Kirkland1244,
But does having a 15" screen bother you? It strikes me as being kinda small. Granted, on a laptop, it would be considered big, and I am toying with the idea of getting a iBook instead of the eMac. But the eMac seems to be a nice price/function balance. The decision will be made about 3 seconds before I type my CC# in for the order…God forbid I am caught ‘planning ahead’.
I am not baffled by WinAmp, I find it to be nonstandard, and thus unusable. The first time you use it, it is confusing. I challenge you to sit anyone down whose only used standard Windows program at the WinAmp window and say “find the menus” and see how fucking long it takes them.
How long SHOULD it take to find the menu? NO TIME. It should be obvious. It should be right there. JUST LIKE IN EVERY OTHER APPLICATION. It would be quicker to put a fucking menubar on the window, LIKE EVERY OTHER APPLICATION, than to make me waste my valuable time clicking around for the god damn thing.
WinAmp violates so many rules of good UI design – small buttons, hidden buttons, hidden menus – it is utter crap. But oooh, its skinnable, so you can layer on even more ugly, non-standard, non-usable UIs.
It’s popularity is its price and the fact that its been around for so long. Eventually Windows Media Player will replace it. Not that Windows Media Player is any good, but it will win, thanks to the weight of the Hegemony.
Plus, most people are too stupid to care about good UI design. They stumble because of arrogant developers who take it onthemselves to reinvent a nonstandard wheel, and just write it off as computers being hard to use. When in truth the fault lies 100% with the developer who chose to go their own route instead of sticking to what works.
And as for Quark, we all use Quark only because we have to use Quark. But no one that I know who uses Quark likes it, and I know dozens upon dozens of publishing professionals. It is a giant piece of junk, but it was the first to really take the desktop publishing market and make a professional niche out of it (sure, PageMaker preceded it, and is still a beautiful program, but for laying out multipage documents or documents with standard layouts and variable content, PageMaker is not up to the task, while Quark, sadly, has been from the word go).
We’ve been trying for two years at Student Media Co. to begin testing InDesign, but this blasted economic slowdown has trounced our tech budget. People use Quark because it is the industry standard, but in spite of its horrible interface and deep-rooted flaws (such as the inabilty to view graphics files inline or to zoom more than 400%). However, Quark’s bloated, un-commented codebase, nonstandard design and arrogant management have finally caught up with them – porting the software to Mac OS X will take at least another year. A year in which Adobe’s InDesign, at version 2.0 and OS X native, can make its move. InDesign is everything Quark should be, its just not the industry default yet. But as Quark continues to drag its arrogant feet, InDesign can patch up their last few problems with their PDF output, and make major inroads. So hopefully the print industry will not be so dependent upon that lumbering albatross Quark.
You will see Apple and Apple fans talk about Quark because it is a major piece of software that runs much, much better on the Mac… but you will never hear anyone with any sense laud its horrid UI.
And no, I would not use your software, if you fill it up with pointless, usability-draining crap like “spinning 3d checkboxes.” The checkbox has been invented. Do you actually think making it a giant piece of distracting eye candy improves the useage of your client’s computer? How so, pray tell?
If you want to be “creative” with your software, here’s an idea: create a feature that I have to have, that your competitors don’t. Nonstandard checkboxes and ugly UI anomolies are not features. Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel. We already have wheels, and your non-standard wheel that doesn’t look like what users expect a wheel to look like is not being creative. Creative would be coming up with something new that ends the need for checkboxes. But fucking up the established look of the checkbox to make yourself seem “k00l” is not an accomplishment. Its a waste of time.
So there I sit using your program, whatever it is, wondering why it doesn’t do something I would like it to do… and then I realize that instead of creating features, you wasted your time reinventing the checkbox. Something that has already been done, and done better, before.
Um…am I not getting something here? I can see the images in the Windows XP “My Pictures” folder without opening them. They’re thumbnails. It’s an easy feature to enable.
fallom, you aren’t following what I was saying.
