... Well, whatever. The functionality was the same, and Apple had it implemented in 1997. That applies whether or not Spotlight is a re-write or new code, no?
Wait, you're buying Sirius subscriptions for people who have Internet access? Out of your own pocket? Why not just use the speakers on the computers to play music through this new invention called the "Internet."
Is your office managed by schizophrenics? Seriously. "We want high morale, but we have monitoring software. We have Internet access (presumably!), but we provide Sirius radios." So weird.
Used to be Blue Badges could get Xbox Live Arcade game activation codes for free from a CorpNet site... is that not the case anymore? Or are you (ewww) Orange?
Regardless of this, it's a bad idea to give EVERYBODY their own Xbox hooked up to their own monitor. There should be one communal "break area" with a large TV or two and an Xbox or two. This gives a lot more advantages: 1) Team games would actually involve teamwork and real communication, instead of talking into headsets. 2) Games like Guitar Hero wouldn't be horribly distracting to everybody else trying to do their actual job. 3) People could watch TV if they don't enjoy video games, or you could keep it tuned to CNN for guests. 4) They'll be social pressure to not spend all day playing video games, since other employees could keep track of this.
You don't need more than maybe 2 game consoles per floor. At most. Where I worked, there was one Xbox 360 for a 4-story office building on a nice big TV, and it's not like people were waiting in line to play. (Of course, there was also ping-pong and foozball.)
Plus, with just one console and a big TV, you get to play split-screen multiplayer games which could build teamwork.
That was a "rogue" feature, not part of Mac OS' design.
The original design was that disks had two similar operations: 1) Eject (Command-E), spit the physical disk out, but keep track of the files so you can continue using the disk for file operations 2) Put Away (Command-Y IIRC), spit the physical disk out, and also remove the icon. I'm "putting the disk away." I'm completely done with it.*
The problem is that someone added the "drag to trashcan" behavior as a shortcut to Put Away. And it's become pretty much the most criticized usability feature ever. (Except perhaps for Microsoft's "press Start to Shutdown" thing.)
If Mac OS had been designed to the spec, spitting out the disk when you're done with it would have been just called "Put Away" all the time, which makes pretty good sense.
Trivia: Put Away in the original Mac OS also worked for files dragged to the desktop; you could drag a file to the desktop, work with it, then use "Put Away" when finished and the file would return to its original folder.
Geek cred: Spotlight was originally called "Sherlock" and was implemented, IIRC, in Mac OS 8.5 (in 1997.) I'm guessing that pre-dates Beagle, although I can't say whether the featuresets are equivalent.
I can't speak for Linux, but Vista does. The UI's a little arcane, but last I used OS X, their "smart folder" UI was more than a little arcane, too. (Basically, you just perform the search you want to save, then there's a "Save Search" icon on the toolbar that saves it as what Apple calls a "smart folder.")
I vaguely recall XP having similar functionality, but I don't have a copy handy to check.
Exactly what can you do with spotlight *nixes haven't done with find, locate, and grep for many more years before apple even thought of going the *nix route?
It's a lot easier to change a few thousand lines of code than 2 million years of evolution.
Computers would be a hell of a lot easier to use if software developers basically took human behavior as a given, instead of saying things like "if folks were competent!"
A lot of that goes to motivation: people learn some pretty damn complex activities when it comes to earning a driver's license, for example.Yet, when it comes to a computer many of those same people can't be bothered to put forth one iota of effort.
Why should they have to?
Why should they have to learn to drive? Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where you could just tell the car where to go, and it'd take care of all the details of getting there without any more interaction? I'd love a world where I don't have to put forth one iota of effort to operate a car.
Obviously people have to learn to drive because we don't yet have computers good enough to do it on their own. But are you suggesting that we should stop all development on automatic driving technology? It sounds from your argument that if Ford put out a car tomorrow that could drive itself with perfect safety, you'd be against using it.
