From: strobl@gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl)
Subject: Re: Why Macs are better (and the others aren't)
Organization: GMD, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Date: Sun, 27 Sep 1992 20:07:12 GMT

In <0_hzlck@rpi.edu> johnsd2@jec325.its.rpi.edu (Daniel Norman Johnson) writes:

>In article <strobl.717604304@gmd.de>, strobl@gmd.de (Wolfgang Strobl) writes:
[...]
>|> Perhaps because Microsoft has had to keep a standard look and 
>|> feel for its applications on a bigger scale, which dosn't just 
>|> include the Mac platform, only?

>Oh, c'mon.. Windows and the Mac aren't that different. Would it have
>hurt THAT much to have Excel do real Cut+paste, for instance?

I don't know. "Real" Cut and Past mean different things on MS-Windows
and on the Macintosh.

>If you are saying the MS SHOULD make the Windows and MacOS versions
>as close as possible, I disagree. This is annoying to people who
>are using them and other apps on one machine. Id rather have it annoy
>people who use just the one app, but do so on various machines.

What do the Human Interface Guidlines say about that topic?
Probably nothing, because the Mac is a closed system.

I agree that it is a good idea to design different user front-ends
tailored to the specifics of the various GUIs, when designing an
application which has to be ported to different platforms.

But on the other hand, I understand the desire of an application
developer to have his application look and work the same on all
the supported platforms. This makes application documentation
simpler, the education of end-users is simpler, and it may
sell a few more apps during that, in addition. The bigger and
applications is (and Excel or Word are good examples for
those "everything included" monster applications), the more
this argument applies. Also, these apps are very often used
on a 1 user, 1 app base, i.e. many users launch them in the
morning and leave them just before they switch their machine
off, without having switched to another app in the meantime.
Because of that, the annoyance isn't that big if that
applications dosn't follow the local GUI guidlines to the
word.

[...]

>|> 
>|> >The point being that it is the data (document) that is important, not the
>|> >applications
>|> >that are used for creating those data.
>|> 
>|> I don't unterstand that. Neither the document nor the application make
>|> any sense without the other. Quick: what is more important: your
>|> laserprinter, or the paper it prints on?

>The paper, once the paper has been printed on. :) After all,
>that's what you were trying to get. And that makes perfect
>since without any laserprinter. [good analogy, btw :)]

So after the paper (== data) has been processed by the laserprinter 
(== application), there is not much necessity for the data to
application link, anymore. Right? You probably wouldn't want to process
your paper by the laserwriter again. Instead you use another 
processor (perhaps an automatic enveloping machine) to process it
further. 

The simple one to one relationship between data and its application
doesn't work very well, in this and similar examples. In reality,
it's a many-to-many relationship, where an application can understand
various document types, and one document type can be understood by
various applications. Both "application" (program) and "document" 
(data) are concepts in their own right and depend on each other.
Both are important.

>[deletia- a desktop corruption example]
>|> 
>|> >No. It is not a setup problem. Have you ever used a Mac? 
>|> 
>|> Yes, obviously. :-)
>|> 
>|> Joking aside, yes, I have. It heavily used one about six or seven
>|> years ago, but very seldom afterwards.
>|>

>There have been some changes since then. :)

Rally? I have been told again and again, that it was fine
and dany from the very beginning. Not so? :-)

>[deletia- explaination of desktop database, advice to rebuild it]
>|> >Your friends desktop file (or database) was obviously corrupted, and all
>|> >you 
>|> >needed to do was to force a rebuild of the desktopfile/database.
>|> 
>|> It wasn't obvious to him (or me) how to do that. After you explaination,
>|> it still isn't obvious to me. 

>That's cuz he didn't say how to do it. It isn't obvious.

I already have guessed that. :-)

>what you do is hold down the command and option keys while
>the hard drive (or whatever) is being mounted. It then throws up
>a dialog asking if you want to rebuild its desktop.. click okay
>and its off.

It seems to me that it is much harder to explain such hidden
secrets to simple minded users, that editing a path statement,
for example.

What about sideeffects from rebuilding the desktop?

Anyway, I think it's similar to the situation one faces
when using one of these fully automatic, all singing all
dancing cameras. As long as the work, they're fast, fun,
and even create decent, sometimes even good pictures. 

But if they don't, you're in a mess. 

No. While I occasionally use my wives Nikon TW2 to
take pictures, I stay with one of my old manual reflex
cameras, especially if I have to ensure that ten out
of ten pictures come out right.

Automatic operation behind the scenes is a fine thing,
especially if you can switch it off.