You have 100 pictures. You have 10 sub-foldes in “My Pictures,” each containing 10 of your photos. How do you see thumbnails of all 100 of those pictures, at the exact same time? You cannot. You can only see thumbnails of the pictures in the particular directory you are in. There is no way to view your photolibrary as a whole, in one window, unless you keep them all in the same folder.
Kirk
I thought it would. Especially since I had grown use the 19" screen on my Dell… but in truth its plenty. The screen is gorgeous, and so fun/easy to use/move/adjust. The image is crystal clear, and bright. And remember, a 15" LCD is larger than a 15" CRT. There’s only an inch or so difference between the 15" LCD on the iMac and the visible portion of the 17" CRT on the eMac.
Hee hee… yeah, when I got my PowerBook G4 last fall, after years of being “Windows only,” I wasn’t sure I was going to get the G4 and not a Dell Inspiron 8100 until the night I walked into the Willow Bend Apple Store and left $2,200 poorer.
And then came the iMac G4, which I fell in love with the moment I saw it (at the Apple Store again… about 200 of us gathered to watch the Macworld keynote). I put my name down for one that day, got it February 14. My most expensive impulse buys ever. And next to my iPod, the best piece of technology I’ve ever used. And I’ve used a lot.
If I were to purchase today, I’d give the eMac a look… but get the iMac… it’s more attractive (IMO), and has that oh-so-cool DVD-R drive.
Kirk
For those of you who would like to see, I’ve posted screenshots of Word XP on my Windows XP Dell system, and Word v.X running on my iMac in Mac OS X v.10.1.5.
The text in the Mac version is anti-aliased, thanks to Mac OS X’s Quartz rendering engine. The text in the Windows screenshot is blurry because Windows Paint does a poor job of scaling the image.
Some nice things about the Mac version:
The status bar keeps a running word count. In Windows I had to show the “Word Count” toolbar, and have to trigger a word count manually to have it count. The Mac word count status item also shows me where I am in the document. It says 2790/4500 in the screenshot because I have the cursor after the 2,790th word. Very handy.
The red “close” dot in the corner in the Mac version is dimmed in the center, indicating that the document needs to be saved. No such indicator on the Windows side.
The Mac version includes the handy Font menu and Work menu. The Formatting Palette provides near-instant access to all formatting options. To get this on Windows you’d have to show a whole lot of toolbars, and it wouldn’t be half as organized or convenient.
The “view” option indicators at the bottom left hand corner of the windows are larger and more distinguishable on the Mac, and all the toolbar buttons are more attractive, larger and cleaner.
The Windows version has the handy “quick help search” field inthe menubar, which is a God send, when you need it. Word XP, also has Task Panes, which are sort of like the Formatting Palette, letting you reveal the formatting of text, manage your clip board, etc. But they’re badly implemented, and I rarely use them.
Also, these are not the default configurations for this programs, just the manner in which I have them set up for the way I work in each.
Kirk
Hmmm… I’m still not sure I’m being clear, so I put this webpage together with a few screenshots to explain what I’m talking about in regards to iPhoto making it easier to see all your photographs.
Yes, go to my webpage, marvel at how badly I’m OCD, and at how much I suffer from insomnia, and be amazed that anyone could care enough to do this.
But most of all, go because one of the pictures in there is of me… and I know you’re just all dying to know what I look like. 
URL=http://homepage.mac.com/fireball1244/iphoto/index.html]You know you want to.
Kirk
Why does it have to have menus? Everything you need to use it, unless you are using the advanced features (which likely less than 1% of Winamp Users do) is right there on the front panel. Open files. Set up playlists. Play said files. Forward. Reverse. Volume. Equalizer. Pause. Play. Stop. Etc. It’s all right there, one-click away. Some people would call that pretty easy.
When do you need access to the menus? When you’re doing something, like changing the MP3 buffer rate, writing the MP3’s out to WAV, or assigning file types, customizing the UI…things that even I, a hard-core and very technical user, access maybe once every … month? or so.
Why make an extra-large and clunky GUI, when everything the average User needs is right there on the front panel, one-click away? 
