Jonas writes:
we even have administrative people at our university who have
learned to be somewhat efficient with our SAP implementation, which
is universally recognised by everyone here as a the most horrible
user interface they have ever used).
------
Funny you mention this because my idea for a new application would
directly compete with SAP for a particular industry. What is
encouraging is that the opinion you cite is the same one I have found
in my own informal poll of actual non advanced "Joe" users.
The question/comment of web apps is valid. Actually, you can
officially create web applications for the iPhone right now and Apple
has not officially/fully released the Cocoa development kit for the
iPhone yet - still beta. So, Apple is a bit bipolar already.
Apple makes it hard for the individual "developer" to think their own
way as far as human interfaces go. This seems contrary to their
advertising - but their purpose is to make the end user's experience
as unobtrusive as possible navigating ANY application right out of the
box. Macs have been typically marketed to artists and if one looks at
the computers shown in TV shows and movies, you will notice that Apple
logo quite often. These artist types usually have a different mindset
than computer programmers and often even struggle with Mac
applications much less Windows or command line systems. If a more
intuitive human interface was not an important feature, we would
probably still be typing in commands at the C prompt. Thus Apple's
philosophy has been to try to force programmers to think Apple's
way. And it works for them. Their users are very happy with the
consistency and it is very hard to get mac users to switch unless they
have to because of pressures at the work place.
Actually, I like being able to let Apple dictate the human interface
GUIDElines AND supply routines to implement those guidelines. It is
a pain at first to have to learn, but after you learn it and have
implemented a shell with them, you don't need to have to maintain a
lot of code. This is Apple's strategy to keep end users happy and
developers subservient. My complaint with Apple is (1) they switched
from Pascal interfaces to Objective C and (2) you must learn their
entire Cocoa development paradigm and not just the individual HI
widgets if you want to be a "true" developer. They bundle an entire
development system to make it easier for you to do it their way. That
is why I haven't been programming for 10 years until now when FPC and
a nice simple third party IDE came out for it and actually it was by
semi accident I discovered it.
I fully understand and sympathize the issues of trying to get a port
out and implementing a HI paradigm is a lot of work. I did this with
some of 15 year old Mac programs at first but ended up learning (and
still at the relative bottom of the hill) and implementing Apple's
current API. Yeah, it is work.
What I am curious about is why are people porting programs from other
platforms to the Mac? From the discussions, it seems that the end
users are happy with their current implementation. Macs are more
expensive. Macs have only maybe 5% of the corporate market share and
maybe 15% (at most) of the home market. The end users are used to
their current HI and seem to like it. A lot of work and money is
needed just to make a bare bones port. This doesn't seem to be
logical to me so I must be missing something. What is driving the
port? Many developers have dropped Mac implementations since it was
too expensive to maintain.
I , myself am thinking I might be able to sell a Mac application where
there is NO currently available product. If I was fluent in Windows
programming, I definitely would write the application for Windows
since the end users mostly/all are used to and have windows
computers. I have ideas how to address this but if I were working for
a regular software company, I have no doubts that this implementation
idea would be thrown out as being fiscally irresponsible. And it
would be hard to argue. In this case, one does need to "think
different" in order to attempt to accomplish this foolish idea.
However, the converse of porting from windows to a Mac seems very
problematic and has me scratching my head.
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