Yes. I. KNOW.
I was railing against the “stereotype”, I took pains to leave the person writing the post out of it. (He or she owns a G4, after all, it would seem odd for him or her to believe that stereotype, now wouldn’t it?)
To quote myself:
For such a stereotype to exist, people must believe it. And that is why I am irritated.
**
None of the people in the ads strike me as incompetent. Just not technical (except, of course, for the tech support guy). Apple’s target audience has always been people with too much to do or too little patience to fuck around with their computers, and who just want to get things done.
That’s why artists flock to the platform, that’s one reason why print journalists flock to the platform. Apple’s products are designed so that you don’t need a lot of technical know-how to deal with them. That is a good thing.
And there’s nothing “crap” about being arty.
I’m hoping the next round of ads will be four or five spots, each with a slightly more “technical” bend, going head to head iTunes vs. Windows Media, iPhoto vs. Windows My Pictures, iMovie vs. Windows XP Pathetic Piece of Shit Movie Maker, and iDVD vs. the fact that there’s no equivelent in Windows, and maybe OS X vs. XP.
Apple’s Switch website goes into all this. In truth, the ads are really just a lure to get people to swing by the website. I’m sure we’ll hear at Macworld how the campaign is going.
Is that a game? I really hate computer games aside from Civ, SimCity or Warcraft/Starcraft.
Give me my four best friends and a board game edition of Axis & Allies any day.
Kirk
If it’s Peter Gabriel we’re specifically talking about, then yes.
Thanks, Kirkland1244 and istara. That’s what I wanted to hear. 
Sorry, that’s what I get for posting at one in the A.M. (doing a little PHP programming, thus giving lie to keithnmick’s stereotype of Mac users being technically unskilled). Try this link instead.
And Necros, you may want to check out Apple’s “Top Ten Questions About Switching” page if you want some quick answers.
We’ve got 3 Mac desktops running happily here at work, all with Office 98 on OS 9.X. They co-exist with a WinXP Dell desktop and a WinMe Compaq destop and a handful of PC-based servers. I, being newly designated Contracts Goddess, hand files back and forth to the PC boys all the time. It seems that you have to add the file extension (.doc) to Word files to get them to work right on the Compaq, but that may be a quirk on that machine.
Also, I second istara’s suggestion on MacLinkPlus. I’ve been using it for years on a variety of file types.
Do you mean like “Thumbnails”? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Black, lets say you’ve got 1000 photos in your My Pictures directory, broken up into 200 sub folders. How do you see thumbnails of all your pictures in the same window, at once? With Windows XP, you can’t. In iPhoto in Mac OS X, you can.
Kirk
**
In Mac OS X with Office v.X, you don’t even have to do that. Word and the OS automatically append the .doc extension, though it is usually hidden (a la Windows).
Kirk
I don’t watch much TV. From which end of the cow does Gateway take their business advice?
Winamp is “inscrutable”? My mother, who can barely add two numbers together given a calculator and an instructional videotape, figured out Winamp on her own.
“Least standard?” Compared to what? In what manner exactly - are you saying it violates the MPEG 1 Layer 3 decoding standards?
I’ve often noticed that Apple users often use the word “Ugly”, “Unattractive”, or even “Fucking butt-ugly” to describe both Windows and Windows software that they hate - especially, of all things, MS Office products. Which baffles me, since Word in Mac looks identical to Word in XP to my eyes…
WinAmp is non-standard in regards to the established interface widgets and rules for Windows operating systems. Of course, Windows Media Player breaks all the same rules, which is kinda sad. WinAmp does not function like other Windows programs, it does not have, IIRC, a menubar, it hides its menus in a widget that is not easily discernable from the rest of the interface. It doesn’t look like a Windows 9x application. That is bad. Applications should adhere to the interface standards of the operating system they are in.
I’ve never used “ugly” to describe Office, on either platform. On Windows and Mac OS 9.x Office is serviceable, but nothing gorgeous. On Mac OS X, on the other hand, Office is a very attractive looking application, mainly because of its adherence to the Aqua UI.
However, the Mac and Windows versions of Word, for instance, are not explicitly identical. Aside from the horrid window-in-a-window approach of MDI apps in Windows, Word on the Mac also adheres better to the Mac OS X Aqua GUI than Word XP adheres to the Windows XP GUI. The Windows version of office uses non-standard scrollbars, non-standard menus. It also doesn’t anti-alias text like Mac OS X’s version of Word does, which makes working in Word v.X much more pleasant.
Yes, the basic interfaces between Word XP and Word v.X are almost the same at a casual glance, but there are a lot of subtle tweaks that makes the Mac version more attractive. And less intrusive, as well. The muted, soft Aqua interface is far more pleasant to look at for hours on end than the garish Luna interface, or even the less garish but still too in your face old Windows 9x interface.
Kirk
I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, seriously, but doesn’t that go against allowing the developer creativity in exploring new woman-machine interfaces to the software? And wasn’t that sort of flexibility one of Steve Job’s primary things he touted about the Apple - how much more flexible it allowed program design to be? 
Personally, I like Winamp because it’s small (both visually and memory-wise), unobtrusive (read: small), simple, and works - it’s very high-performance with respect to CPU usage. But everyone sees things differently.
I am not sure I understand what you mean. I doubt Jobs wanted each application to be difficult and tricky to learn, and I doubt he wants the user to have to “re-learn” everything over again, for each new app they use.
One of the things that stand out for me about Mac software is that there is a consistency. All programs will quit when you press the Apple + Q keys. (All programs that I’ve ever used, anyway.) Other keyboard shortcuts are the same across the board, on most if not all Mac applications. The same cannot be said for all Windows programs. I am quite spoiled by the Mac OS. I don’t understand why Windows programs can’t have the same consistencies.
