Apple Logic Pro /LogicExpress Discussion

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 GAmoore@... wrote:

> I am listening to an hour radio interview with Steve Bass, the author of the 
> best selling book "PC Annoyances" now in 2nd edition. The first thing he says 
> is he is already working on a new edition with plenty of new PC annoyances, 
> and even Bill Gates has acknowledged many of his issues. Then the next thing is 
> the only way to avoid most of these annoyances is to get a Macintosh and that 
> Macs do not suffer from most of the typical PC annoyances.... kind of 
> surprising coming from a PC guru.

This is always an interesting topic of debate...not the whole mac vs. PC 
thing, but more of "why doesn't the mac have these problems?"

One theory is just the economy of scale - there's a zillion more PC 
programs out there than Mac programs, and with a population that alrge 
you're bound to have more interaction problems.

Another is a theory of control: from the beginning, apple as kept very 
tight control over hardware, software APIs, etc...this rigorous 
enforcement may be a plague to developers but could be a boon to users, 
since there's nobody breaking the rules to do something cool.  

And there are the UI issues...the Mac GUI gets a lot of flak from PC 
people for having one menu bar at the top, having a one-button mouse, etc 
etc...but most of these decisions were made consciously.  The single menu 
bar is designed in accordance with Fitts' Law - you've essentially got 
infite space to move the mouse to at the top of the screen - you don't 
have to worry about overshooting your menu.  One button mice don't require 
the kind of muscle-memory as multibuttons, etc...  So all other things 
being equal, the mac may just give the impression of being less annoying 
because of a few small usability touches.

There are plenty of other hypotehses, I'm sure.

_______________________________________________________
Eric Oehler / wonko@... / www.nulldevice.com
Synthetic music for synthetic people.