From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: IBM Funny
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Sat, 03 Oct 1992 03:52:44 GMT

In article <6092.2ac9c038@hayes.com> bcoleman@hayes.com (Bill Coleman) writes:
> Easier to learn? GACK! No way. There's little consistancy between
> applications.

There is. It's a different kind of consistency. And you get better feedback.

> Heck, applications can't even decide on a consistant way to stop a program,
> at least all Mac applications have File / Quit.

ALT<SPACE> pulls up a standard menu that includes quit.

> More Powerful? Well, that's quite vague. It is hard to determine what you
> mean by "powerful." Do you mean capable? About the only thing that Windows
> is capable of doing that you can't do on the Mac involves dynamic memory
> allocation of storage between applications. OTOH, there's a whole lot of
> things you can't do under Windows that you can do on the Mac, from switching
> depth on the fly and multiple monitors, to AppleEvents and Publish / Subscribe
> over a network. I don't think this qualifies as "more powerful."

None of that is part of the GUI, except the multiple monitors bit. I'm not
talking about the underlying OS (DOS sucks, badly), but the user interface.

> Less surprising. NOT! Windows lacks consistancy between applications. Quick!
> What do the middle and right buttons do on the Windows mouse?

What do they do on the Mac mouse? Oh, they don't have physical buttons there,
so you get a bunch of ad-hoc keyboard chords.

Both the Mac and Windows use a single-button mouse model with modifiers
left up to the application.

> Better Feedback? In what way?

More consistent and reliable reaction to user command actions. Closer ties
between keyboard and mouse actions.

> You must be referring to a specific operation.
> On a Mac you can jam a diskette in the drive and the OS knows
> you've done this.

Not a GUI issue. If you want me to defend DOS you're picking the wrong guy.

> So much for those arguments.

What arguments? I'm *suggesting* that you look at how the Windows *user
interface* works and see how the Mac interface can be improved.

> Wrong. You bring up a dialog window, and ALT <ET>, ALT <EC> and ALT <EP>
> (Cut, Copy, and Paste, respectively) won't work.

Good point.

> Note that your message didn't
> even have these correct, or perhaps there's even more variance between apps
> than I thought.

I don't know. I'm not discussing the applications. I'm discussing the user
interface.

> No, to use shortcuts consistantly, you can't reply on ALT menu activation.
> You have to use Shift-DEL, Control-Ins and Shift-Ins for Cut, Copy and Paste,
> respectively. These will actually work in the dialog box.

Well, they're pretty mnemonic.

> > Quick, on the Mac, what's the keyboard shortcut for "Print Draft"?

> There's no such shortcut. You print by pressing Command-P. You select 
> draft mode in the subsequent job dialog.

I don't want a job dialog. I just want to print something and get on with
it (here we get back to GUI versus CLI, actually).

> I picked a generic example -- Cut, Copy and Paste. Things that you use all
> the time in every application (practically). Notice that you picked an 
> obscure example. 

Well, I don't ever use cut myself, just copy and paste. So why should I
bother remembering what the Cut mnemonic is.

I do a lot of "select italic font" though.

> I disagree. Come back in 5 years when there's some modicum of consistancy.

That's an application issue. Seriously. I'd like *my* mac a lot better
if I could easily and conveniently run around the menus without leaving
the home row.

> > In any case, the two suits cover basically the same ground. Xerox invented
> > most of the items Apple claimed rights to.

> If you believe that, then you believe that Apple should win the MS/HP suit.

No, I believe that neither of these suits should stand. Apple did have a
couple of minor points that were valid (trashcans), but the rest of the
Windows interface is no closer to Apple's than it is to Xeroxes. As for
Xerox, they might have made one of their claims (that Apple was claiming
ownership to a technology they developed) but they took too long to act.

> > I don't think so. They sold the Xerox Star office system for quite a few years,
> > and it was also significantly better than the Mac.

> UGH! I actually had the priviledge of USING a Star (back in 1983, before
> there ever was a Mac). 

Me too. 1982.

> It wasn't better than the Mac. I'd say it was barely usable. The Help system
> was awful. And many times there were hidden modes were you couldn't do 
> something that wasn't obvious.

I don't generally judge an interface by the help system. I found the Star a
lot more consistent than the Mac (for example, drag and drop was universal
instead of only working for the special cases of moving and deleting files).
It was a mite slow, but then so was the Mac back in 1986.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
 `-_-'   "Heeft u vandaag al uw wolf geknuffeld?"
  'U`  
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.advocacy