On Apr 30, 2005, at 9:57 PM, Steve Kidd wrote:
On 30-Apr-05, at 12:39 PM, John Christie wrote:
I'm personally hoping for better stability of apps (Safari and Dashboard are unstable for starters) and better actual usability in the interface (Dashboard is just plain rushed) before I expect any of the aesthetic issues to be fixed (if ever).
Should have read this one before I sent off my reply. How do you get to "unstable?" Come on, honestly. Unstable is when you only have a 50/50 chance of the app starting up without a crash, and if you're having difficulties that bad, I can only suggest you look to hardware problems on your Mac.
Interesting... I think of unstable as a relative term. If my version of the app never crashed and the current one goes down once every couple of days I call it unstable. Safari can crash daily. Thankfully it is better than 1.4 is on Panther (2.0 is probably in between 1.3.9 and 1.4). But, it isn't as good as the last one on Panther. And, the memory usage is dramatically greater. 1.3.9 used to hover for me about around 100 meg unless something else needed the memory back. 1.4 and 2.0 (they use the same webcore) quickly get to 200 and stay there. Of course, this will be very user and system dependent. But, my usage patterns have stayed the same.
To me, your claim that an app has to have a consistent probability of only 50/50 to start in order to define it as unstable is a ridiculous.
Its probably better to ask someone, when they say an app is unstable, what they mean by that in the context. And, maybe even find out their usage. It's not uncommon for me to drop half a dozen windows with 20 tabs each open. Its situations like that that cause it to lock up or bomb.
As to Dashboard, I seem to remember having a similar conversation with you about the Dock. Didn't you think that was unusable? And that Apple was going to have to change it because of the huge number of users who hated it?
Nope, never said anything about the Dock being terribly bad. The dock behaves in a consistent fashion for what it is and doesn't do anything tremendously stupid (except perhaps for moving all the time). Its just not what some people want it to be. No... having to click the "+" button for add in dashboard to close a window (OK, there is a secret keycode that doesn't require this, but ITS SERCRET) is as bad as the "Start" button for shutdown in Windows. Its an embarassment for Apple.
Not everyone is going to like everything about an OS. The nice thing about Apple is it is usually easy to modify things to work the way you like, either through preferences, or third-party enhancements. But I stand by my position that Apple is continuously trying to enhance the usability and the user experience.
I would say that usability and user experience can be enhanced a number of ways. One is by adding useful features. Spotlight is definitely one of those and supports your argument. Needlessly changing the interface to mail is not.*** So, perhaps they are "continuously" trying to enhance some aspects of the user experience. But, they are not continuously refining and improving the core interface design which I would take as Aqua, brushed metal, and the specific implementations in their own apps. That is actually consistently getting more eclectic. Which is the #1 reason that Windows is bad.
***I actually agree with others that the current mail is more attractive. But, it is also again different from the rest of the OS and breaks down consistency. If they wanted to do that they should have changed the core aqua UI, not just that one app. I haven't looked at interface builder but if it is yet another app specific "theme" instead of system specific that does nothing to differentiate on functionality or mode (as it currently does) then it is a waste of resources. I suppose there is the off chance they were field testing this as a complete update of Aqua.
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