I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point.
Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.
Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design.
Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.
Design is about usability and understanding the user and making an interface for the user that works well according to the users understanding, perspective and needs.
Design is an engineering discipline.
Seriously.
The Linux community hasn't had that, and I've seen many of them reject it. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. You see it all the time in lots of contexts. Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows.
Literal copying is about as far from design as you can get.
Sure, over the years, designers have taken cracks at bringing design to linux, including the work of Ubuntu, but it is rejected by the community.
Rejection of design is a cultural trait of the linux community. They reject it as a discipline, doesn't even see that it exists. (broadly speaking, of course.)
But as users, they have been influenced by it and many of them have switched to OS X because it is the best designed operating system.
And then they write long blog posts about how its wrong that OS X does things a certain way ... based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.
Its ironic.
But its fine- if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design, more power to you. Won't ever fault someone for making that decision. We should all use the systems that we prefer.
But the culture that doesn't value design, and can't even see it as an engineering discipline, is going to have a great deal of trouble making something usable by the mainstream.
I'm sorry..I strongly disagree. You have me on the video support...OS X does a much better job there. You even have a point on audio drivers...they can be a pain at times. But design? Gnome 3 and Unity to me are FAR superior to OS X in terms of UI experience. YMMV of course. I bought a Macbook, gave it a fair shot, and it ended up being a dust collector simply because the desktop experience was painful compared to Ubuntu or Fedora (well, that and the fact that I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery, and the fact that I can't upgrade it past 4 GB of ram o.O). Perhaps I'm set in my ways, but the absolute insanse window switching behavior, the piss poor excuse for a terminal, the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window, and the general SLOW performance made my $2500 investment one I'll regret for very long time. Switching to a Lenovo running Ubuntu was a far better (and MUCH cheaper) experience.
It sounds like you expected a clone of Windows and were predictably disappointed.
> I got maybe three hours of the supposed 7 hour battery
You should have taken it back. Seriously.
> Perhaps I'm set in my ways
You hit the nail on the head here. There's nothing wrong with that but most of your complaints amount to "this is not what I am used to".
> the absolute insanse window switching behavior
On Windows and Linux I cannot switch to an app bringing all windows to the front, I have to do it one at a time. Anyone used to one behaviour could claim the other is insane just because it is different.
> the piss poor excuse for a terminal
What on earth are you talking about? The Terminal app? Get iTerm2 or something else then. If you don't like gnome-terminal you don't whine about it, you just install urxvt or whatever.
> the fact that apps continue to run in the background after you close the last window
The fact that you have to have visible windows for an app to run on Windows and Linux could be perceived the same way. What if I wanted to switch back and use that app again?
On (...) Linux I cannot switch to an app bringing all windows to the front, I have to do it one at a time.
Sure you can. Just launch (or move) each application to its own virtual desktop. You can even group them logically, like an email reader with an IM client!
What if I wanted to switch back and use that app again?
Window and Linux applications are not disposable, they can be launched more than once.
> Window and Linux applications are not disposable, they can be launched more than once.
But when the last window is closed the application quits. What if I want to keep it running because I will switch back and open something in a minute? On Windows & Linux I have to launch the app again.
I'm not arguing for one or the other here, just illustrating that this argument is based on familiarity not one actually being better than the other. Each has pluses and minuses.
That's my point. It's not that a lot of people like it. In fact, whether people like it or not isn't really relevant.
It's that this is the correct way to do it.
When the menu bar is at the top of the screen, the user is much faster at getting the mouse over a menu item and clicking to open the menu.
It works better. This isn't opinion, it's measurable scientifically.
When the menu is on a window, you overshoot with your mouse and come down and have to hunt to get on the menu to open it. This slows you down.
But the thing is-- people get used to being slower and less efficient and then when on a better solution, they think the better solution is worse because it goes against all the compensations they've had to build up over the years to get around the other, poorer, design.
Now, I'm not saying that you can't prefer a windows style UI and menubar, but I am saying it is most likely because this is what you've been taught to use, and thus it feels more natural to you, even though it is less efficient for you.
Except when you have multiple monitors. How is it the correct way to do it to force me to mouse 4000 pixels to the left or right to get to the menu for an application that isn't on the same screen as the menu?
There's never just one correct way to do things. Your arrogance towards other implementations is overwhelming.
