Quoting Stanislav Malyshev <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Come on. I gave support to five year child (the real one, not proverbial) > and she was perfectly able to know to handle the mouse. It took about > couple of days to teach her what it is and what it means, but it is > certainly doable. After all, everybody of us three-buttons-and-wheel > geniuses was novice once. I don't by this "people are idiots" thing. > Most people aren't _that_ idiotic. >
Well, first, Children catch those things quicker than adults. I worked in Macintosh support for three years. I blessed the one-button mouse every time I heard the conversations the PC support people in the next cubicle were making. Take my mother, for example. She knows how to install MSN messenger. She doesn't know how to cut and paste. I'm serious. If the Apple people thought "one button is all you need", then support for multiple buttons would not be built in in the OS, would it? Why waste code? That was how things worked in MacOS 9. Fact is that currently, I plugged in my USB trackpad which has two physical buttons, one virtual one and a "scroll area" (equivalent of a scroll wheel). Guess what. No drivers needed. I wish Linux recognized it when I tried to install Linux on the same machine. It's not that people are stupid. It's newbies that need hand holding at the beginning of the way. It's much easier to (a) build the built-in Mac tutorial so it says "click the button" and not have the learner wonder "which button". Everybody has common ground, you work with that. It also shortens support calls. Apple does recognize that it has power users, and it makes changes to the system to appeal to them as well. For example, the current default shell in MacOS X Jaguar is tcsh. The next one - MacOS X Panther - will have bash by default. As for the menu issue you mentioned. First, having a menu bar in each window wastes screen realestate - you can't get to a menu without changing the window focus anyway. So why not just present the focused window's menu? Besides, Apple researched this issue. They came to the conclusion that users can find their way more quickly around the screen if they have fixed locations for menus. You may *feel* differently, but they actually tested this. My original point has been that they did some research, as opposed to most of us Linuxers who base our development on our personal taste. It's not that MacOS is perfect. I just think it's got the right idea. Herouth ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
