this is just to say that

[calimac]

I have sworn eternal hostility against every claim that Apple device interfaces are "user-friendly." A more frustrating, illogical, incomprehensible, inconsistent screen I never hope to see. Bah.

Comments

[brithistorian]

I think that in order to find Apple devices to be "user-friendly," you have to learn to think in Apple. I had a Mac for several years (long ago), and there was a fairly steep learning curve at first because I basically had to unlearn how I'd learned to think about things in the Windows environment.

[voidampersand]

And what screen would that be? I was a long-time member of the tribe of Macintosh developers, whose motto was "All computers suck, we try to make Macs suck less."

[calimac]

"you have to learn to think in Apple."

Precisely the problem. "User-friendly," as the term is used by people I've heard extolling that quality in Apple, is supposed to mean that it's intuitively understandable, that it fits the way you already think, that there is no learning curve.
Sheer nonsense, of course, but that's what they say.

[calimac]

ipad mini. The curse came with trying to put icons in the bar at the bottom of the screen and then to make them stay there.

The Mac committed terminal suckitude in its first edition by having "eject disc" and "delete file" be the same 'trashcan' command. That alarmed me so much I was frightened off for good.

[voidampersand]

I don't know why icons didn't stay in the dock. The iPad is more like a phone with a big screen than it is like a Mac. But the iPhone has had a dock from day 1 and it works. Sometimes these things are more complicated than they should be.

i remember dragging the floppy icon to the trash. It was not the greatest metaphor. But in context, the original Mac remembered a diskette and kept its icon on the screen even after the diskette was ejected. This was to work around the very limited storage capacity of the diskettes, and the lack of a hard drive. Originally, if you were done using a diskette that you had ejected, you could drag the ghost of its icon to the trash, and the Mac would forget about it. That kind of made sense - it was deleting not the diskette, but the reference to it. Then logically, if you drag a mounted diskette to the trash, it would both eject it and forget it.

Did the Mac delete the data on your diskette when you dragged it to the trash? No. The Mac engineers were very careful to safeguard user data, regardless of the alarming metaphor.

Apple did not keep the drag disk to trash metaphor for long. They added a Command-E for Eject shortcut, control-click or right-click on the disk and select Eject, an eject icon for the disk in the Finder side panel, and even a dedicated Eject button on the keyboard.

[calimac]

"That kind of made sense ... very careful to safeguard user data" Yes, but we were talking about whether the interface was user-friendly. "alarming metaphor" is the relevant point. Good thing they soon changed their minds about having it.

[brithistorian]

I do think that Apple developers tend to use a more consistent interface across different programs, but it still requires learning the "Apple way of doing things" first. (And a lot of the "Apple way of doing things" is the "Steve Jobs way of doing things" - such as, for example, the way Macs had a single-button mouse long after Windows PCs had gone over to two [or more] button mice - Jobs insisted that a single mouse button was better, and no one was willing or able to tell him no.)