Your entire post makes one assumption: easy-to-use applications can't be powerful applications. It's wrong. It's complete rubbish. Stop thinking that.
Photoshop is simultaneously easier-to-use than GIMP and more powerful than GIMP. (GIMP's UI has fans, of course, and more power to you if you like it. But I think it's safe to say that the majority of people prefer Photoshop's UI)
Don't like it? Then what the fuck are you doing on slashdot?
I don't recall having to change my opinions when I signed up for an account here. Hell, if you get so emo over someone with a differing opinion from yours, if you can't cope in a dignified way with the exercise of free speech, what the hell are *you* doing on Slashdot?
What supported Windows configuration requires the use of RegEdit?
RegEdit in Windows is analogous to about:config in Firefox: it's the place where the unsupported/unworking configuration options go. It's not intended to be used by end-users, ever. RegEdit only ships with the OS for two reasons: 1) To help advanced users troubleshoot issues 2) To allow the registry to be exported/backed-up. (And now that Windows makes internal Registry backups, *and* ships with good backup software, this reason is legacy at this point.)
When I wanted to change the DPI on my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04, and "DPI" didn't show up in the Help system, I Googled it. The first and third Google results reference either config files and the CLI. The second was totally irrelevant. It wasn't until the fourth result that the *correct* (GUI) solution is listed. (At which point, knowing that a GUI for this exists, I just got pissed that it didn't show up in the online help at all!)
Then you set it and all your applications are in the correct DPI except the one you actually cared about (Firefox).
I tried and rejected it because it, for some reason, decided that the PC speaker in my laptop should make extremely loud horrible noises, instead of playing the pleasant woodblock sound set as the default alert sound. This is a regression, a new bug in 9.04, that is extremely irritating. The fact that, in 2009, Ubuntu doesn't have regression testing... well.
Foldershare actually turned into Windows Live Sync, but it still works great on Windows and OS X. It keeps my desktop and both my laptops constantly updated with the latest versions of documents, and I never have to touch it or think about it. (Unless there's a sync conflict, which happens extremely rarely.)
From my experience, people don't like *change*, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. (Although, generally people will stop complaining about positive change after a few weeks.)
How do you filter out "I don't like it but I don't know why" from "I don't like it because it's different?" Because if you accept the second as a legitimate complaint, there would never be any progress in computer UIs.
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
I've never had that problem.
I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.
Ok, so you agree that the vast, vast majority of people are better off with Word than "AucTeX" (whatever the hell that is). So what's the debate about, again?
Next, OO is not hard to use, and having written quite a few long documents I don't see outline as an essential functionality.
When I watched TV back in 1999, I didn't see DVR/Tivo as essential functionality. Now that I've had a DVR, I couldn't even imagine watching TV without it. At no point did I (or anyone) say that outline mode is essential for the creation of large documents, what we're saying is that it makes things so much easier it's worth the purchase price of Word to get it.
If you don't like/use the feature, fine. But you can't fault the people who want it from griping that OpenOffice doesn't have it.
They didn't ship the PDF export with Office because Adobe sued them to remove. (Yes, your precious "open" format! The current Adobe management is full of asshats.) If you want someone to blame for that fiasco, blame Adobe, not Microsoft!
Except Office does all those things, *and* has a much easier-to-use interface.
On your point 2: Table of Contents works if your document is laid out correctly. True, Word allows you to lay-out a document in such a way that he ToC won't work, but if you're using Outline mode, you'd break your outline too, most likely.
On your point 4: If you're using Styles the way they're intended to be used, you can easily make document-wide changes like switching from MLA to Chicago simply by changing the associated styles. Again, it's possible to set-up a document incorrectly so this won't work.
Well, then you can move on to argument number 2, which is: "why *should* a human have to hit ctrl-S every few minutes?" That sort of automated task is *exactly* what computers are good at-- doing repetitive tasks is exactly what we built computers for in the first place!
If the computer can save 20 minutes of lost work by spending about 100 milliseconds of every minute doing an auto-save, why on God's green earth should it not do that?
