On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 2:08 AM, Simon Wears <[email protected]> wrote: > I'm very uncomfortable using Apple computers. My friend bought one about 2 > years ago, I still struggle to use it. It seems to try to be different so > much, it becomes a little unusable (in my opinion). Case example is (again, > 2 years ago) I started college. My girlfriend is an artist, and had to do > some work in Photoshop. She took me up to the art computers to help her get > used to it, and I was utterly confused about how to even OPEN Photoshop! > Then, getting the pictures from her camera was a pain, so we decided to > close the program. I couldn't even work out how to do that...
You plug in the camera. iPhoto opens. It asks you if you want to download the pictures. It does it. At least, that's what happens for pretty-much every camera out there. Pretty much like what happens with F-Spot in Ubuntu these days! And for people coming from a Windows background, that's often where they trip up with Macs - the answer is just too obvious, too easy, and therefore it's not what they're looking for. They expect to have to delve into Photoshop or run some bespoke third party software just to get pictures off a camera or use a scanner or whatever. So, that's what they're looking for. (BTW, I'm not saying that's what happened with you - there may have just been something broken on the machine, or the camera was one of the very very few which won't work like that, or whatever). > When people ask me about getting a Mac, I often tell them to instead bring > their laptop in sometime, and I could give them Ubuntu, meaning they get > increased performance, better security, an OS that would do everything they > needed, and wouldnt have to spend £1000 on a Mac. Ubuntu is (obviously) not > Windows, but people who come use my computer get how to do everything > instantly from never having even heard of Linux before. The most anyone has > every been lost is by acidentally switching to another desktop and thinking > everything closed. You'd be surprised about what baffles people when switching platforms. I recently encountered someone who was very confused by the idea of going to Add/Remove Applications to *find* new apps. They thought that was a really, really dumb idea. That's not what the similarly-named thing on Windows does, so they hated it. There's two ways of looking at design for switchers. The first is to try and make everything work the way Windows works. The problem with that is that Windows has lots of interface design choices that are really dumb, and that if you're not wedded to Windows look like candidates for change. The other option is to simply ignore Windows switchers, and design what you think works best. Personally, I think the second option is best. Create the absolute best, easiest-to-use interface you can, and see if people get it. If they don't, keep evolving. -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