I’m guessing you’ve never written any large program for paying customers…?
Don’t dare chalk up innovation as “arrogance”. I’ll wager you have not been in the GUI design meetings of a major software development project.
We honestly are trying to make things easier for the User. And the User pays our bills. In the team I led, we analyzed the most frequent tasks that any User would do, and discovered that the User spent about 50% of their time looking at results, 30% of their time entering data in one area, and about 18% of their time entering data in another. Out of perhaps a hundred plus core features, the average User spent 98+% of their time in three of them.
We had standard menus, arranged in textbook fashion. And, of course, the Users were confused. They complained most bitterly about having to Search through the menus for three items. So we moved them to the front of the menus, violating the data organization of the menus. They still didn’t like that, because when they clicked on the menus, they saw their top three options, but so many others as well…and which ones should they use?
So we violated “good GUI design” - we put three big-assed buttons right on the front panel, hanging off of the menu. It stopped 99% of the complaints.
Don’t assume that it’s arrogance that drives these things. Sometimes it’s an honest response to a confused User base. I could have sat there, like Apple apparently would like me to, and have said “But it’s in the menus, why can’t you find it?” or “Just hit <CTRL-E> to edit.”, but that would have been, ironically, arrogant.
We can also talk about Standards in Apple’s rejection of the right mouse button in its “Standard”. Arguments against the right-click sound more and more like “Windows does it, so we won’t.” People say that “The right mouse button is too confusing.”, “Why do you need more than one mouse button?”, etc. None of which address the fact using the right mouse button is simply faster. The right mouse button speeds up my workflow, makes me more effiient, not less, and this is true of everyone I know, and was true in all of the client GUI testing that we did. Right-click to access menu items is an example of good and efficient GUI design, and I submit that it is arrogance that keeps Apple from making it a standard part of their design.
It was a programming exercise. It didn’t go in anything commercial. You’d rather like my independent software I’ve written, as it is a plain, boring, Menu-driven interface with buttons exactly in the right places, controls that follow the exact standard of what they should do, and screens that cascade logically.
Creating the checkbox was neat. And it was an accomplishment. It doesn’t mean it should be used. But your continued little pokes back at me (“to make yourself seem k001”) are not waranted. Once again, I’m guessing you’ve never actually written large software before for paying clients - certainly not clients that can sue you in court for a refund if they don’t like it (it costs in the low 6-figures). In making the rotating checkbox that you already hate, not ever having seen, I learned alot about how the GUI container classes worked.
That aside, with all due respect, it’s not up to Apple to tell me that my wheel is not better than theirs. It’s up to the market and the Users to. And if I made a silly rotating 3-D checkbox for my paying Users, and they liked it and used it, then Apple’s elite GUI design people have nothing to say on the matter.
I constantly have to listen to complaints, suggestions, and problems. And analyze workflow processes on the screen. If I find a way to make workflow better for my Users, and they test it and like it, then really, I’m doing the Right Thing.
I used a specious example of the rotating checkboxes in my previous post as humor. There was a 
by it, up above. Now that I’ve explained it, I trust we won’t be discussing it anymore.
[sub]Of course, I could talk about the “7-button cubical rotating checkbox”, which had one side that randomly appeared, in place of another, but you couldn’t see it happen, since you could only see at most 3-sides of a 3-d cube on a 2-d screen…but that was a game program, and I guess we’ll be discussing why that design was bad too in the next post.[/sub]
I still maintain that the ads are promoting the incompetent dorks who produce arty crap stereoptype. This guy is the main offender:
http://www.apple.com/switch/ads/markfrauenfelder.html
“I dont have to be in that…that clunky world there’s…there’s…a clunkiness to it”
…very well expressed indeed Mark, now stop fidgeting so much.