So the arguments are, in order: 1) People (generally) don't do it and, 2) People shouldn't have to do it.
Everyone benefits from everyone, that's the exact point I'm making. The difference is that Apple doesn't look at what BSD's doing and go, "oh that's awful, that's a terrible idea, man it sucks," etc.
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research. I mean OpenOffice's interface *is* Office 97-- the amount of work saved by the OpenOffice team because they had a model to work from is tremendous. Nobody's going to fault you for using other people's good ideas in your own products, but you could at least appreciate it, instead of just slamming Microsoft for it.
Microsoft may be no good at it, but who's better? Adobe's recent UI "innovations" have been criminally-bad. Apple's made some good progress with their iWork suite, but the unfortunate fact is that Pages has a simple UI because it's a simple product without a lot of features.
(And this next new idea you're slamming will undoubtedly make its way into open source products any day now, at which point it will become "innovative" and "brilliant." to the Slashdot hordes.)
The ribbon takes less space vertically than the default toolbars in Office 2003. Plus it can be minimized, in which case it takes the same space as Office 2003 with zero toolbars.
I keep seeing this complaint, and it just goes to show that when people don't like something, they'll pull reasons for it out of thin air. Did it ever occur to you to actually *measure* whether the ribbon was bigger or smaller than the last version? Or did you just need a knee-jerk reason to hate it, and this is the first one that popped into your mind?
Software is designed for actual human beings. Actual human beings, in generally, don't hit ctrl-s every 2 minutes by instinct, therefore your software should cope with that usage scenario. Posts like yours just demonstrate why open source applications usually have horrible usability. Sure it's a small point, but those small points add-up.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio is a type of vector-art program specifically designed for making diagrams. The textbook example would be a flowchart, but the most common usage seems to be things like network diagrams. (Of course I worked with network people...) It has dozens of "sets" of shapes for use with any kind of diagramming out there, and they all have the correct "connectors" and text labels and such in-place, so it's really easy to create a powerful diagram from scratch.
It has a lot of cool features, for example, you can point it at a SQL database and it'll automatically populate a diagram with all your tables and relations. I use that one all the time.
Vizio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
First of all, it's spelled "Visio." Secondly, it's not part of any of the Office suites (oddly; you'd think it would be in Ultimate at least), but it is an "Office product." So... there's that. Thirdly, it's by far the least-popular Office product, so... there's that as well.
Anyway, OpenOffice Draw has no equivalent in the MS collection and is arguably much more useful to the average user.
All the Office applications have vector drawing tools in them. There's also Publisher, which seems the closest to meeting this requirement...
Of course, if you don't care about the brand, you can get Expression Design, which is a pretty full-featured vector drawing program from Microsoft. It's just in the Expression suite, not the Office suite.
The point isn't that we (people writing long documents) *need* it, the point is that having it saves *by far* enough time and effort to make up for the purchase of Microsoft Office.
The entire "it's not there but you don't *need* it" argument completely misses the point. There are a hundred things in my house I don't *need* (plumbing, wall sockets, lighting, cable TV hookup, phone hookup, insulation), but I'd never move into a house that didn't have them. Would you?
If you have to read the manual to get the Ribbon, you're beyond help. You'd be just as confused by any other computer UI, and probably most household appliances.
1) The Windows and Office team are completely, utterly, 100% distinct from each other. They don't share code (other than the obvious APIs), and they don't talk things over with each other. What Office does has no bearing on what Windows programmers *should* do.
2) I'd prefer an innovative new UI like the Ribbon to the crazy unusable UI changes that, for example, Adobe has made. I can't even express how irritating and frustrating the new Adobe Flash CS3/4 interface is compared to the older Macromedia versions. (And the Macromedia UI sucked! Adobe found ways to add entirely new layers of suck!)
That's what I use to justify people not liking 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Oh, well, I guess he's just too immature to get it. Maybe in a few years..." I'll never accept that someone can simply dislike the film, damnit.
I really, really, hope that the current work of DnF is not lost. That all the data, code, levels,..., are going to be released somewhere. Or better, finished into a playable state.