The arrogance comes in the way you deliver your argument and insist that your preference is the only valid choice, regardless of any difference in conditions; it has nothing to do with the science.
I took the same Human Factors class that cites the same decades-old studies that you're pushing as ultimate truth; all of that science was done when multi-monitor setups weren't even supported, let alone common. I have no problem agreeing that a universal menu is optimal for certain sets of conditions, but that doesn't mean it's the one true way for everything.
For a start, it precludes a sane implementation of focus-follows-mouse.
Secondly, for frequently used commands, keyboard shortcuts will be faster anyway (I'm aware of the study you're probably going to mention, but plenty of other studies have had different conclusions).
Lastly, and this is pure conjecture on my part, wouldn't having the menu bar at the top of the screen result in a much narrower arc from the current mouse position to the desired entry? The theory also seems to ignore the fact that in most cases you'd want to move the mouse back to the original window, or hit some specific (and often quite small) target in that window. Which is now made more difficult by the mouse being farther away. Just some idle wonderings, they were quite possibly addressed in that study.
I know that you started your post with "Whether people like it or not isn't really relevant. It's that this is the correct way to do it.", and thus are unlikely to be swayed from your opinions; it's worth considering though that every choice has pros and cons, and sometimes the total value of each side very much depends on the person.
(although I share your "Screw the people, this is /correct/!" view when it comes to tau: no-one's perfect)
much narrower arc from the current mouse position to the desired entry
Particularly since the top left option (in the easy-to-hit corner) isn't usually one that you want to access much in the use of a program. Sure, you can get your mouse in the vicinity, but you still have to hunt for the menu you actually want. If your screen(s) is large enough that this requires moving your head (or even your eyes significantly), it rapidly eats up any trivial advantage you gain from 'knowing where the menu bar is'.
Science says that it's faster to hit a distant infinite target given sufficient mouse speed vs a small but local target.
given sufficient speed.
However it says nothing about whether an application's menu bar is important enough to warrant that extra acquisition speed.
Also the mac menu bar does not present an infinite target, particularly if you have any significant horizontal velocity, which is extremely common with wide screen monitors or multiple monitors.
Also with the advent of large/multiple monitors there is the need to change where you're looking causing extra delay for refocus.
It is not the correct way to do it. It has some very simple problems.
First, if I have a bunch of little windows on a big screen--something very common on Apple computers--I have to drag my mouse all the way to the top of the screen and then drag it back. For me, this was an serious problem. Partly this was because I was also using one of the horrible Apple mice (the "mighty mouse" or something of that nature). This was particularly annoying because I would often lose focus by clicking on something else by accident and have to go all the way back to my original window and then all the way back to the top... Incredibly annoying.
Second, not all programs have--or need--options on top. I essentially live out of Emacs and Chrome these days; neither uses a menu. That would make the Apple bar just a waste of screen space--completely absurd. Moreover, I've found that bar to be superfluous on other software I use as well. Having more minimalistic interfaces is a breath of fresh air--and completely impossible on OS X.
It also fails to generalize well to multiple screens.
Oh, and there are going to be problems if you want to make the available options context-dependent. This is a reasonable design decision if you have a complex program with a bunch of small, discrete windows for different tasks--something else that isn't uncommon on OS X. This sort of behavior is far clearer if there is a menu per window than if there is a single menu for whatever is currently active.
I submit that we are talking about a physiological issue, not a preference.
Attempting to hit a target in the middle of the screen is more difficult for humans than hitting a target at the very top of the screen.
When you overshoot the target in the middle of the screen, you have to come back around to click on it.
When you overshoot the target at the top of the screen, the pointer is stopped by the border of the display. Stopped right on the target, and you can just click.
It may not feel faster to you-- that's perception.
My point is that it is faster. And I haven't seen an argument for why the two things would be reversed for any specific person.
It's the nature of the latency between our eyes, mind and muscles.
So you're saying that humans have laser-like accuracy in the horizontal dimension, and sloppy accuracy in the vertical? Your interpretation of the science is poor.
I don't know how you get that interpretation from the parent post. Only having to worry about one degree of freedom in your movement is much easier / faster than having to manage two.
The OS X menu bar is modal. It depends on what application is current. There's also research indicating that the usability of modal UIs is poor; it's also measurable scientifically.