Are you seriously suggesting that software makers can't possibly make the filesystem any easier to navigate? Or are you upset that cars get more attention? I don't really understand what you're arguing, I just know that it sounds crotchety and has a distinct air of "get off my lawn you kids!"
Automating a lot of image handling tasks, say [look at sng and pildriver]. Or building their own image tagging/searching system [http/mail-header based key-value pairs in.txt files, find+grep]. Just off the top of my head.
Or they could use something like Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, or hell even Google Picasa or Apple's iPhoto, which do all that about 50 times more efficiency and with graphical previews every step of the way? There's probably even an open source product that does it.
Seriously? I think a huge problem of Linux is that Linux users have a severe misunderstanding of the computer market. To seriously suggest it's worth somebody's time to learn a huge and complex CLI interface to do a task that can be done in a much better way, with much less learning, is completely ridiculous. That you posted it as a serious suggestion communicates that perfectly.
Isn't that the same thing as "Open Recent Files" in... well, most GUI applications made in the last 10 years?
I can tell you from personal experience that there are lots of users who assume files they edit are stored "in" Word (or Excel, or whatever application) due to this feature, and if you save enough files to push older files out of the "Open Recent" menu, the user will assume the file disappeared.
Or maybe you're suggesting something different, and I didn't understand?
Yeah, the other problem is that Microsoft attempted to develop a spatial filesystem for Windows 95 and failed for several reasons (poor grasp of the theory combined with need for DOS backwards-compatibility.) Therefore, you say "spatial interface" and most people run screaming the other way, even though it was very, very successful for Mac OS for well over a decade.
Really, when you come right down to it, spatial interfaces accomplish two things:
1) They don't show you anything you don't need to see. Classic Mac OS consisted of less than 100 files, each clearly named. Its functioning only required 2-5 of these files, depending on version. Windows, Linux, and OS X will happily show you 50,000 files, many of which are required for operation, but with no way of telling which and what they're doing. The OS should show you one file for each feature installed, I don't get why anything has to be more complicated than that.
2) Things stay where the hell you put them. Windows is constantly re-arranging my icons for idiotic reasons, or opening windows in a different view than the last view I set on that folder. OS X is actually *worse*, in that it does those, but does them in a seemingly random and arbitrary manner. At least I can be pretty sure Windows'll do it when the screen resolution changes, but OS X is still a mystery to me.
Of course, there's more to it than that, but those are the two things I miss the most. I have to admit, though, Vista has been much better about leaving my icons where I put them than older versions of Windows.
Or if you do, it's software that you never expect any actual humans to use.
Who uses default save locations anyway?
Maybe you would, if they made more sense and were more usable.
If you do that, they'll shortly become cluttered with all sorts of unrelated garbage. Make separate directories for each project and save your files in the appropriate location. Give them meaningful file names too. Then you'll never lose a file.
Yes, but the whole point of computers is to make your life easier. Why doesn't it just do all this FOR you? I think you're missing the main thrust of the article. Well, and combined with your basic ignorance and/or disdain for usability.
Your idea is interesting enough, but it's still not going to work until all applications understand it and expose the data in some way more useful than listing 20+ files for every actual file. I mean, the above is basically what "Previous Versions"/Shadowcopy does on my copy of Vista now, since it's obviously not going to be understood by applications.
I guess the short story is that the hard part of solving this technology isn't the technology, it's getting everybody to agree and adopt it.
Yes, and since everybody in the universe is EXACTLY LIKE YOU, the opinion you posted is the only one that matters! Thanks for the useful, informative post.
Not to mention the fact that Symantec likes to do in-depth scanning every once in a while in the middle of the day for no apparent reason and starts consuming 100MB+ of RAM and hits 50% CPU utilization.
That's not Symantec's fault, somebody at your organization told it to do that before it was deployed. I'm not the hugest fan of Symantec in the world, but you can't really blame it for: 1) Having a feature where an admin can schedule full scans 2) Your organization having crappy admins
A lot of games' physics are based on a time quantum based on that of the TV's vertical retrace, and developers need to retune the physics, retest all the levels to compensate for this.