The guy concludes by saying he’s a freelance writer and illustrator. This writer can’t do better than describing the clunky world as having a clunkiness to it? Give me a break. He really looks like someone who produces arty crap. (not arty goodness)
Please note I’m attacking the ads here, not the products. I’m an industrial designer, and I use a G4 and a P4 daily so I know the ins and outs of the OS’s (and some UNIX as well). The mac plenty fast and is a nicer place to be. The windows machine is faster and runs software I need to use, especially Rhino 3d. Rhino isn’t a game, it’s a 3d surfacing program. http://www.rhino3d.com/
here’s my story:
My husband always has been a Apple user.
He purchased a G4.
I used it for a while.
I never had a problem with it. Never crashed.
It was easy and simple for me to use.
It got to the point that I needed my own computer.
we decided to get a pc.
Specifically we got an HP pavillion.
We mainly decided to get a PC because at my work we use AutoCAD (a pc not mac prog).
We also thought it would be nice to have “one of each”.
WHAT A MISTAKE.
The Pavillion was non stop problems.
It was a pain in the ass to use.
The Usb ports always acted up, if they bothered to work at all.
The interfaces were indeed different on the programs I used (photoshop, flash etc). They were not drastically different, but enough to make it annoying.
we had to do a re-install so many times. (sorry, but I don’t know the techincal name for this).
so, I honestly don’t know:
were the problems I had a pavillion problem (i,e the USB ports).
were they pc vs mac things?
I dunno.
I do know that when I see those ads, I say “Amen to that!”
they do speak to me, so I guess I am one of those arty dork types.
one a happy note:
my little side business has done well enough that I was able to buy a new G4. The pavillion was given the boot out the door.
(I am still so amused at how the light glows on and off when he goes into sleep mode. it’s like he’s snoring! )
now I aspire to save up enough to buy a flat screen monitor.
Just one minor point. The eMac isn’t a consumer product. It’s an education only computer. It’s only for schools.
Of course, that does beg the question, if it’s only for schools why confuse consumers by making it so prominent on their site and in news releases?
I love my Mac and have no intentions of switching to PC, but I don’t care much for their marketing. Then again, I don’t care much for marketing in general.
An education only computer? Like it’s a speak-and-spell with a nicer screen?
Nah, while the folks at Apple, for some odd reason, may want to only sell these to educational facilities, they seem like great machines, and as long as they are available to general public, they can call it whatever they like. (They are indeed available to the general consuming public through the Apple store, I just confirmed that, so they are technically ‘consumer products’, no?)
are you sure this is still true?
I saw one for sale at CompUSA.
from apple’s site:
A concise history of the eMac
Apple designed the eMac after talking to teachers and students about what they most wanted in a computer — features and attributes like a PowerPC G4 processor, a 17-inch flat CRT display, an all-in-one design, and lots of useful applications — at an affordable price. And then something happened. The Apple switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. The phones started ringing. And ringing. Then came a blizzard of email. All from people of all ages demanding to know when they could buy an eMac for their home. Well, we’re pleased to announce that the answer is “now.”
the real story on the eMac:
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-931691.html?tag=fd_top
BNB: The problems were the fault of HP. The big companies like HP, Compaq, and Gateway make shitty computers. If you want a real good one that doesnt crash, you’ll have to spend 1 to 2 thousand dollars on a Falcon or Alien.
It doesn’t. But it does, and if it is going to have menus, it should present them in a standard way.
In six-pixel by six-pixel buttons that don’t look like buttons. Having buttons so small, and not clearly evident, violates not only Fitt’s Law, but it in effect hides things. Even if you can tell that the little bitty letters are buttons, you have to click through them to find out what the fuck they do. That is NOT good design, no matter how ooh neat you think it looks.
Toolbar buttons, which is what those crappy little letters are, should be large and clearly buttons. The smaller you make a target, the harder it is to hit it, and that is bad.
Fine, use toolbar buttons… but make them clearly buttons, not just little letters. And make them large, not six by six… the more delicately the user has to aim the mouse to hit your widget, the worse the design.
No. I write novels, not software. But I know a good GUI when I see one, I know what makes a program harder to learn, I know that using ugly non-standard software slows people down. I’ve dealt with newbies when I was a tech support person, and I know that programs that hide or obscure their tools or menus are confusing to average users and new users.