I personally don't mind the OS X menu bar's location, but its modality is a big pain point. Combined with the fact that apps often don't exit when all their windows are closed, it's a bit of a magic box of functionality where I'm never certain of what's going to be there, and how to get it back if it disappears. At least Windows' menu bars have a sense of location.
Some people don't use menus often. From my experience, I use menus 2-5 times a day at most. However, if you rely heavily on clicking menus, learning keyboard shortcuts can be a really good time-saver.
And the second argument against this "smart" (or maybe legacy?) menu placement: In some applications menus have sub-menus, and sub-sub-menus, etc. And it is impossible to put all sub-sub-...-menu items on the top menu bar, so you have to click many times in different parts of the screen anyway. (Oh, yes, this is not an issue for a program with simple menu, but then the keyboard shortcuts can be the way to go).
So, there are many shades of "correct", I think. Alternatives must be at least considered, I think that it's better to let the user decide what they prefer.
What's wrong with the Terminal.app? Except for the fact, that it does not really work?
Yeah, for simple stdout/stderr output it is fine, but for medium-sized ncurses apps it is a major PITA. Even Icaza's own Midnight Commander does not work there.
No, seriously, what’s wrong with mc in Terminal.app? I mean, OS X and Terminal.app take over function keys for other purposes like, I don't know, changing the volume, but these things can be disabled if you want to use function keys for something else, like mc commands.
> Design is about usability and understanding the user
Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users.
There are however people who do care about mass adoption, i.e. Canonical, "Linux Advocates". Generally they're either emotionally invested in Linux for some reason or they get a paycheck for their work. These people are the minority of Linux users.
Saying the culture doesn't care about design is absurd, it's the non-technical user we don't care about. Let's not conflate the two. Looking at a piece of software like XMonad or TMux it's hard to not appreciate the elegance in it's design. It's just different form of design that say iTunes or Photoshop.
> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks.
That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest.
Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unrelated applications. Copying the file to an appropriate font directory does not "install" the font so it is visible to applications. No, I have to shut down all terminal windows and restart them to be able to use the font. Do you see an advantage in this? I don't want to spend time doing (or even researching) this when I could be developing instead (with the best console font known to mankind please!). Desktop Linux just lacks basic functionality and wastes people's time.
Sure, I was fine developing with fvwm2 or twm 15 years ago and did not mind using xfontsel and "xset fp rehash" back then, but today it feels like an unproductive waste of time when Win7 and OSX (esp. OSX) do not "get in my way" in any conceivable meaning of the phrase when I just want to develop stuff in an environment that I can adjust to my liking.
If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.
And for every anecdotal UI problem you bring up I could also come up with a corresponding anecdotal pain point with Cygwin on Windows or BSD/GPL header file craziness on OS X.
Personally manually rebuilding a font hash doesn't irk me so much as not having the ability to rip the guts out of my system and fix things when doing low-level system development. Messing with virtualization and vendor enforced settings seems much worse than Googling for a shell command or manually fixing a package.
> If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.
Yeah, I'm not delusional. I have a niche, Linux fills that niche. I have a lot of other colleagues who also fit in that niche. It's fine if you don't want to use Linux, I don't care in the slightest. But making broad sweeping statements about what "most technical users" do or don't need just makes you come off as uninformed.
Oh, for... Just drop the .ttf in your .fonts directory and be done with it. That you insist on mucking around in a GUI to do something as simple as placing a file in the spot where it belongs says everything you need to know about whether you belong in the "technical user who wants a system that gets out of the way" class or not.
There is no .fonts directory and this is a desktop machine - I want to install the font system-wide. Plus, the problem with half the running applications not seeing the font still exists.
So I'm not a technical user for you because I insist that such things should not require no more attention than a double click on the font file? Technical users aren't by definition masochists who take the longest route just because they can. I need to get stuff done - stuff other than installing fonts and learning the pecularities of a particular desktop Linux flavour!
Are you for real? In what universe is "mkdir ~/.fonts; mv .ttf ~/fonts" (or "sudo cp .ttf /usr/share/fonts" if you want them system wide) the "longest route"?
So fine, you didn't know this trick. No shame there. But you're willing to click around trying to discover the feature in your GUI (and expect the desktop to hold your hand trying to do it!) yet won't take 30 seconds to google for "install linux fonts". (I just did, by the way: the first two links tell you exactly what I just did).