Wow, we're getting posts from the past! This post for example was obviously typed back when the SNES was the latest and greatest, as that hasn't been true for a long time.
My favorite MOD has always been Shifter_v1 for the original Starsiege Tribes. In fact, Tribes 2 would have been a much better game if they'd just taken the gameplay of Shifter_v1 and updated the graphics.
Well, the two aren't mutually-exclusive, exactly. You could modify WOW to be a decent RP game, it wouldn't be *that* difficult, but Blizzard simply has no will to do it. (They already run servers they call "RP servers" but... they're lying.)
I think an absolute bare minimum of RP features would be: 1) Sensible channels. No In-Character channels you can hear all over the world (unless you can explain it in a more rational manner than "everybody's telepathic." Many, many MUDs make this mistake by making the "tell" channel IC.) No Out-Of-Character channels that affect the game world, i.e. talking to NPCs. No mixing between IC and OOC channels. 2) Real character customization. It's no fun to RP when all characters are virtually identical, both in appearance and in skillsets. WOW is actually slightly closer to this now that they finally added "barbershops." That's a very small step in the right direction. 3) A way of advancing in the game without involving combat. The MUD I admined had a simple system where people were allotted RP points they could spread to other players, so it was a nice peer-to-peer effort: if somebody liked your RP, they could give you more points, if they hated it, they could give zero points. 4) Speaking of 4, non-combat classes. If I want to make a RP character who's a lawyer, I should be able to. (Had one on the MUD and it worked out fine because that system was flexible enough.) It sounds like Star Wars Galaxies had this, too, with the "entertainer" classes.
One clear assumption in their ribbon design -- screen sizes. MS apparently thought that everyone has big screens. If you've got a small monitor, the unchangeably huge size of the ribbon crowds the screen and reduces your effective working area.
Actually, the ribbon takes up the same or fewer pixels than the default configuration of older Office versions. And you can set it to auto-hide if even that's too much for you. But, again, Microsoft *does* consider things like this when they design features, take a look at this blog post on your exact concern:
Another assumption -- that folks don't mind losing all the time they put into learning the old UI (which also happens to be standard to all other non-MSO-2007 apps).
If you phrase the question slightly differently, though, it doesn't have the negative spin you're attaching to it:
"Does the increased productivity with the new interface outweigh the time taken to learn it?"
You said yourself that the lessons learned in older versions of Office still apply to the vast majority of applications, so it seems to me that even when Office changes, it's still time well-spent, yes?
Though admittedly anecdotal, my example was of a school full of teachers and office staff, who use tech to get other things done. They don't take kindly to that tech suddenly changing and making it harder to get those exact same tasks done. Change alone is not disliked -- rather, pointless unannounced change that increases the complexity of previously known processes is disliked, with a passion.
But you're making a tacit assumption: that Office 2007 "makes it harder" to get their tasks done. Have you done any studies or measurements to show that is the case? Or is it just people complaining about change with no factual basis? (My guess: the latter.)
The old adage "if it ain't broke..." comes to mind.:)
Their attitude isn't: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" Their attitude is closer to: "if it ain't broke, there's no possible way to ever made it better so you shouldn't even try"
The key here though is that all this change *is on my own terms*. *I* choose when to switch interfaces in terms of OSes / apps / keyboards / languages. *I* choose what I'm going to spend my time learning. And I choose not to spend my time learning an inconsistent and confusing system that is effectively being forced on me (making me resent it), and that gets in my way (moving, hiding, and sometimes even completely removing, functionality that I have relied on in the past), and that doesn't come across, to me personally, as useful, intuitive, rewarding, or interesting.
That's fine, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy it. I just want to avoid knee-jerk complaints made by wags with zero practical experience with the technology, and zero data to back-up their claims. (Yes, things like "Office 2007 is more usable" are testable in a lab.)