It is arrogance. The checkbox has already been innovated, you moron. For you to throw out how it works, or play around with it, to add bullshit eye candy, or whatever garbage mutilations you did to standard interface guidelines in your little game, was redundant and wasteful effort.
Innovation would be creating a new widget, that seemlessly meshes with the standard UI, but extends it with functionality not otherwise present. Tabbed dialogue boxes, for instance, were an innovation in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
No, and I’ll wager you’ve never chatted about user interface design, what makes one work and what makes one not work, with Jef Raskin or Bruce Tognazzi. The two men who helped create what we consider good user interface today, and who would disagree with pretty much every single one of your arguments.
And have you read through the Interface Hall of Shame? You might find it enlightening.
That’s not violating “good GUI design.” You added a fucking toolbar, apparently. OOOH! Watch out everyone! Big innovator in the house.
Toolbars are good GUI design. You even stumbled on the very reason for them, to make one-click available the most commonly used features of an application. Gosh. Wow.
No, Apple would have put the most commonly used commands in a toolbar to begin with. As would Microsoft. Or any other major developer.
Apple rejected the two-button mouse in 1982, well before it was a “standard,” after over a year of testing on computer newbies and mouse newbies, which showed that multiple buttons confused the user. So Apple shipped with one-button. Since then, the idea of a mouse has become more standard, and people have become more comfortable with it, so multiple buttons isn’t so much of a stretch (though when I worked tech support for Dell, there were people who couldn’t understand why one button did one thing and another did another thing).
However, Apple’s OS supports two button mice out of the box. All you have to do is plug one in and you have a fully functional two button mouse. Apple continues to ship one button mice because: 1) it’s one of their trademarks, 2) its still easier for computer newbies (like my mom… given how she clicks her mouse, two buttons would be a potential disaster) and 3) they just do.
Show me where Apple says that.
It can be for new users. It would be for my mom, and it was for some of the people I dealt with when I worked for Dell.
On a Mac, you don’t. There’s nothing you can do with a two button mouse that you can’t do on a Mac with a one button mouse.
I can’t say that having a two-button mouse on my Mac, and right clicking for context-menus is any faster than my one button mouse when I Control-clicked for them. In fact, I’d say its not.
Apple has the exact same functionality available in their systems via Control-click with one button mice, or right clicking with a third party two button mouse. Learn what you’re talking about before you go running your mouth.
In other words, well designed software. Well designed software’s interface should be boring, because the interface should get the fuck out of your way. You shouldn’t be thinking about the interface, but about the work you’re doing in the application.
Only in the same way creating a website with all “blink” text is an accomplishment.
Actually, since Apple has spent millions of dollars researching and testing GUI design, and Microsoft has done the same, and they come to pretty much the same conclusions on all points: yes, it is.
Kirk
I was enjoying this discussion. Until this:
1)It was, as I said quite clearly and unambiguously, “a programming exercise. It didn’t go in anything commercial.” I guess since most things we were taught in class were already done, College was a wasteful effort as well? Why does anyone do any sample programs, if not to learn coding? Or did you just not bother to read what I wrote? And the 7-button box was a game, as I clearly and unambiguously posted - but you ignored that as well.
So let’s see here - you’re stacking up the fact that you reputedly “chatted” with two people most of us never heard of, versus my work experience actually designing GUIs for a living for paying clients to whom I’m legally and morally obligated? I once reputedly “chatted” with a former head of the US Department of Transportation at a conference - does that somehow qualify me for a Cabinet post?
You see, I can be fair about it and say that perhaps neither of our (alleged) experiences make the other an expert. But in any event, your qualifications are certainly somewhat nebulous here on this point.
Your sarcasm was unwarranted. And I suppose you can tell me exactly what OS I was using, and if it supported toolbars natively at all? And if, in fact, I added a toolbar to a system that didn’t have one, then I guess even though I followed Apple’s example, that is not good enough for you?
