🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <danpop.807383895@rscernix>, Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch (Dan Pop) wrote:
 
> Pure bullshit.  Nobody is a born Mac user.  If you have never used a
> computer with a GUI before, you're completely helpless in front of a Mac.
> All those "intuitive" actions aren't intuitive _at all_ if you don't know
> the Mac GUI philosophy.  If nobody told you about "drag and drop" and
> "double click", you don't have too many chances to discover them by
> yourself.

Perhaps not all incredibly obvious at first.  However, someone who learns
a few things on a mac can quickly build the intuition to do most
everything else.  The key is that nearly everything has a common logic to
it. 

> Nobody became a Mac expert simply by "just playing around with the software
> for a little bit" instead of reading some books.  And the Mac books have
> the reputation of being rather thick.  The internals are a little bit
> more complicated than the GUI.  

Well, actually I did...  I've never sat down with a mac book, but then I'm
usually not much of a reader.  I picked things up here and there on
newsgroups and mostly just learned everything from working with the
machines.  Yes I have looked at manuals from time to time when I got
stumped.  (For example, today I learned how to remove page numbers in Word
6.  What the hell were those guy's thinking when they wrote that?!?  Not
exactly intuitive.)
 
> Those who never read the manuals are those who are unable to make
> _effective_ use of their computers.

I'd beg to differ with you there unless you're really emphasizing the
*never*.  Sure I pick up a manual when I absolutely need to but in most
instances I don't need to bother with it.  (Speaking of the mac, that is,
I *do* read my UNIX book and man pages often.)

> Take someone who's been using a
> typewriter for 20 years and put him in front of a wordprocessor,
> without any manual.  He will start using it as an electronic
> typewriter, not as a word processor, because the word processing
> features are not familiar concepts for him.

Hmm... well if he's using it as an electronic typewriter he's doing better
than some I've seen.  I've literally seen people raise their arm to smack
the side of the monitor at a carriage return and count letters to center
text.  But this is more because of too much familiarity with an old
concept than lack of familiarity with a new one.  

No I don't expect many people when set down in front of a gui based word
processor will be able to jump in and create perfect documents in an
hour.  But show them how a few key things work and they'll learn the rest
of the basics on their own.  It's not that documentation is a bad thing. 
Not at all.  But why should I have to read a manual to learn how to center
a line?  Double space my text?  And in-particular, why should I have to
read a different manual every time I use a different piece of software?

Consistency is very powerful.

                                  - Joel