It's no surprise that the majority of Slashdotters hate Office 2007's new UI, considering that they seem to loathe the entire concept of "usability" and "talking to end-users" in the first place. But until they can *prove* it's worse, at least to the extent Microsoft has *proved* it's better, I put zero credibility in their claims. (Jensen Harris' blog, linked above, has a lot of articles about results from Microsoft's usability labs and studies.)
Good RP MUDs have a system in place where you can get "experience" (or something equivalent) via roleplay. The MUD I used to admin at (dead now, sadly) had a "RPPGIVE" command you could award other people with, and they would level up with RPP the same as with EXP. If you were max level, you could use RPP to buy other benefits, like custom-made mounts or items. We also had a system where you didn't instantly know everybody's name; they had to actually introduce themselves in some way before you could "RECOGNIZE" them in the future.
Anyway, I've yet to see any MMO that even tells you which channels are IC and which are OOC, much less actually encourages RP.
If it is, it shouldn't be. I've never played a more irritating game in my life.
If you had a joystick plugged-in, the keyboard commands for the spaceships were disabled. Good thing the tutorial DIDN'T TELL YOU THAT! It took me like 45 minutes to work that one out, after digging my dust-covered joystick out from behind the monitor. Christ that was a terrible bug.) The tutorial alone wasted almost an hour of my time, stupidly pressing 'W' on the keyboard and wondering why my damned spaceship wouldn't accelerate. Ugh.
Slashdot Mirror
... Well, whatever. The functionality was the same, and Apple had it implemented in 1997. That applies whether or not Spotlight is a re-write or new code, no?
Your own pocket? Seriously?
Wait, you're buying Sirius subscriptions for people who have Internet access? Out of your own pocket? Why not just use the speakers on the computers to play music through this new invention called the "Internet."
Is your office managed by schizophrenics? Seriously. "We want high morale, but we have monitoring software. We have Internet access (presumably!), but we provide Sirius radios." So weird.
Used to be Blue Badges could get Xbox Live Arcade game activation codes for free from a CorpNet site... is that not the case anymore? Or are you (ewww) Orange?
Regardless of this, it's a bad idea to give EVERYBODY their own Xbox hooked up to their own monitor. There should be one communal "break area" with a large TV or two and an Xbox or two. This gives a lot more advantages:
1) Team games would actually involve teamwork and real communication, instead of talking into headsets.
2) Games like Guitar Hero wouldn't be horribly distracting to everybody else trying to do their actual job.
3) People could watch TV if they don't enjoy video games, or you could keep it tuned to CNN for guests.
4) They'll be social pressure to not spend all day playing video games, since other employees could keep track of this.
You don't need more than maybe 2 game consoles per floor. At most. Where I worked, there was one Xbox 360 for a 4-story office building on a nice big TV, and it's not like people were waiting in line to play. (Of course, there was also ping-pong and foozball.)
Plus, with just one console and a big TV, you get to play split-screen multiplayer games which could build teamwork.
That was a "rogue" feature, not part of Mac OS' design.
The original design was that disks had two similar operations:
1) Eject (Command-E), spit the physical disk out, but keep track of the files so you can continue using the disk for file operations
2) Put Away (Command-Y IIRC), spit the physical disk out, and also remove the icon. I'm "putting the disk away." I'm completely done with it.*
The problem is that someone added the "drag to trashcan" behavior as a shortcut to Put Away. And it's become pretty much the most criticized usability feature ever. (Except perhaps for Microsoft's "press Start to Shutdown" thing.)
If Mac OS had been designed to the spec, spitting out the disk when you're done with it would have been just called "Put Away" all the time, which makes pretty good sense.
Trivia: Put Away in the original Mac OS also worked for files dragged to the desktop; you could drag a file to the desktop, work with it, then use "Put Away" when finished and the file would return to its original folder.