So sure, the Linux desktop isn't for you. You want more polish and attention than it's willing to provide. Just don't pretend that your inability to learn a few facts about the implementation of your desktop and/or develop an intuition about how things might be done represents "hassle" that takes time away from your important work. Those skills are good to have, and those of us who have them are, quite frankly, better at our jobs than those who don't.
I found out what to do to install the fonts and it cost me precious time unnecessarily (~20 mins total until all issues were resolved - and by the way, Consolas with antialiasing still looks crap because Debian apparently ignores subpixel hinting [guessing]). That is the point.
Your proposed solution does not fix the (totally unnecessary) issue of running applications not seeing the new fonts. This is just broken.
My skills, memory, learning efforts are better spent developing stuff, not finding out what needs to be done in the current Linux FOTM's half-assed GUI to install fonts (KDE installs them on double-click e.g.). There is no "inability to learn" on my behalf involved, just unwillingness to spend time on things that can be and should be simple and straightforward and where the cumbersome Linux solutions are certainly no precious skill to have.
The rudeness and arrogance of you evangelists just drives away more users, by the way.
I'm a technical user who spends a lot of time using Linux, and it gets out of my way for doing development quite well.
Of course, that's because I exclusively connect to Linux machines through an ssh terminal on my Win7 workstation. I've personally abandoned all hope for using Linux as a desktop OS. I live in the terminal on Linux because that's where the design actually lives. Anything GUI related is an afterthought.
Double clicking a .ttf and then clicking the install button has been in Ubuntu's/Debian's default for years now.
I mean, you installed a stripped down desktop for some reason, of course it's going to be missing some features when you could have just used the default installation that has all of that already.
I actually ditched Linux as a primary OS as it didn't get out of my way, I had to spend way too much time burying into the system to get the results I needed. That can in a few cases be attributed to poor design, the thought process seems often to be "I get this piece of design fine, everyone else will".
Agreed. I do a lot of scientific computing, and many of my tools simply don't exist in OSX compatible builds. While the majority of the work that I do is remote, on servers running Linux, tools like Xmonad and aptitude are basically indispensable for me.
Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it. [...] Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.
Actually, I'd say the same of Windows, if not more so. I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.
I absolutely agree. I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion. But Windows does not have a Unix terminal.
And I think that is the main point here: Linux might lack design graphically, but the Linux command line is about the most beautiful thing out there. There is an abundance of elegance there is probably only rivaled by some Lisp machine.
Who knows, maybe, I will switch from OSX to Linux because of that at some point. It is certainly tempting.
> I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion.
Explorer? Versus finder? That's a pretty low-hanging fruit, I can't remember ever preferring finder to explorer and I've been using OSX as my main dev machine (and Windows mostly for the game box) for 6 years now. I prefer OSX overall, but the finder still isn't a good shell.
I was going to leave a snarky comment with just a list of awful OSX applications here. But then I looked at a list of the applications I have installed and... Well, while many of them might be bad, their usual alternatives on Windows aren't exactly better.
But Finder really is bad. Then again, I wish ANY other OS would implement the column view Finder has. As bad as Finder is, column view is awesome.
But many of the great things on the Mac have been subverted in the last few years.
Have you tried dragging a proxy icon from the title bar of an OSX application to an external disk lately? It creates a new alias there. An ALIAS. On an external disk.
Or HFS+, which still has a global lock whenever ANY application wants to write to the file system. A GLOBAL lock. No other program may access the hard drive while one is writing. Insanity!.
Or the complete lack of uninstallers. I am continuously baffled by that. How can you have a "modern" operating system without uninstallers?
Desktop apps are really fine though. It's just the foundation that is getting rusty. Not a good thing, that.
Or the complete lack of uninstallers. I am continuously baffled by that. How can you have a "modern" operating system without uninstallers?
Well, the dream is that you don't need one. Drag the app from Applications to the Trash and... ta-da! Of course, that never happens with anything more complex than the most superficial of apps.
> Of course, that never happens with anything more complex than the most superficial of apps.
Well all of my applications are superficial apparently, because apart from Little Snitch I can't think of one I'll need an uninstaller for. And LS is a special case.
I'd say at least 25% of the OS X apps I try have an installer and therefore require an uninstaller that often doesn't exist. Usually someone on a forum somewhere lists a sequence of terminal commands required to remove an app and it's background services. If I'm lucky.
