First impression of Vista

Aaron Vegh aaronvegh-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Tue Feb 6 18:54:17 UTC 2007


Yikes,
This is the last place to start a flame ware, but hey, there's good
reasoning for some of those brain dead features you speak of:

> But there are two things that I think are brain dead on a Mac,
> 1) why is every apps tool bar on the very top of the screen,
> I have been an apple user since about 1981, and certainly when i got my
> first 128MB Mac, with only running a few apps, and a small screen,
> having a common top pull down menu panel was OK.
> Fast forward to this century, and people have 20-30 apps/windows open,
> and i don't want to be going to the top of the screen for my menus all
> the time.

There's a couple answers to that one. The best is something called
"Fitt's Law" which talks about the ease of acquiring a target with
your mouse much easier when it's at the hard stop on the sides and
corners of a screen. This is a feature, not a bug. Even taking that
into account, the proliferation of keyboard shortcuts tends to
invalidate the mousework -- when you use an app long enough you tend
to not use the menus much. Ubuntu realizes this to a certain extent
anyway: placing their system-wide menu in the always-at-the-top
position.

> 2) on the alt tab'ing on a Mac, when you land on a "shrunk"
>  app, like in linux dt's it should revert out of "shrunk" state.
> I mean what was apple thinking, you are going to alt tab to a app,
> release on it, and _not_ want to use it?

The very question is a funny one because if you've been using a Mac
for this long, then you should know, you don't shrink apps, you shrink
windows. So definitely, if you want to shrink a window to the Dock,
and you switch back to the app, it'll stay in the Dock. You can then
create new windows from the app. It's a partcularly Mac phenomenon,
actually, and it throws off Windows users all the time. Linux users
too.

> But unless Jobs gets his
> thumb outta his ass, I just see the Mac slipping farther and farther
> behind with respect to usability as compared to a good linux desktop.

There's "good" again. others have asked what you mean by this; I'd
like to know as well. I think Apple has provided some great,
innovative user interface features, like system-wide instant search,
and Exposé to make sense of all those open windows. Suffice to say
your experience is your own, and you need to make the call on your
platform that makes the most sense for you. That's all any of us can
do. :-)

Cheers,
Aaron.
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