P
Pascal J. Bourguignon
Jerry Coffin said:Enough of that Mac snobbery! If you think people are gonna rewrite
everything just for the Mac because you don't quite like a shade of an
icon you can eat your one-button mouse.
Seriously, for many applications cross-platform toolkits are a nice
thing and a Mac user surely prefers a "close enough" GUI to one that
hasn't been ported to the Mac at all.
[ getting badly off-topic...]
A few years ago I was frustrated with how difficult it was to do
something fairly simple in Photoshop, so I wrote my own little Windows
program to do the job. It was fairly complex internally, but externally
pretty boring -- you opened a graphics file, it did its job, showed you
the result and let you save the filtered file. The only bit of visible
complexity was that it let you do the same transform on an arbitrary
number of files at once, and allowed you some flexibility about how it
dealt with file names.
A friend of mine who uses a Mac watched me use it once, and exclaimed
about how boring and ugly it was. As it happens, at work at the time I
was doing a little bit of Mac development anyway, so I decided to port
this bit of stuff to the Mac -- but with a twist.
Instead of making it boringly simple, I deliberately made everything
stupidly complex -- in fact, I pretty much implemented the same things
that Photoshop had, and then gave a rather complex set of directions for
how to carry out the steps in the right order to do the job. Just for
fun, I also included a few complete wild goose chases -- a few things
that looked like they were supposed to manipulate your picture (with
careful explanations about how they were much more subtle than the
"gross" controls in other programs), but really did nothing, no matter
how you adjusted the controls. OTOH, make no mistake about it: I spent a
ridiculous amount of time making sure those useless controls followed
Apple's Human Interface Guidelines as closely as I possibly could. I
took a process that could be (and was) completely automated, and added
useless human intervention _every_ step of the way -- and even
introduced a couple of steps that had absolutely NO use at all except
for making you do more "stuff" before you were done. As a finishing
touch, I added the automation back in, but only to have it "coach" you
for the optimum setting each step of the way -- if you tried to do
things out of order OR set the controls wrong, it told you so.
The next April 1, I decided to send this piece of crap out to the Mac
users I know (including the one who'd originally commented about the
"boring" Windows version. Apparently none of them realized this was
supposed to be a joke -- I got back about a dozen emails exclaiming
about how wonderful it was to see a former Windows programmer really
"get" the Mac, and go to all the time and effort to design such a user
interface that (according to one of them): "really showed how beauty and
efficiency could be harmonized." Rather than people noticing how I'd
made them waste dozens of steps on things it already knew how to do, I
go praised for such a thoughtful touch of having it help guide you
through the process to produce such superb results.
You can't deny the marketting genius of Steve Jobs and his followers.