::scr tell me why you're using OSX, you big geek

[simon wistow]

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 02:56:13AM -0800, celia romaniuk said:
> One of the traditional reasons people dissed Macs was because they didn't
> like being able to get 'under the hood'. Is being able to do this in OSX a
> compelling reason to start using it?

Well, sort of. You can't really get under the hood of Windows either but
there were better development enviroments for that. Plus x86 hardware
wasn't so expensive and you could upgrade/fix it yourself and boot into
windows to play games.

Personally I don't want to have to go under the hood for my desktop
enviroment. I want it to just work. Although I do like having shell
scripting so that I can do simple tasks such as grep through all my mail
for occurences of phrases and stuff. Chaining stuff through pipes is
powerful AND fun!

MacosX might combine the stuff I need but when I used it last it suck
quite badly. I have got to love the taskbar of MacOS (n<X) and the way
I can switch between apps and their windows easily. I'd love something
like that for my *nix desktop at work. I fake it now using virtual
windows but it's not the same.

 
> And above all: where does this leave the 'number of mouse buttons'
> debate'?

Seriously though (he says in danger of dragging up arguments passim).
Having just finished Insanely Great by Steven Levy (which is the story
of the Macintosh - I'm sure I've read it before but I didn't remember
very much of it at all) I finally understood why Macs only have one
mouse button - users got confused because whilst there was a metaphor
for pointing with your forefinger (which translated to pointing with the
virtual hand on the screen) there was no metaphor (is metaphor the right
word? /shurg/ ah well, you know what I mean) for right clicking.

Fair enough, these were days of yore when people still laughed when you
said Wizzywig and Gooey. And probably when you said Ram and Floppy as
well.

So why didn't they introduce it later? They have Option-Click for
context clicking but I either want both hands on the keyboard or one on
the mouse, not some unholy combination of the two. 

Well, you could argue that 
a) The Mac interface is *supposed* to be simple. Putting in too many
options would defeat the point. Don't fix what ain't broken.
  
  and

b) the type of work that people tend to do on the Mac tend to need that
keyboard/mouse interface (Photoshop, Quark etc etc)


But they've added confusion to the interface in MacOS 7 (I think) when
they introduced symlinks/aliases/shortcuts [DELETE as appropriate] which
have no real world metaphor (apart from cross referencing I suppose).
Plus they let you plug in two button mouses - couldn't they have had a
control panel option that was off by default that let you turn on dual
button support and then shipped their laptops with two buttons. Although
the argument here is that laptops have their meeces on the laptop anyway
so Ctrl-Clicking is probably easier than right clicking.

Anyway, my real point is that people argue that this could confuse users
so they haven't done it. Which is fair enough. I mean if they argued for
ages over symlinks being confusing then ...

And then they go give users, who they expect to be confused by right
mouse clicking and symlinks a Bash prompt.

Go figure.



....


that's not very well thought out but J2ME is making my brain rot. IT
MAKES ME WANT TO SMOKE CRACK. GAH! GAH! GAH! [0]

...

*cough*

sorry.



[0] Not as bad as VB but it's still bad.