On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 1:56 AM, Sean Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> Means that when folks ask me about switching to Macs, which people > seem to increasingly do, I am rather jaded. I accept their positives > but I also am befuddled as to why they seem to have created for their > converts such a steep learning curve, forcing them to throw out > everything they are used to and buy into a completely different > regime. Because "everything you used to know is wrong" :) Like all modern desktop OS's, the Mac is a mixture of things old, new, borrowed and blue. For example, if you were designing a new computer today, for an audience which had grown up with PC keyboards, getting rid of the ctrl key makes no sense - people are used to it. But back in the early 80's, most people hadn't used a computer, or even seen one. In fact, most people didn't even use keyboards daily. They maybe used a typepwriter, and that only had a shift key on it. >From that perspective, why include a key that (a) the OS doesn't need, and (b) didn't mean anything to anyone you were trying to appeal to? Look at a keyboard with fresh eyes, and it's complete gibberish. What does ctrl mean? Alt? Esc? What do all those F keys do? Why does that little key say "Delete" on it, when I use that big key with the arrow to actually delete thing? Of course, since then, the Mac has inherited lots of other interface conventions, largely from the NeXTSTEP world. It's lost some of its puritanical consistency (why is there what amounts to a subset of the File menu on a pop-up "Action" button on the top of every Finder window, for example. And what the heck is the "Library" folder - it makes sense to me, but imagine you're someone who's never used any kind of Unix before... is it where you store eBooks?). -- [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
