>Yes, very funny. Well, I'm a CS graduate, and I have no qualm with using iTunes. My colleague in the next workstation is a PhD from Cambridge and he uses iTunes too. Might want to expand your horizons about what is a "generally accepted piece of crap" and what is a personal preference.

http://www.straferight.com/photopost/data/500/medium/double-...

Whoopdeedoo, you've got a degree! Congratulations! I got a C in German when I was 16 but I don't brag about it.

>That you "know what you want" doesn't mean what what you want is also right for you. For example, every obese person that craves for McDonalds also, er, "knows what he wants". But it would be better for him, in the long term, if he was denied that.

Where's that triple facepalm jpeg...

What would help an obese person, and anyone else trying to break a habit in the long term is education, not taking away their free will. If an obese person understands what causes his sugar cravings, why eating sugary food makes him fat and that eating sugar will spike his blood sugar levels and then cause them to crash which will then cause yet another craving, he will stop eating it and lose weight. If that same person is educated about amino acids and how L-Glutamine, a non-essential amino acid, can stop cravings dead in their tracks when taken as a supplement, he will take a spoonful of that instead of reaching for the junk food when a craving hits him. If, through experience, he learns that exercise makes you feel awesome and has that little side effect of bringing weight down, he'll be sold for life. Denying people their right to make choices is a weak attempt to control what is not ours. Education is the way forward.

To address the other points you made, programmers do not like customized UI's. That's something which designers come up with because they are a) not aware of standards and the implications of breaking them and b) take orders from management who are advised by marketing on how to make the product memorable. To quote those crazy Asian rappers, the Wu-Tang Clan - "Cash rules everything around me, C.R.E.A.M. - get the money, dollar dollar bills y'all!"

> but if your OS vendor comes up with designs you don't like you have no recourse except some basic customizations (which might not even apply, e.g you cannot change how the menubar works or where it is placed on OS X)

I agree that this is exactly what's wrong with the current GUI toolkits - those kinds of customizations should be implemented at the library level, not the application level. I.E. have a widget for a menu which a theme can render however the hell it wants. Hell, make themes applicable on a per-application basis since you might want a different style for, say, music production software or an IDE.

Besides, OS X is possibly the worst example of a customizable UI, save Gnome/GTK. Almost none of it is customizable by design. I swear, Apple products are completely brain damaged.

> The implication that designers don't know how to think is as idiotic as is preposterous.

Just as the implication that programmers can't design is idiotic and preposterous, not that anyone would ever claim such a thing. Nonetheless, they completely suck at it - http://www.davelgil.com/BC_placeholder.png Just as designers can think but completely suck at that. If they would just combine forces and form into a bigger and better machine...

> And the insinuation that non-designer "thinker" can just "tell 'em what needs prettying up" and we'll get good GUIs (as if design work is mere "prettying up"...) is even more laughable.

But that's exactly what happens even with web UI's - the programmers define the structural elements - e.g. this is a button, this is a list - and the designers skin those widgets. You can't paint a structure which doesn't exist!

Auf Wiedersehen.