>|> Application to file association isn't fully automatic under Windows
>|> (in comparison to the way the Macintosh seems to handle that), but
>|> it isn't a big problem: you can do it manually, by using the the
>|> filemanagers "associate" menue entry, but usually the setup 
>|> programm of an app makes all the necessary changes. And the
>|> automatical method has its own problems, imho.

>Such as? [assuming nothing is corrupted.. I doubt windows would work
>too well if it was corrupted, either...]

I suspect a quite nonstandard use of the word "corrupted" here.

In the case I was talking about, there wasn't any indication
of a "corrupted desktop" - no dialog box saying "Desktiop corrupted,
please recreate it". It just said that it couldn't find the
file. Well, if this is just the same thing as "This disk
isn't initialized, shall I initialize it" instead of
"There is something wrong with the data structures describing
the contents of this disk, I can't understand it", than
this is the first problem. 

COuld it be that "corrupted" simply is a notion for all cases where the 
automatic mechanism fails? 

I fail to see how an automatic mechanism should be able
to decide which of various copies of an application
(some on the floppy, some on a local, others on a 
remote hard disk) I intend to use. It only can guess.

Perhaps its guesses are better than mine, but perhaps, not.

>[deletia- system file drag&drap, using the font tool to add fonts in windows]
>|> 
>|> >Why a font tool? In system 7 you just drop the font on the system folder
>|> >and that's it.
>|> 
>|> Why a font tool? For example in order to show you details of the
>|> font to be installed or removed, including a sample of how it looks.

>To get this, you double click the fonts icon. A window comes
>up displaying a sample. You can tell if a font is truetype or not
>by its icon, and also because you get samples at various sizes
>if its a truetype font. If its a bitmap font, you just get the
>one size that the font is bitmapped in.

I fail to see where the big advantage on the Macintoshs side
is. Here you double click a font icon and get a window which
displays that font. There you do exactly the same. Here you
install the font by dragging it to a folder. There you simply
hit the INSTALL button contained in that windows.

Where is the big difference?

>|> Why a control panel at all? It is quite possible to encode each
>|> and every parameter change in the system into some kind of file
>|> movement ("Move the 'Green' file to the 'BackgroundColor' folder"),
>|> but I doubt that this is the way to go.

>This is why the Macintosh has a control panel also. Actually,
>it has a control panels folder, and there are control panels inside
>of it. You can move htem, rename them, etc like files (they are files);
>You can add new ones that do c00l things. Its a very use-friendly
>way to extend your system.

>I dont know if that is possible in Windows. Care to enlighten me?

Windows 2.x and 3.0 had a static control panel, which displayed
a fixed set of system setup icons (fonts, clock&date, desktop,
keyboard and so on). Windows 3.1 has a dynamic control panel, 
which looks very much the same, but uses separate dynamic link
libraries for each icon. System extensions which need some kind
of global setup add these to the Windows system directory, and
the control panel uses them, automatically. There is no dra&drop
interface withing the control panel I am aware of.

>|> > 
>|> >> There aren't such things as desk accessories in Windows.This is
>|> >> an outdated concept.  
>|> 
>|> >Nor are there in System 7 - this is indeed an outdated concept.
>|> 
>|> Fine, finally we can agree on something. :-). Nice that the
>|> Macintosh OS has finally caught up to Windows, after six or seven
>|> years. (Sorry, couldn't resist - in fact I don't like that sort 
>|> of remark much; I just hear it all to often).

><grrrr>

>Anyway, I dont know when Multifinder came out, but we didn't need
>DAs after that... although the apple menu didn't support non-DA-thing
>until System 7. However, Windows did (and still doesn't) have an
>Apple menu equivalent. Ya still gotta use teh program manager.

Not so. There are various shareware and payware utilities which
extend the system menu (its functionality is partially shared
by all apps) or the desktop (the background window, to be precise)
to give similar functionality. I have tried a few of them, myself,
but found them not very usefull. Most people I talk to see a
need for it, too. This is perhaps because Windows doesn't use
the "single menu bar at the top left of the screen" concept.
Switching between applications is much more smooth because of
that. If I have the need to launch various applications in
rapid succession, I just keep the PM window open somewhere 
on the screen. 

>So I dont think its 6 or 7 years.

This is a matter of definition. As far as I know, System 7 is
the first version which essentially abadoned the differention
between applications and DAs. Earlier systems couldn't do
that, because the Multifinder was only an option, so DAs had
to stay as a kind of poor mans multitasking. MS windows, on
the other hand, never had something equivalent to the
(single) Finder.  It did multitask from the very beginning
and could implement applications and DAs in a uniform way,
because of that.

Wolfgang Strobl
#include <std.disclaimer.hpp>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy