From: krawling@banana.ucs.indiana.edu ("Ken Rawlings")
Newsgroups: fj.mail-lists.x-window
Subject: Re: GUIs Considered Harmful
Date: 3 Sep 92 03:25:10 GMT
Distribution: fj
Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington

Date: Wed, 2 Sep 1992 17:13:42 -0500
Message-Id: <1992Sep2.171407.11876@news.cs.indiana.edu>
Newsgroups: alt.religion.computers,comp.human-factors,comp.windows.misc,comp.windows.news,comp.windows.x


        I love GUI's as much as the next person, and I do believe they have
their place. However, it seems to me that when you take them to the extreme,
they become not only cumbersome, but _unusable_.

        Case in point: The MacIntosh OS. Is it just me, or when you use a Mac,
do you feel like you're at a foreign customs office trying to explain something
to an official that doesn't understand english? You can communicate simple
concepts quite easily(by pointing, etc), but every time you try and do anything
beyond that, he just looks at you with a dumb grin on his face..

        There are two relatively simple things that I want to do on a Mac that
I _still_ have no idea how to do, even after reading all of the info-mac
digests, and using Mac's extensively. 

        #1: Send a postscript file to the printer. Just shove that baby down
            the serial connection to the printer. No, I don't want to modify
            it in a word processor, or anything else. Here's the file, across
            the room is a postscript printer. Send it. I've talked to
            _numerous_ people that consider themselves "Mac Gods" and they
            all agreed, "Can't be done without a special program, and I don't
            know where you'd find it"

        #2: See this file sitting on the Hard Drive? Execute it. No, I don't
            care that you think it's a "Document", just trust me and run the
            damn thing. This is a _real_ problem when you have a bunch of
            .hqx files, and have a copy of binhex4.bin that you downloaded
            with a PC(why didn't I download it on the mac? Those beautiful
            unstandard serial ports that I don't have a cable for and Apple
            wants an arm and a leg for a converter for, and ComputerLand 
            can't understand the question in the first place :-( )


        These are two _real_, non contrived problems I have encountered
_recently_ with Mac's and have caused me no end of consternation. The thing
that makes me mad is that I _WANT_ to like Mac's, lord knows i'm sick of DOS,
but there's this big wall that's put up between me and the Machine that
_purposely_ keeps me from doing what I want to do.

        These are also things that a Mac "User" like myself SHOULD be able to
do. We won't get into the inability to write shell scripts, or other hairly
issues - these are _TRIVIAL_ things that for me makes the Mac less a real
computer, and more an expensive Information Appliance(or Word Proccessor).

        Basically, I can't deal with a computer that thinks it's smarter than
me...

                                        Hoping to be proved wrong(please!),
                                                        Ken Rawlings




-- 
: Ken Rawlings      | One Tool to rule them all, one Tool to find them,       
: Computer Science  | One Tool to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
: Indiana University|           -J.R.R. Tolkien(referring to Emacs)