Happened to me several times in the last two weeks alone. I vaguely remember it took me ages to get VMWare or similar off my machine.
>Or HFS+, which still has a global lock whenever ANY application wants to write to the file system. A GLOBAL lock. No other program may access the hard drive while one is writing. Insanity!.
Could that be the reason I had to disable Spotlight's indexer to prevent bouts of extreme unresponsiveness on my 2011 Mac mini?
There are nice terminals for Windows and you can install gnuwin32 & win-bash to get almost complete UNIX command-line experience without Cygwin burden.
The thing about the Unix shell is that not only is it extremely power and flexible, it is designed to work with pure ascii so it can used on many remote, bare bones machines and it really is there running on many remote, bare bones machines. And given all this there are many people with strong skills in that shell and a strong attachment to that shell (for rational and irrational reasons imho). With all this, it would be hard to replace this shell even with something that's better. That actually makes me sad since actually dislike using it since for all its power, much of it is annoying and bass-ackwards imho again.
It's unbelievably verbose and the documentation sucks hard. Also, working on remote machines is unreasonably annoying. It is decent at manipulating structured data though.
>I far prefer the Windows 7 interface to OSX, it's just stuff like the terminal/command prompt that really lets Windows down.
I'm not sure. Windows has some overall design, but also has tons of design neglect.
One example: due to static compiling and linking, you often get programs (and lots of them) that still use Windows 98 like Open/Save File dialogs, instead of every program automatically getting the latest OS standard widget with late binding.
Or things like the Metro/Windows dichotomy in the latest version.
Windows always feels design by committee to me, and one where some manager can have idiotic ideas and no developer/designer can shoot it down.
That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility.
Software compiled in 1998 has no problem using the newest common dialogs if they used the standard API without installing their own hooks and customisation.
>That example isn't due to static linking, it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility.
I'm not sure what this means though:
"it's because they chose a particular style of dialog which is deprecated and cannot be updated without breaking backwards compatibility."
So you mean something like the Windows API featured 2-3 different dialog styles and they set some option / flag in their code to use one that was subsequently not updated by MS?
Could be. But at least the dialog style could change, it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc.
MS should have continue to offer the dialog styles they once had as options instead of deprecating them. But even failing that, they should at least made it so that their graphical elements (sub-widgets like buttons, text fields etc) are kept updated. That doesn't involve changing the API or binary compatibility will the calling program.
Also, seeing those dialogs in old shareware/commercial programs when run on modern Windows is one thing. But one also sees them in some very-rarely-updated MS applications that MS ships with Windows. At least you did, until Vista (haven't used Windows since).
Another infuriating thing from Windows dialogs of old --that still appear in apps: when the size of text-entries, icon fields etc is too small, but the dialog is not resizable.
"it seems in Windows API all drawing is hardcoded, so the dialog also comes with the old style buttons etc.
"
IIRC, the particular style allows applications to paint on top of the system dialogs, add controls, etc. The API call cannot know when or where drawing will take place (or whether it will happen at all), so it cannot use any other screen real estate than what it always used. That means controls must stay the same size and exact location. That rules out shadows, font changes, etc, so the control must forever stay as it was in the dark ages.
Design is important, really. However I find it disturbing that such a self-righteous rant has crawled up the rankings in this thread...
Design is an engineering discipline.
Design isn't engineering discipline. It is certainly a discipline and deserves respect but the reason software engineers fail at design so often is that it is different discipline with a different mindset.
Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.
Here I simply disagree. Apple's look pretty because they are designed well. I don't find that they function well in terms of usability - that I have to use the mouse for nearly everything is a usability nightmare. The way they've hidden file system is also a usability nightmare. But enough prettiness and responsiveness, Apple can still feel enjoyable to use without being more useful or even as useful as Linux or Windows.
In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example.
Wow! Holy leaps of logic, here we've got the disingenuous conflation part of the rant. For the sake of argument, the particular way iOS or OSX is designed might indeed be a work of genius but the patents Apple is hurling Samsung are not for that unique approach but rather are a disgusting grab of the right for anything vaguely like iOS or OSX, which would include really badly designed things.
You're conflating design with the marketing and support that convinces people to open themselves to learning a new system design.