What makes you think any of that stuff even exists? They've released a few dozen pieces of concept art, a few game play movies (that could easily have been faked in other engines with modding tools), and-- well that's it.
My guess is that the only thing Take Two has to show for their $12 million is a really high score on the 3DRealms breakroom pinball machine.
The whole Duke Nukem Forever thing was a complete scam from day one, IMO.
I think the real problem isn't that Microsoft *can't* do it, the problem is that Microsoft can't find a use for the damned thing that would be compelling enough to put in the effort to ship it.
I mean, look at all the meta-data you can put into NTFS. Now look at how many applications actually use it...? None. And all the original cases where WinFS was supposed to revolutionize things are already present in Vista and Windows 7, using plain ol' NTFS and a background indexing service.
So, let's say I'm working for Microsoft, and I want to roll-out WinFS-- knowing that the roll-out will have huge compatibility concerns. My boss asks me, "why?"
It sounds like Volvo made it a pain in the ass for the dealership to open the hood, too. That probably contributed to the car's failure as much as the "no customer serviceable parts" thing.
But yah, I own a PT Cruiser, and when I first bought it, I thought it was going to be such a pain that the battery is located in a completely inaccessible place-- you basically have to remove one of the front wheels to get at it. After thinking about it, though, what do I care? The battery the dealership puts in lasts 7 years, and when it needs replacing there's a 99% chance I'd have the guy at Costco do it for me anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, off the meds today, huh?
Your entire post makes one assumption: easy-to-use applications can't be powerful applications. It's wrong. It's complete rubbish. Stop thinking that.
Photoshop is simultaneously easier-to-use than GIMP and more powerful than GIMP. (GIMP's UI has fans, of course, and more power to you if you like it. But I think it's safe to say that the majority of people prefer Photoshop's UI)
Don't like it? Then what the fuck are you doing on slashdot?
I don't recall having to change my opinions when I signed up for an account here. Hell, if you get so emo over someone with a differing opinion from yours, if you can't cope in a dignified way with the exercise of free speech, what the hell are *you* doing on Slashdot?
What supported Windows configuration requires the use of RegEdit?
RegEdit in Windows is analogous to about:config in Firefox: it's the place where the unsupported/unworking configuration options go. It's not intended to be used by end-users, ever. RegEdit only ships with the OS for two reasons:
1) To help advanced users troubleshoot issues
2) To allow the registry to be exported/backed-up. (And now that Windows makes internal Registry backups, *and* ships with good backup software, this reason is legacy at this point.)
When I wanted to change the DPI on my laptop running Ubuntu 9.04, and "DPI" didn't show up in the Help system, I Googled it. The first and third Google results reference either config files and the CLI. The second was totally irrelevant. It wasn't until the fourth result that the *correct* (GUI) solution is listed. (At which point, knowing that a GUI for this exists, I just got pissed that it didn't show up in the online help at all!)
Then you set it and all your applications are in the correct DPI except the one you actually cared about (Firefox).
Jaunty seems pretty stable to me.
Stable, perhaps.
I tried and rejected it because it, for some reason, decided that the PC speaker in my laptop should make extremely loud horrible noises, instead of playing the pleasant woodblock sound set as the default alert sound. This is a regression, a new bug in 9.04, that is extremely irritating. The fact that, in 2009, Ubuntu doesn't have regression testing... well.
Even easier: https://www.foldershare.com/
Foldershare actually turned into Windows Live Sync, but it still works great on Windows and OS X. It keeps my desktop and both my laptops constantly updated with the latest versions of documents, and I never have to touch it or think about it. (Unless there's a sync conflict, which happens extremely rarely.)
From my experience, people don't like *change*, regardless of whether it's positive or negative. (Although, generally people will stop complaining about positive change after a few weeks.)
How do you filter out "I don't like it but I don't know why" from "I don't like it because it's different?" Because if you accept the second as a legitimate complaint, there would never be any progress in computer UIs.
