M… Mouse &c
A new apple mouse with more than one button and a name that makes me cringe whenever i come across it. Which uses only one button and touch-sensors to distinguish between left- and right-clicks. Which apparently has the unfortunate side effect of forcing the user to lift his index finger from the left-”button”-side of the mouse before you can actually perform a right-click. In case this isn’t glaringly obvious to anyone outside apple’s qa department: Dumbest. Thing. Ever. I’ll have to have a play with the m… mouse at my local apple retailer, but i really don’t see this working very well.
While i’m bashing apple: this article about user interface shortcomings in spotlight is by no means exhaustive, but it’s a good start. The mac user interface is steadily deteriorating, but looking at “nine things kde should learn from mac os x” it’s easy to see why i haven’t switched to something else yet: the mac isn’t so much good as it’s a lot less bad than its alternatives.
Oh, come on. Comparing OSX to KDE is like comparing apples to pears. Most of the points in the poorly written text you referred to are simply not valid, because they support a totally different paradigma, e.g. the core applications point. I for one do like the fact that I can choose from a number of different apps for a single function, thus I’m able to find out which one suits me best. Isn’t it the beauty of a transparent system that the underlying process can be projected onto many different GUIs?
In the end, OS X is proprietary software with a fixed set of core apps. If I don’t like one of them, what am I to do? Write an angry letter to support and expect them to fix it? With KDE, everything is possible.
Comment by gibarian on Aug. 9th, 2005, at 0:30 #
Well, the article may be poorly written, but i think most of its points are valid because they’re not really about choice, openness or core apps, at least not exclusively. Core applications can have really poor user interfaces (spotlight) or lack integration (dashboard) and third party apps can excel in both (i’ll once again drag nnw out as an outstanding example with a user interface many times better than anything apple has done recently and outstanding system integration through e.g. exemplary apple script support).
Regarding openness, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that anyone’s gonna redo the user-interface of some application because it sucks despite getting the job done functionally. Anyone anything like me will swallow his frustration and go on with his life.
Two issues raised in the article are application interoperability and integration which are core paradigms in unix clis (pipes anyone?), so apparently they aren’t contradictory to openness. Even loosely coupled integration needs a foundation to be built upon even if it’s something as seemingly trivial as consensus among developers and support from the underlying system certainly wouldn’t hurt either.
The most important point raised in the article imho is its subtle emphasis on the importance of the “blank slate” state of software. I think this is a vital factor in easing adoption of new applications and one of the core problems in end-user open source software. As a developer it’s easy to lose track of how your application presents itself to a new user because of your intimate familiarity with your own creation. It seems that most efforts in this area focus on getting users up and running as effortlessly and hassle-free as possible with improved hardware support and risk-free live-cd distros and it’s a great first step. The problem i have with live-cds is that they’ll get me up and running in minutes, but once i’m up and running there’s little guidance. I then flee into the nearest terminal because it’ll give me a set of well-known, interoperable, established core apps. I guess it’s just a matter of time and myriads of prying eyes to get linux up to snuff because the ambition to get it onto the desktops of non-geeky people is definitely there, but i also believe it’ll take time and growing respect for and appreciation of end-users among developers. Not that things aren’t rapidly improving, it’s just not quite there yet for me.
Of course, take anything i write about kde with a salt mine, my last time with linux was a few days short and only took me into gnome-land. I found most of the issues raised in the article valid, but if anyone feels like stepping up and actually refuting them i’ll eat my words.
Comment by christoph on Aug. 9th, 2005, at 4:15 #