In fact, I did just that - I did add a toolbar to an OS that did not support it natively. And yes, that makes me an innovator. In fact, from what I gather, that means I followed the Apple way of doing things. So that makes me a moron?
So why did you call me a moron, anyways? Maybe you should do a few Searches before you continue down this path here… And (and I expect an answer for this one) where did I insult you in a similar fashion? Please link to it, thank you.
You’re right. You did say that. But you were also so damned proud of it, from your “tone” in your first post about it, that it sounded like something you would like to foist on a poor, unprepared user. I’ve seen interfaces designed by people who don’t give a flip about standards. I fight with them every day, on my Windows machine (and occassionally on my Mac).
I don’t know where you went to college, but most of what I’ve learned in college has not been by simply replicating the efforts of those who preceded us. That’s more like that utter waste of time and money known as “high school.”
We don’t sit around in Constitutional Government classes writing our own Constitutions, you know.
There is no difference. The ideal is easily achievable: use the standard GUI widgets and design protocols, and everything will be fine. Don’t sludge up computerdom with gee-whiz bullshit and pointlessly redone, hacker implementations of already tried and true interface components.
If you come up with a truly NEW way of doing things, implement it in such a way that it feels like a natural extension of the existing GUI paradigm.
I’m not angry. I’m fed up. Mostly with having to click on a link 15 damn times on this board to get anywhere.
But I’m also fed up with bullshit computer programs with garbage interfaces concocted by programmers who felt their second-rate baby was too cool for the established and understandable interface paradigms that all good software are built around.
If I’m quick to angry, its because my life and my time are very valuable, and I get sick of wasting time relearning interfaces that SHOULD BE USING ESTABLISHED STANDARDS.
That, and the fact that the Boards have been responding like crap to day put me in a really pissy mood when I posted my first reply. And of course, there’s no edit function. I didn’t mean to come off so harsh. So please don’t take it so personally.
Not entirely, no. Sure, you’ve reputedly “designed” GUIs, but from what I’ve read here you design them in non-standard ways. And anyone who doesn’t know who Jef Raskin and Tog are has no place discussing computer interfaces over the past 20 years.
Actually, as a political science major, I can honestly say that yes, that does make you qualified for several Cabinet posts. I know President Bush, if you want me to put a word in for you.
I’m not an expert. I wouldn’t care to be an expert in writing software or designing software. But I have designed, for fun, computer interfaces before. I have the files around somewhere, where I drew out how I would design a computer UI. I tried to bring over the best things from every established interface I’d ever used. But there was nothing innovative (had a Dock-like thing from NeXT that had the Eraser, disk icons, program launcher… the option to put menubars in the window or at the top of the screen) to it… except maybe the systemwide status bar, which was always present. I really hate it when programs don’t have a statusbar, so I thought making a universal one would force developers to include such functionality.
But that was all just playing around, and years ago. Doesn’t make me an expert… and it also doesn’t change the fact that forcing users to relearn things in a GUI that already has established means for doing things IS ALWAYS WRONG AND ALWAYS BAD.
Sarcasm is the language of the gods.
Adding toolbars is still not an innovation. That’d be like Apple adding a “start” button to the Mac OS and calling it an innovation. Innovaton is coming up with something new, not just doing what’s been done elsewhere somewhere new.
Not sure I follow you here.
Mainly because I was so damn frustrated with the crappy servers that run this board, and thus in a particularly foul mood when I posted. Sorry. I really didn’t mean it. If I actually thought you were a moron, I wouldn’t have posted at all.
Kirk
Nice theory, but since the CNet article doesn’t have any Apple employees state that the eMac was a low-price iMac substitute, it remains unsubstantiated.
Besides, when the LCD G4 iMac was announced, Apple was still selling (and continues to sell) the earlier G3 iMacs for about $700 or so. I think those properly qualify for the moniker of “entry-level iMac.” Besides, given the changes/differences between the G3 iMacs and the eMac, I doubt the eMac was a throw-it-together-in-a-weekend engineering rush job.