Word has in theory been able to do these things for several versions, no? But my experience was that it simply didn't work well. Is Word 2007 better behaved? In the past, my every attempt to use auto-numbered and formatted section headings ended badly. In one case (don't recall if it was 2000 or 2003), inserting a table of contents stripped out my bulleted and enumerated lists and removed the formatting and numbering on all my headings. A web search revealed that there was a bug in normal.dot, but since I required a table of contents, I ended up having to manually reformat every bullet list, every section heading, etc. Based on my experience I simply don't trust Word.
I've never had that problem.
I agree that Word has a superior interface for most people, but if you're a command line freak comfortable with Emacs/AucTeX, using Word feels like having skewers inserted into your eyeballs.
Ok, so you agree that the vast, vast majority of people are better off with Word than "AucTeX" (whatever the hell that is). So what's the debate about, again?
Next, OO is not hard to use, and having written quite a few long documents I don't see outline as an essential functionality.
When I watched TV back in 1999, I didn't see DVR/Tivo as essential functionality. Now that I've had a DVR, I couldn't even imagine watching TV without it. At no point did I (or anyone) say that outline mode is essential for the creation of large documents, what we're saying is that it makes things so much easier it's worth the purchase price of Word to get it.
If you don't like/use the feature, fine. But you can't fault the people who want it from griping that OpenOffice doesn't have it.
They didn't ship the PDF export with Office because Adobe sued them to remove. (Yes, your precious "open" format! The current Adobe management is full of asshats.) If you want someone to blame for that fiasco, blame Adobe, not Microsoft!
Despite that, you can easily download and install it-- it's a free add-on: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en
Except Office does all those things, *and* has a much easier-to-use interface.
On your point 2: Table of Contents works if your document is laid out correctly. True, Word allows you to lay-out a document in such a way that he ToC won't work, but if you're using Outline mode, you'd break your outline too, most likely.
On your point 4: If you're using Styles the way they're intended to be used, you can easily make document-wide changes like switching from MLA to Chicago simply by changing the associated styles. Again, it's possible to set-up a document incorrectly so this won't work.
Well, then you can move on to argument number 2, which is: "why *should* a human have to hit ctrl-S every few minutes?" That sort of automated task is *exactly* what computers are good at-- doing repetitive tasks is exactly what we built computers for in the first place!
If the computer can save 20 minutes of lost work by spending about 100 milliseconds of every minute doing an auto-save, why on God's green earth should it not do that?
So the arguments are, in order:
1) People (generally) don't do it and,
2) People shouldn't have to do it.
Everyone benefits from everyone, that's the exact point I'm making. The difference is that Apple doesn't look at what BSD's doing and go, "oh that's awful, that's a terrible idea, man it sucks," etc.
It bothers me when the open source community benefits so much from Apple and Microsoft's UI research. I mean OpenOffice's interface *is* Office 97-- the amount of work saved by the OpenOffice team because they had a model to work from is tremendous. Nobody's going to fault you for using other people's good ideas in your own products, but you could at least appreciate it, instead of just slamming Microsoft for it.
Microsoft may be no good at it, but who's better? Adobe's recent UI "innovations" have been criminally-bad. Apple's made some good progress with their iWork suite, but the unfortunate fact is that Pages has a simple UI because it's a simple product without a lot of features.
(And this next new idea you're slamming will undoubtedly make its way into open source products any day now, at which point it will become "innovative" and "brilliant." to the Slashdot hordes.)
The ribbon takes less space vertically than the default toolbars in Office 2003. Plus it can be minimized, in which case it takes the same space as Office 2003 with zero toolbars.
I keep seeing this complaint, and it just goes to show that when people don't like something, they'll pull reasons for it out of thin air. Did it ever occur to you to actually *measure* whether the ribbon was bigger or smaller than the last version? Or did you just need a knee-jerk reason to hate it, and this is the first one that popped into your mind?
Software is designed for actual human beings. Actual human beings, in generally, don't hit ctrl-s every 2 minutes by instinct, therefore your software should cope with that usage scenario. Posts like yours just demonstrate why open source applications usually have horrible usability. Sure it's a small point, but those small points add-up.
On that note, would you mind telling me what it is that Visio does?