Linux copied the Windows interaction paradigm (and everything else too - fvwm95/afterstep/olvwm/cde/etc) because the goal wasn't to create a new method of interaction and suffer from two adoption battles, but to appease people complaining about how Linux wasn't intuitive (after they'd already gone through one UI learning curve). Ubuntu will never ship with a default tiling window manager (certainly not the "best" design, but it's a novel design).
> based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.
If a user desires for their operating environment to function in some way, they should be able to develop that customization, full stop. I use 24 virtual desktops with windows generally maximized, switching between them with [Alt+]F1-F12. Is this good design, especially for the average user? Hell no. But it fits my desires and is quick enough that I can't understand why people desire multiple monitors. The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable, and only serves to illustrate the bounds of the field.
> This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them.
Sigh, back to this again? Nope, what's being rejected is the idea that engineering an implementation of a concept should get you the rights to the entire concept through a "concept plus computer" patent. Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input? Instead, we get descriptions of straightforward processes in terms of vague programming idioms.
>You're conflating design with the marketing and support
No, I'm talking about knowing that users are faster and more efficient when the menu bar is at the top of the screen rather than attached to windows. Design makes people more efficient. Undesigned things, or poorly designed things don't care about these factors, or do them half assed.
> The idea of someone saying my setup is 'wrong' from a design perspective is laughable,
This is because you reject design. You claim it is marketing. You reject it as an engineering discipline. That's my point.
>Where's the novel signal processing algorithms to clean up capacitive touchscreen input?
Patented, and you guys claim that the patent is disproven by the existence of "touch screens" in the past that worked by pushing one layer in enough that two wires touched closing a circuit.
> should get you the rights to the entire concept
The only people claiming that the rights to an entire concept are involved are those who are trying to claim that these are bogus patents... which is either profoundly ignorant or completely dishonest.
Firstly, just no, stop arguing against a straw man. I'll agree that putting window toolbars at the top of the screen seems more efficient. I honestly don't have much experience with OSX, but given what people say, I'm willing to assume that it has examined these details and come up with a nicer all-around experience.
However, the nicest experience in the world isn't sufficient for success. Something has to make people get over the activation energy and earnestly investigate something other than what they know without complaining what's different and lacking - generally social factors.
> This is because you reject design
No, it's because I acknowledge that design happens within a context - most design is not universal. What is an appropriate UI for a CAD program is not appropriate for an airport kiosk, and vice-versa. When a user wishes for customization, they are designing within their own context. Their judgment is small in scope and may end up hurting other aspects of their experience, but it's ridiculous to say that the opinions of a blessed Designer aiming for the 'common user' are more valid than their own opinions of what they desire.
I had skimmed the tap to zoom patent and all of the claims seemed quite generic. I'll have to examine it in more detail, but I have to ask - if the patent does contain a novel technique for using a capacitive touchscreen as input to a UI, why does it include the specificity of zooming, a quite necessary and obvious activity for most UIs ?
Linux never got usable enough for design to matter.
The process of getting linux to boot, and then run usably -- with wireless networking and sound -- was too hard. If you got as far as being able to actually get work done, you claimed victory and used your machine as a continuing monument to your success.
In 2001, when I switched from Linux to OS X, the mere fact that I could go buy a machine, turn it on, open a terminal, and type 'ls' was enough to make me switch. It still took hours to get a portable machine working reliably with linux -- and it took 2 machines if you wanted wifi to work at the time. One to get wifi working, and another to look up the documentation and download whatever you needed.
Even as I'm back on Linux, I don't think of buying anything other than a ThinkPad, for the fear of returning to that worthlessly hellish place.
I believe that the lack of "strong-D" Design you refer to is because Linux's desktop is pretty much the ultimate committee-driven project. It's very democratic: great for preventing abuse, but rather bad when it comes to vision.
Most of us here know how difficult it is for one person in a company to drive an idea through without it being diluted; countless product companies have gone bust over the years because of committee-induced paralysis. It's much worse when you have a distributed group of volunteers who rarely, if ever, get to meet.
Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.
Maybe collaborative development is incapable of producing something as complex and difficult as a clean, well-designed desktop environment and API? Forking, competing spinoffs, factionalism are all useful things in some ways, but they're death to this kind of project.
Because developers understand what they want and need from their own tools.
Now, they might have different wants, and disagree on how to meet their needs, and march off in 800 different directions, but ultimately with enough effort any one group is capable of meeting their own needs.