Geek cred: Spotlight was originally called "Sherlock" and was implemented, IIRC, in Mac OS 8.5 (in 1997.) I'm guessing that pre-dates Beagle, although I can't say whether the featuresets are equivalent.
I can't speak for Linux, but Vista does. The UI's a little arcane, but last I used OS X, their "smart folder" UI was more than a little arcane, too. (Basically, you just perform the search you want to save, then there's a "Save Search" icon on the toolbar that saves it as what Apple calls a "smart folder.")
I vaguely recall XP having similar functionality, but I don't have a copy handy to check.
Novell? No, Apple developed it.
Exactly what can you do with spotlight *nixes haven't done with find, locate, and grep for many more years before apple even thought of going the *nix route?
Uh, use it without 5 years of training?
It's a lot easier to change a few thousand lines of code than 2 million years of evolution.
Computers would be a hell of a lot easier to use if software developers basically took human behavior as a given, instead of saying things like "if folks were competent!"
A lot of that goes to motivation: people learn some pretty damn complex activities when it comes to earning a driver's license, for example.Yet, when it comes to a computer many of those same people can't be bothered to put forth one iota of effort.
Why should they have to?
Why should they have to learn to drive? Wouldn't it be great if we lived in a world where you could just tell the car where to go, and it'd take care of all the details of getting there without any more interaction? I'd love a world where I don't have to put forth one iota of effort to operate a car.
Obviously people have to learn to drive because we don't yet have computers good enough to do it on their own. But are you suggesting that we should stop all development on automatic driving technology? It sounds from your argument that if Ford put out a car tomorrow that could drive itself with perfect safety, you'd be against using it.
Are you seriously suggesting that software makers can't possibly make the filesystem any easier to navigate? Or are you upset that cars get more attention? I don't really understand what you're arguing, I just know that it sounds crotchety and has a distinct air of "get off my lawn you kids!"
Automating a lot of image handling tasks, say [look at sng and pildriver]. Or building their own image tagging/searching system [http/mail-header based key-value pairs in .txt files, find+grep]. Just off the top of my head.
Or they could use something like Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, or hell even Google Picasa or Apple's iPhoto, which do all that about 50 times more efficiency and with graphical previews every step of the way? There's probably even an open source product that does it.
Seriously? I think a huge problem of Linux is that Linux users have a severe misunderstanding of the computer market. To seriously suggest it's worth somebody's time to learn a huge and complex CLI interface to do a task that can be done in a much better way, with much less learning, is completely ridiculous. That you posted it as a serious suggestion communicates that perfectly.
Isn't that the same thing as "Open Recent Files" in ... well, most GUI applications made in the last 10 years?
I can tell you from personal experience that there are lots of users who assume files they edit are stored "in" Word (or Excel, or whatever application) due to this feature, and if you save enough files to push older files out of the "Open Recent" menu, the user will assume the file disappeared.
Or maybe you're suggesting something different, and I didn't understand?
Yeah, the other problem is that Microsoft attempted to develop a spatial filesystem for Windows 95 and failed for several reasons (poor grasp of the theory combined with need for DOS backwards-compatibility.) Therefore, you say "spatial interface" and most people run screaming the other way, even though it was very, very successful for Mac OS for well over a decade.
Really, when you come right down to it, spatial interfaces accomplish two things:
1) They don't show you anything you don't need to see. Classic Mac OS consisted of less than 100 files, each clearly named. Its functioning only required 2-5 of these files, depending on version. Windows, Linux, and OS X will happily show you 50,000 files, many of which are required for operation, but with no way of telling which and what they're doing. The OS should show you one file for each feature installed, I don't get why anything has to be more complicated than that.
2) Things stay where the hell you put them. Windows is constantly re-arranging my icons for idiotic reasons, or opening windows in a different view than the last view I set on that folder. OS X is actually *worse*, in that it does those, but does them in a seemingly random and arbitrary manner. At least I can be pretty sure Windows'll do it when the screen resolution changes, but OS X is still a mystery to me.