Visio is a type of vector-art program specifically designed for making diagrams. The textbook example would be a flowchart, but the most common usage seems to be things like network diagrams. (Of course I worked with network people...) It has dozens of "sets" of shapes for use with any kind of diagramming out there, and they all have the correct "connectors" and text labels and such in-place, so it's really easy to create a powerful diagram from scratch.
It has a lot of cool features, for example, you can point it at a SQL database and it'll automatically populate a diagram with all your tables and relations. I use that one all the time.
You can also script it, like you can most Office applications, to make horrible abominations unto God: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The_Customer-Friendly_System.aspx
Vizio isn't part of any of the Office suites. It's effectively a completely separate package.
First of all, it's spelled "Visio." Secondly, it's not part of any of the Office suites (oddly; you'd think it would be in Ultimate at least), but it is an "Office product." So... there's that. Thirdly, it's by far the least-popular Office product, so... there's that as well.
Anyway, OpenOffice Draw has no equivalent in the MS collection and is arguably much more useful to the average user.
All the Office applications have vector drawing tools in them. There's also Publisher, which seems the closest to meeting this requirement...
Of course, if you don't care about the brand, you can get Expression Design, which is a pretty full-featured vector drawing program from Microsoft. It's just in the Expression suite, not the Office suite.
The point isn't that we (people writing long documents) *need* it, the point is that having it saves *by far* enough time and effort to make up for the purchase of Microsoft Office.
The entire "it's not there but you don't *need* it" argument completely misses the point. There are a hundred things in my house I don't *need* (plumbing, wall sockets, lighting, cable TV hookup, phone hookup, insulation), but I'd never move into a house that didn't have them. Would you?
If you have to read the manual to get the Ribbon, you're beyond help. You'd be just as confused by any other computer UI, and probably most household appliances.
Two points here:
1) The Windows and Office team are completely, utterly, 100% distinct from each other. They don't share code (other than the obvious APIs), and they don't talk things over with each other. What Office does has no bearing on what Windows programmers *should* do.
2) I'd prefer an innovative new UI like the Ribbon to the crazy unusable UI changes that, for example, Adobe has made. I can't even express how irritating and frustrating the new Adobe Flash CS3/4 interface is compared to the older Macromedia versions. (And the Macromedia UI sucked! Adobe found ways to add entirely new layers of suck!)
Because Slashdot editors are stupid.
I decoded the secret message: "really fucking this"
That's what I use to justify people not liking 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Oh, well, I guess he's just too immature to get it. Maybe in a few years..." I'll never accept that someone can simply dislike the film, damnit.
I really, really, hope that the current work of DnF is not lost. That all the data, code, levels, ..., are going to be released somewhere. Or better, finished into a playable state.
What makes you think any of that stuff even exists? They've released a few dozen pieces of concept art, a few game play movies (that could easily have been faked in other engines with modding tools), and-- well that's it.
My guess is that the only thing Take Two has to show for their $12 million is a really high score on the 3DRealms breakroom pinball machine.
The whole Duke Nukem Forever thing was a complete scam from day one, IMO.
I think the real problem isn't that Microsoft *can't* do it, the problem is that Microsoft can't find a use for the damned thing that would be compelling enough to put in the effort to ship it.
I mean, look at all the meta-data you can put into NTFS. Now look at how many applications actually use it...? None. And all the original cases where WinFS was supposed to revolutionize things are already present in Vista and Windows 7, using plain ol' NTFS and a background indexing service.
So, let's say I'm working for Microsoft, and I want to roll-out WinFS-- knowing that the roll-out will have huge compatibility concerns. My boss asks me, "why?"
What's my answer?
It sounds like Volvo made it a pain in the ass for the dealership to open the hood, too. That probably contributed to the car's failure as much as the "no customer serviceable parts" thing.
But yah, I own a PT Cruiser, and when I first bought it, I thought it was going to be such a pain that the battery is located in a completely inaccessible place-- you basically have to remove one of the front wheels to get at it. After thinking about it, though, what do I care? The battery the dealership puts in lasts 7 years, and when it needs replacing there's a 99% chance I'd have the guy at Costco do it for me anyway.