Applications can still be “different” in many ways, but can’t the damned keyboard shortcuts work the same? (At least most of the time?) Is that too much to ask?
I suspect that this may be the kind of consistency that Kirkland is talking about. And, for the record, I don’t like WinAmp’s interface either. And I am not unfamiliar with MP3 players, having tried many. I just don’t like Winamp very much. iTunes IS pretty damned easy, I must admit.
That same consistancy, while a very good and admirable thing, is also something that Windows programmers rail against w.r.t. Apple. Users dislike inconsistant products; but many programmers like to express creativity by creating individual products - I know I do. Which is not always a good thing, I admit - especially if it makes the product unusable or undesireable.
I don’t know how one strikes the right balance.
You can be flexible, but within guidelines. For instance, on a Mac, you can never put a menubar in a window. Ever. That’s a violation of the human interface guidelines. The same with putting scrollbars on the wrong side, or changing how the close/dock/zoom buttons work. Or not using, say, Cmd-E to quit a program instead of Cmd-Q. Or, God forbid, Alt-F4 or somesuch nonsense.
All GUI interfaces have to have guidelines that the applications within them follow so as to provide a consistent interface to the user. That’s the key to making a computing experience easy to learn: Cmd-B should always make text bold, Cmd-W should always close windows, Cmd-Q should always quit the application you’re in. At least on the Mac. On Windows they swiped Cmd-B and made it Cntrl-B, but the window closing command is not standard, and the application quitting command is the ludicrous Alt-F4.
Apple has never touted “flexibility” of the interface. The Apple community has always held sacrosanct the Human Interface Guidelines created in the mid-1980s (and recently greatly revised for Mac OS X). The idea is that the skills for using a program that you learn in the OS or one program should transfer to the next program you’re in. You shouldn’t have to learn a new interface, a new bold command, or a new quit command, or how the fuck do you close this window???, in each new program you purchase.
That was the crappy DOS way of doing things, where Shift-F1 in one program would bold the text you were using, and Shift-F1 in another would quit the program without saving the changes, and you damn well better remember which is which! So everytime you had a new piece of software you had to scale not only the learning curve of “what does this software do?” and “how does it do the special things it does?” but also “and how does it do the simple things like present data on the screen, save files, quit the program, etc”?
The idea behind a GUI, an always present and consistent interface, is to get rid of that last learning curve. The basic widget and interface of all programs is unified around certain guidelines, making it easier to use them, because you don’t have to learn all that crap gain, you jump right into using the software for whatever features you purchased it for.
Microsoft has tried to emulate this on the PC with Windows, but has never really enforced it. But worse, their customers haven’t really demanded it, either. While on the Mac side anyone who puts for a non-standard application that doesn’t work like a Mac app is supposed to work is quickly driven off the market (with the exception of those vile bastards at Quark), on Windows no one seems to care that the bad old days with DOS are still present thanks to braindead developers who think its k00l to create non-standard UIs and make people waste time learning how this program does things (like present its program menus) that every other program also does.
Some h4ck3rrr who thinks its so cool to make some fugly, gaudy GUI that’s totally nonstandard is a detriment to the computing environment. He makes you learn everything again. He defeats the entire purpose of having a standard GUI. And frankly, none of the nonstandard interfaces I’ve ever seen have ever been any good. They all hide simple things, like the way WinAmp hides its menu… it has like six eight-pixel buttons… which don’t look like buttons… that’s utterly fucking absurd. You’re just supposed to click around on all the little gaudy baubles until you hit the one you want. that is wasteful and counter-intuitive. Clearly defined menu, title and work areas, standard to all major GUIs, are present for a reason. As are easily distinguishable, and consistently placed, window management widgets.
Apple and Microsoft have spent millions of dollars reseraching what does and doesn’t work, what is and isn’t intuitive, what is and isn’t clear. The people who make products like WinAmp haven’t. And it shows.
Any program where the first time you start it up and you have to stop and figure out how to do things that are common and easily done in all other programs is a badly designed, non-standard interface, and no program with such an interface should be supported in the marketplace, because they cheapen and weaken the very principles UI design are all about: consistency, clarity, intuitiveness and ease.
Sigh…
A) I will be ordering my eMac next week. Now I just have to tell my PC, and all those games…It’s going to be a tear-jerker.
B) I will be sure to tell Apple that thier commercials are stupid. Stupid stupid stupid! Fucking stupid, even. Craptastic. Shitty. Not good. But I probably won’t have the guts to use those words.
I saw an eMac today at MicroCenter. Nifty little machine. My mom would like it. It looks like the iMac I gave her last Christmas, buts its of course faster, and more expandale (more USB and FireWire ports), and has a bigger screen.
But I prefer my iMac G4. I love the ergonomics of the easily-shifted screen, the Pro Speakers, and I’ll never again be able to live with a computer without some sort of DVD-burning capability.
So I guess you would really hate that rotating 3-D checkbox-button cube that I have in one application, huh? 
Isn’t Quark often touted as an example of the “best” Apple software? The Mac users I know swear by Quark - but if they are non-standard, how can that be a good thing?
Doesn’t it also come down to whether or not you believe that the “Human Interface Guidelines” are the best and only way to do something? Look at us here - you seem to be baffled and confused by Winamp, and I find it to be very clean and easy to use. Does this make you an idiot? Does this make me a sick glutton for punishment who like doing things the hard way?
No, in neither case.
Winamp is free software - 100% free - and I would imagine that if its UI was really that bad, people would move to one of the other umpteen free software MP3 players out there. But why aren’t they? Aside from Media Player, Winamp is still the single most popular MP3 player in existance.