UI/UX that works well for "normal people" is something that most developers don't understand; they know the UI/UX that meets their needs, but developer needs are quite rarified and abnormal compared to the typical user.
Thus, when they respond to disagreement with a UI/UX engineer by marching off in 800 different directions to scratch their own itches, they end up with no solution that meets the "normal user"'s needs. There's no culture of shutting up and following orders for the greater good of the project.
tl;dr you can't solve the problems of someone different from yourself if the only thing you do is scratch your own itches.
I would bet if you ask people what they don't like in their linux setup design would come last. The main issues i hear seem to be compatibility and missing obvious functionality (oh clipboard). In fact , most desktops are so configurable you can actually make them look great.
If you want to make a system popular, start with the people who are actually using it. Linux is used by technical people, so why are they putting us off with silly animations and glossy layers that will break in the next upgrade? OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.
Right, because the people who use linux don't understand what design is.
Look at the responses to my comments-- almost all of them defending linux make comments that show they don't understand what design is. They think it is how it looks.
>OSX is not easier to use either, it has many nonintuitive quirks but they stick to their design and improve it instead of overhauling it.
I suspect you simply haven't used OS X much. It was designed correctly and is intuitive. The reason you think its "unintuitive" is likely you've been trained to use a broken system that was not designed correctly and thus what feels "natural" to you-- which is actually learned behavior-- feels wrong on OS X.
Meanwhile, Apple has continued to improve their design, and in the rare case where they got something wrong, they fix it -- for instance, they reversed the direction of scrolling to make it more intuitive... move the finger up on the trackpad and the page moves up on the screen.
They don't need to overhaul it because they have been improving it for 3 decades....
They've done such a good job at it, that you think they havent' done anything!
I said there are some quirks , OSX is very usable in general although first time users do have to learn the ropes. For example, maybe everyone likes the fact that the maximize window does different things depending on the app or hate using keyboard shortcuts but i don't. I didn't mean to be anyone's advocate, as you seem to do.
At the risk of re-igniting that flame war, I posit that this is also a cathedral vs. bazaar issue. OS X is more or less centrally planned, by one company, Apple.
I would think so, but OS X has had several great or important applications within it's ecosystem, that break UI conventions.
Twitter clients used to be a playground for new UI concepts, none of which came from Apple. The Sparrow mail client was a good example of something probably more influenced by Tweetie than anything else.
Even Apple doesn't have a ton of consistency. iTunes continues to baffle me with random changes things like what resize does. The App Store app shifted the window management buttons.
So I don't buy that the OS X ecosystem is a "cathedral" at all, just a bazaar with better taste.
What's interesting is that I noticed the standards of design for Mac apps were significantly better than Windows apps when I "made the switch" several years ago; and these are for apps that were not coming out of Apple. I could never entirely figure out why; the ecosystem was just more attuned to details.
I posit that Apple was helped by having the right people excited long enough to get a great ecosystem going.
Linux didn't die because it's a bazaar; every modern app ecosystem (OS X, iOS, Android, the web) functions like a bazaar. Linux just made it absolutely painful to set up shop.
Yeah, but you need an architect that people will listen to in order to build a cathedral. It has to be many people, united under a common vision. That's really hard to pull off in the Linux community.
Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals).
Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.
When something doesn't work or works badly on Linux, the critics always say it's Linux fault (just read the comments here). Hold Windows and OS X to the same standard and you'll see they aren't so wonderful in comparison.
Windows isn't a closed hardware platform like OS X, so driver support can be difficult (Windows update helps a lot on that).
Also, are you overclocking? Using a 4-year-old motherboard? There has to be some reason for BSOD - it's not a normal condition. Not making excuses, hundreds of millions of machines run for years without doing it.
In the early days, say, Windows 95, it did BSOD a lot for seemingly random reasons.
Nowadays, with the experience of handling dozens of Windows machines both server and client, I can tell you with a high degree of confidence that BSODs happen only when hardware is dying or a driver is buggy. The flavors I can confirm this for go from XP SP3 to Server 2008, passing through Server 2003, Vista and 7.
I completely endorse this, and wish I could hit the "up" arrow hundreds of times over. It's also refreshing to see a comment like this that isn't immediately shot down. It's hard to overstate the importance of actually having things written by someone with at least a sense of what it takes to make an intuitive and pleasant-to-use interface.
