[OT] Re: [Ti] Panther Firewire debacle

[Tarik Bilgin]

DISCLAIMER:

the contents of this email will be highly Off-Topic. It's a rant of 
sorts and may be unsuitable for those of a nervous disposition.

YMMV.

On Friday, October 31, 2003, at 09:26  pm, Steve Wozniak wrote:

> Today at a ribbon cutting for a Carnegie Mellon campus it was asked 
> how many think software works. Not a hand went up.

I am still on 10.2.8, mainly for reasons of lack of time to upgrade (I 
normally pencil in 6-8 hours for a major OS upgrade as contingency that 
things may break), as my Ti is the machine where almost 99% of my work 
gets done, but perhaps there are other reasons I did not run out and 
buy it as soon as the clock on www.apple.com struck zero hour.

I recently had a long debate with a friend of mine about where Apple 
are, software wise. He thought they were doing a great job with respect 
to Panther; I had my doubts.

I can not complain about the hardware;  I think that they have done a 
good job on that front. The hardware is so usable it hurts. We like 
that.

On the subject of software though, I am not impressed with regards to 
its usability.

OK , the main reason I got back into Apple products after abandoning 
them for around 4 years was OS X. In those 4 years I became a UNIX 
"nut" and could see the benefits that UNIX could bring to the Mac OS, 
and went out and bought (and carried home in a black cab) a graphite 
iMac DV+ SE, my first mac since the 8600.

As I plugged the beauty in to the AC and the phone connection in my 
living room, my eyes lit up as went through the Apple "Welcome" wizard 
after installing OSX Public Beta.

However, in each and every release since 10.0.x I have been waiting for 
Apple to go back and read their own book on usability.

Most software doesn't just "work", you have to learn to "work" with it, 
but while businessmen were wrestling with the computer operators who in 
turn wrestled with "mini computers", Apple in the 1980's somehow got a 
reputation for building a Desktop Environment that just "works", an 
"insanely great"  "computer for the rest of us"....

I want this back; at least in part.

Yes, UNIX does bring a level of complication (multi-user for starters)  
to a computer, just as Microsoft Windows 2000 brought it to the Intel 
platform, but this is not to say that Apple had to burn the entire book 
on usability.

I remember me and my Mac buddies laughing at explorer.exe, the clunky, 
ugly and slow "disk browser", while we double clicked our Hard Drive 
icons in 21" greyscale bliss...

I'm sorry to say that explorer.exe is actually now a pretty decent 
browser (although partly for its unilateral familiarity) while I spend 
3 minutes wrestling with Finder.app and watching beach balls trying to 
find the file that I want.

Any of you who work in software will know the scenario; If the app 
being demo'd to the client has an easy, nay "intuitive" GUI, that will 
usually sell the product over another, perhaps more capable but less 
usable one.

So, a big thumbs up to Apple for creating the iMac,Powerbook G4, Darwin 
project and OSX including Aqua, but a big thumbs down for not yet 
producing a Finder that "just works".

But hey, maybe we should go easy on them, producing software that "just 
works" is just about the hardest thing I (and probably your friends at 
Carnegie Mellon) have ever  seen.

--
Tarik Bilgin