Of course, there's more to it than that, but those are the two things I miss the most. I have to admit, though, Vista has been much better about leaving my icons where I put them than older versions of Windows.
Wow, I hope you never write software.
Or if you do, it's software that you never expect any actual humans to use.
Who uses default save locations anyway?
Maybe you would, if they made more sense and were more usable.
If you do that, they'll shortly become cluttered with all sorts of unrelated garbage. Make separate directories for each project and save your files in the appropriate location. Give them meaningful file names too. Then you'll never lose a file.
Yes, but the whole point of computers is to make your life easier. Why doesn't it just do all this FOR you? I think you're missing the main thrust of the article. Well, and combined with your basic ignorance and/or disdain for usability.
That's great, and the UI when trying to open a file in a "legacy" application looks like this:
Grandma's Party:2008-10-12.10.01.32
Grandma's Party:2008-10-12.10.06.54
Grandma's Party:2008-10-12.10.09.12
Grandma's Party:2008-10-12.10.14.07
Grandma's Party:2008-10-12.11.33.30
Grandma's Party:2008-10-13.09.11.59
Grandma's Party:2008-10-14.08.45.00
Grandma's Party:2008-10-15.10.31.18
Grandma's Party:2008-10-23.12.08.52
etc.
Your idea is interesting enough, but it's still not going to work until all applications understand it and expose the data in some way more useful than listing 20+ files for every actual file. I mean, the above is basically what "Previous Versions"/Shadowcopy does on my copy of Vista now, since it's obviously not going to be understood by applications.
I guess the short story is that the hard part of solving this technology isn't the technology, it's getting everybody to agree and adopt it.
Yes, and since everybody in the universe is EXACTLY LIKE YOU, the opinion you posted is the only one that matters! Thanks for the useful, informative post.
Not to mention the fact that Symantec likes to do in-depth scanning every once in a while in the middle of the day for no apparent reason and starts consuming 100MB+ of RAM and hits 50% CPU utilization.
That's not Symantec's fault, somebody at your organization told it to do that before it was deployed. I'm not the hugest fan of Symantec in the world, but you can't really blame it for:
1) Having a feature where an admin can schedule full scans
2) Your organization having crappy admins
WTF? Why?
Ok, I guess I'll have to qualify: it hasn't been true for any *sane* game developer for a very long time.
A lot of games' physics are based on a time quantum based on that of the TV's vertical retrace, and developers need to retune the physics, retest all the levels to compensate for this.
Wow, we're getting posts from the past! This post for example was obviously typed back when the SNES was the latest and greatest, as that hasn't been true for a long time.
My favorite MOD has always been Shifter_v1 for the original Starsiege Tribes. In fact, Tribes 2 would have been a much better game if they'd just taken the gameplay of Shifter_v1 and updated the graphics.
Well, the two aren't mutually-exclusive, exactly. You could modify WOW to be a decent RP game, it wouldn't be *that* difficult, but Blizzard simply has no will to do it. (They already run servers they call "RP servers" but... they're lying.)
I think an absolute bare minimum of RP features would be:
1) Sensible channels. No In-Character channels you can hear all over the world (unless you can explain it in a more rational manner than "everybody's telepathic." Many, many MUDs make this mistake by making the "tell" channel IC.) No Out-Of-Character channels that affect the game world, i.e. talking to NPCs. No mixing between IC and OOC channels.
2) Real character customization. It's no fun to RP when all characters are virtually identical, both in appearance and in skillsets. WOW is actually slightly closer to this now that they finally added "barbershops." That's a very small step in the right direction.
3) A way of advancing in the game without involving combat. The MUD I admined had a simple system where people were allotted RP points they could spread to other players, so it was a nice peer-to-peer effort: if somebody liked your RP, they could give you more points, if they hated it, they could give zero points.