The problem that linux seems to have, is that everyone wants everything and so everything gets thrown in with configuration options to change absolutely everything.
I don't think, however, that lack of good design - or even seeing the need for it, is isolated to linux - in a very real sense, I think most of the population is usually oblivious to it - they just know whether something is easy to use or not.
This mythical user must also be the bottom of the barrel. I don't think the Apple designers ever consulted me when they designed OS X. Who were they designing for? Everyone? How can they possibly conceive of what every user wants but me?
This "design," argument is a floppy, magical, hand-waving fish. I know what design is. I design software all the damn time. I am sensitive to interface and expectation. I want as little friction between my tool and the thing I am creating.
In that regard, as a software developer, OS X is a piss-poor experience. Using emacs on the thing is ripping years out of the cartilage in my fingers due to the masochistic meta-key layout that I've had to accustom myself to. It's terrible.
The eco-system of package management systems on OS X is infuriatingly shoddy. Between macports, homebrew, and fink -- none of them can seem to get it quite right. They have to compete with the user-land eco-system that Apple ships. Half the packages are broken. And I can never bloody well find any configuration files anywhere once it has installed something. It's ludicrous how much time I've wasted trying to figure out how in the seven hells you're supposed to get MySQL or Postgres to run on the damn thing (there are half a dozen ways at least by my reckoning and google's).
Their /design/ isn't the best design there is. They are designing for someone, but it surely isn't me. If you happen to fall into their mold then I'm sure you're as happy as a clam but don't think the entire world of people are just like you.
Thank you. All too-often that entire line of thinking was minimized into simply "caring about eye-candy" and summarily dismissed. That irked me. It was like with the Linux desktop, you had to choose a side, instead of simply marrying what is great about GNU/Linux with what is great about a cohesive modern design and user experience.
The last time Linux on the desktop looked and felt good was when Enlightenment DR16 came out. When I installed Ubuntu last year I felt like I was using something for children.
>I think he's right, but I think he's missing a key point.
Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.
I'm not sure he is missing it, even if he doesn't name it explicitly on the post.
For one, he was always pro good design (and trying to get the good design parts of other systems), but also, when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side, he is essentially lamenting the lack of a central design authority.
> when he laments the anarchy and lack of long term planning on the Linux side
Maybe that is what really makes Linux struggle as a desktop. Fragmentation. It really sucks to have to install hundreds of libraries to run an app because you run Gnome but it was made for KDE. It's always unconfortable to change environments because it's not just different looks, it is different ways of doing things.
Some users and hackers do like choice, but most common users don't, because it is reduces the number of things to learn. You don't have to copy MS Win or OS X to be good, but consistency is good, and unless you select a subset of Linux desktop (and its related apps) you will be missing a more consistent user experience.
Design. Design is what killed the linux desktop. It never had it. OS X has it. Even windows, crappy as it may be, has it.
Before I go on, let me say that Design is NOT "making it look pretty". In fact, thinking that this is what design is, is what leads many linux advocates to reject the needs of design.
Apple's work looks pretty-- because it is designed to function well.
Design is about usability and understanding the user and making an interface for the user that works well according to the users understanding, perspective and needs.
Design is an engineering discipline.
Seriously.
The Linux community hasn't had that, and I've seen many of them reject it. In fact, you can see it in the rejection of apple's patents. This is why they think that apple patents are not original is because they reject that any engineering went into them. But that's just one example. You see it all the time in lots of contexts. Look at the UIs of Linux... they didn't design one, they just copied windows.
Literal copying is about as far from design as you can get.
Sure, over the years, designers have taken cracks at bringing design to linux, including the work of Ubuntu, but it is rejected by the community.
Rejection of design is a cultural trait of the linux community. They reject it as a discipline, doesn't even see that it exists. (broadly speaking, of course.)
But as users, they have been influenced by it and many of them have switched to OS X because it is the best designed operating system.
And then they write long blog posts about how its wrong that OS X does things a certain way ... based on their lack of design perspective that would let them see why things should work that way.
Its ironic.
But its fine- if you want to run a linux desktop and don't value or care about design, more power to you. Won't ever fault someone for making that decision. We should all use the systems that we prefer.
But the culture that doesn't value design, and can't even see it as an engineering discipline, is going to have a great deal of trouble making something usable by the mainstream.