UI that annoys me (well, apart from the whole chrome thing, which is just a bit nasty because it's inconsistent) is the way they bark at Windows developers like they're small children when they port their apps to Mac OS and don't conform to every Mac OS UI convention...but when Apple port their apps to Windows? Well, screw the standard UI furniture and behaviour! We're Apple!
Case in point: focus behaviour. Windows and Mac OS deal with focus switching differently. In Mac OS, you click on a window that does not have focus, it switches focus to it, and that's it. It doesn't matter where you click, a Mac window will eat the click. Whereas in Windows, all controls are 'live' even if the window does not have focus. So if you click on a button in a window that does not have focus, the button receives the click (as well as the window receiving focus).
Now, you can argue about which is best all you like, but the important thing is: Windows does it one way, Mac OS does it the other, and users on both platforms are used to that.
Until iTunes for Windows comes along, and it uses the Mac OS focus model. I've only started using iTunes again for a week recently, and I've already lost count of the number of times I've had to double/triple/quadruple click because the first click was eaten etc, and then my intentions were misunderstood by iTunes, and it's let me rename a track instead of playing it as I want to, etc.
It's either ignorance or sheer arrogance, and either way it's annoying. Don't screw with platform standards, just because you think you're so great that you can. iTunes is the only app I run on Windows that behaves like this. Great. Just great.
And don't get me started on why the fsck it uses Aqua scroll bars on Windows. What the hell were they thinking?
Answers like "it's branding" don't wash. To most people, that argument plays in their heads like this: "We don't give a fsck about the users."
Have you heard the expression "Bad workmen blame their tools"?
"If you want to be the best,
If you want to beat the rest,
Medication's what you need..."
Jealousy is never attractive.
Wouldn't that be GPG-13?
I agree, that is indeed part of what makes the UK great.
I get this with my printer if I plug it into another port...but Windows just reinstalls the driver - I don't have to reboot. That is sort of odd.
Also I like this from the page I linked:
I hear this now and again, and wonder what the big problem with Douglas re-using these ideas is. Shada was never made. What was he supposed to do? Sigh, and think "Oh well, BBC strikes put paid to that story with all those nice ideas so nobody ever saw it, I'd better just come up with another idea instead."
If you're a writer and you come up with some good ideas/writing that doesn't get used in the end, I can't see the problem in re-using it elsewhere where it's appropriate, or if you really like the story/ideas you came up with.
Similarly, Life the Universe and Everything. Try googling for "Dr Who and the Krikkitmen" (but you probably knew that anyway, you Dr Who freak :-)
Is that what you say to new parents? :-)
Also, I thought that was new for the movie. Where did it appear before? I can't find it in the books or radio series scripts.