4) Speaking of 4, non-combat classes. If I want to make a RP character who's a lawyer, I should be able to. (Had one on the MUD and it worked out fine because that system was flexible enough.) It sounds like Star Wars Galaxies had this, too, with the "entertainer" classes.
One clear assumption in their ribbon design -- screen sizes. MS apparently thought that everyone has big screens. If you've got a small monitor, the unchangeably huge size of the ribbon crowds the screen and reduces your effective working area.
Actually, the ribbon takes up the same or fewer pixels than the default configuration of older Office versions. And you can set it to auto-hide if even that's too much for you. But, again, Microsoft *does* consider things like this when they design features, take a look at this blog post on your exact concern:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
Another assumption -- that folks don't mind losing all the time they put into learning the old UI (which also happens to be standard to all other non-MSO-2007 apps).
If you phrase the question slightly differently, though, it doesn't have the negative spin you're attaching to it:
"Does the increased productivity with the new interface outweigh the time taken to learn it?"
You said yourself that the lessons learned in older versions of Office still apply to the vast majority of applications, so it seems to me that even when Office changes, it's still time well-spent, yes?
Though admittedly anecdotal, my example was of a school full of teachers and office staff, who use tech to get other things done. They don't take kindly to that tech suddenly changing and making it harder to get those exact same tasks done. Change alone is not disliked -- rather, pointless unannounced change that increases the complexity of previously known processes is disliked, with a passion.
But you're making a tacit assumption: that Office 2007 "makes it harder" to get their tasks done. Have you done any studies or measurements to show that is the case? Or is it just people complaining about change with no factual basis? (My guess: the latter.)
The old adage "if it ain't broke..." comes to mind. :)
Their attitude isn't: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Their attitude is closer to: "if it ain't broke, there's no possible way to ever made it better so you shouldn't even try"
The key here though is that all this change *is on my own terms*. *I* choose when to switch interfaces in terms of OSes / apps / keyboards / languages. *I* choose what I'm going to spend my time learning. And I choose not to spend my time learning an inconsistent and confusing system that is effectively being forced on me (making me resent it), and that gets in my way (moving, hiding, and sometimes even completely removing, functionality that I have relied on in the past), and that doesn't come across, to me personally, as useful, intuitive, rewarding, or interesting.
That's fine, nobody's putting a gun to your head and forcing you to buy it. I just want to avoid knee-jerk complaints made by wags with zero practical experience with the technology, and zero data to back-up their claims. (Yes, things like "Office 2007 is more usable" are testable in a lab.)
It's no surprise that the majority of Slashdotters hate Office 2007's new UI, considering that they seem to loathe the entire concept of "usability" and "talking to end-users" in the first place. But until they can *prove* it's worse, at least to the extent Microsoft has *proved* it's better, I put zero credibility in their claims. (Jensen Harris' blog, linked above, has a lot of articles about results from Microsoft's usability labs and studies.)
Good RP MUDs have a system in place where you can get "experience" (or something equivalent) via roleplay. The MUD I used to admin at (dead now, sadly) had a "RPPGIVE" command you could award other people with, and they would level up with RPP the same as with EXP. If you were max level, you could use RPP to buy other benefits, like custom-made mounts or items. We also had a system where you didn't instantly know everybody's name; they had to actually introduce themselves in some way before you could "RECOGNIZE" them in the future.
Anyway, I've yet to see any MMO that even tells you which channels are IC and which are OOC, much less actually encourages RP.
If it is, it shouldn't be. I've never played a more irritating game in my life.
If you had a joystick plugged-in, the keyboard commands for the spaceships were disabled. Good thing the tutorial DIDN'T TELL YOU THAT! It took me like 45 minutes to work that one out, after digging my dust-covered joystick out from behind the monitor. Christ that was a terrible bug.) The tutorial alone wasted almost an hour of my time, stupidly pressing 'W' on the keyboard and wondering why my damned spaceship wouldn't accelerate. Ugh.