quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson: BTW, I just want to clarify that when I say "Nano-sized," I'm talking about height and width. Depth is almost irrelevant to me, as long as the thing isn't a cube.
Ah. That changes everything, since my objections to the plausibility of your feature set were from an engineering standpoint.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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JT, They're meant to ridicule the computer, not the person using it. Also, PC users who are perfectly happy with their computing experience are not the target audience. PC users who find their computers frustrating, or want something more user friendly but have never considered switching; they're the target audience.
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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ALmost every article I see about "feature bloat" in Microsoft Office very quickly lists several features that I use regularly.
I also find them to have excellent UIs. Some of it is due to Windows' familiarity to me. But much of it is due to fairly consistent UI standards across applications.
There are a few Microsoft apps that, for some reason, have entirely different UIs. These UIs are more "intuitive" (in the sense that a total stranger can pick them up more easily and use without having to reason anything out) than most other apps. They very quickly become far more furstrating to use because the thing that makes them easy is that they have a single use path.
Intuitiveness is needed for seldom-used applications. Ease of learning and ease of use after learning - which are different things than intuitiveness altogether - are far more useful for apps that will be used often.
MS apps are by no means perfect. But they are not counter-intuitive and they, in general, have very good UIs compared to the rest of the desktop world.
I read a great book on the failure of intuitiveness as a UI goal a long time ago. I'll try to remember the name.
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quote:You can use your PC, and I'll save up for my Macbook Pro.
And while you're saving for the Macbook Pro, I'll be using my PC. It's a good thing you don't need any work done right now, really. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:What are you comparing the Microsoft UIs to? Have you tried Apple's apps?
OSX and its apps are far easier to learn and easier to use after learning.
I have used Apple apps extensively in the past, some before I had extensive experience with Windows, some after.
They are not far easier to learn. They might be far easier to perform the single most common task, but this is not a good measure of ease of use.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:re: Apple's ad campaign -- there's absolutely no reason why Apple can't advertise what they do well without denigrating Windows. It makes Apple look petty, and the ads turn me off almost as much as the real life Apple snobs do.
Part of the problem with that ad campaign is that the Windows guy is actually funny, and I always want to see more of him and less of of the Mac guy.
Absolutely. The Mac guy is smug and boring. The Windows guy is my kind of geek.
quote:Originally posted by TomDavidson:
quote:Microsoft software is bloated with features, without taste, and counter-intuitive.
You make these assertions, and I believe they are to a significant extent unfair and untrue.
That Microsoft software is perceived this way does not necessarily indicate that it is reality.
Agreed 100%.
quote:Originally posted by Euripides: JT, They're meant to ridicule the computer, not the person using it.
Very fine line, as the emotionalism and vitriol of too many computer debates shows.
quote:Originally posted by Euripides: PC users who find their computers frustrating, or want something more user friendly but have never considered switching; they're the target audience.
Who are these people? Seriously, if someone is frustrated with their OS, why had they not considered switching?
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Almost every article I see about "feature bloat" in Microsoft Office very quickly lists several features that I use regularly.
I also find them to have excellent UIs. Some of it is due to Windows' familiarity to me. But much of it is due to fairly consistent UI standards across applications.
There are a few Microsoft apps that, for some reason, have entirely different UIs. These UIs are more "intuitive" (in the sense that a total stranger can pick them up more easily and use without having to reason anything out) than most other apps. They very quickly become far more frustrating to use because the thing that makes them easy is that they have a single use path.
Intuitiveness is needed for seldom-used applications. Ease of learning and ease of use after learning - which are different things than intuitiveness altogether - are far more useful for apps that will be used often.
MS apps are by no means perfect. But they are not counter-intuitive and they, in general, have very good UIs compared to the rest of the desktop world.
quote:You can use your PC, and I'll save up for my Macbook Pro.
And while you're saving for the Macbook Pro, I'll be using my PC. It's a good thing you don't need any work done right now, really.
Compared to a PC laptop with similar specs, Macbook Pros are not too expensive. The problem is that I'm a university student with an irregular income.
I'll be doing my work on this PC until then, thanks very much.
quote:Originally posted by Dagonee:
quote:What are you comparing the Microsoft UIs to? Have you tried Apple's apps?
OSX and its apps are far easier to learn and easier to use after learning.
I have used Apple apps extensively in the past, some before I had extensive experience with Windows, some after.
They are not far easier to learn. They might be far easier to perform the single most common task, but this is not a good measure of ease of use.
What can I say. I totally disagree. In my own experience, the only reason people have had trouble learning how to use a Mac is because they have trouble shedding Windows habits. That would work the other way around too.
quote:Originally posted by rivka:
Who are these people? Seriously, if someone is frustrated with their OS, why had they not considered switching?
You don't know people who find their PCs frustrating? People who haven't tried other OSs because they prefer what's mainstream and supports the software they know, or don't have the time to deal with computer issues? I do.
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As a typical example of Microsoft software, take Internet Explorer 7. The browser doesn't comply with W3C standards, which gives web developers and designers a headache - they have to write more illogical unsemantic code to work around IE's erroneous interpretation of code. But the end user doesn't see this. Okay.
IE7's new text rendering 'features' make small initialised text difficult to read, and makes large text look ugly. The old IE problems have not been fixed; it's still a leaking sieve security wise (thanks to the browser's many bugs), and IE7 is more difficult to navigate than IE6. Microsoft was late to include tabbed browsing, PNG alpha channel support, and each release has been bug-ridden.
It's a similar picture for most of Microsoft's products.
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Microsoft can't be all bad. After all Microsoft Office is on the Mac. The vast majority of Mac owners also use it. It would be a big blow if Microsoft stopped making it for the Mac.
Posts: 796 | Registered: Mar 2005
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quote:Compared to a PC laptop with similar specs, Macbook Pros are not too expensive.
Errrmmmm...no.
Macbook Pro (mid-level model): $2499 Core Duo 2.33 2 gigs DDR2 667 RAM 120 gig hard drive 15" display 6x Combo Drive Radeon X1600 256 MB
For comparison:
Dell Inspiron E505: $1,579 as configured Core Duo 2.00 2 gigs DDR2 667 RAM 120 gig hard drive 15.4" display 8x Combo Drive Radeon x1400 256 MB
Mildly different specs (.33 ghz diff in proc speed but identical FSB/L2 Cache, Radeon x1400 instead of x1600), but an almost $1,000 difference in price.
quote: As a typical example of Microsoft software, take Internet Explorer 7. The browser doesn't comply with W3C standards, which gives web developers and designers a headache - they have to write more illogical unsemantic code to work around IE's erroneous interpretation of code. But the end user doesn't see this. Okay.
IE7's new text rendering 'features' make small initialised text difficult to read, and makes large text look ugly. The old IE problems have not been fixed; it's still a leaking sieve security wise (thanks to the browser's many bugs), and IE7 is more difficult to navigate than IE6. Microsoft was late to include tabbed browsing, PNG alpha channel support, and each release has been bug-ridden.
This, however, I definitely agree with. I hate IE. I hate that because so many people use it, almost every major page in existence warps their code to conform to it. As a designer, I hate having written wonderfully simple code only to discover that whoops, IE has no clue what to do with it. What's that, IE? You don't know how to interpret float when it applies to a freakin' div? You selectively read the spaces and hard returns in code, making it extraordinarily difficult to organize code for easy editing?
quote:Originally posted by Euripides: I stand corrected re: the laptop prices.
Part of the problem is that Apple's prices & specs remain static for extended periods of time. Because Windows PC makers have such a wide variety of components to choose from (and are not competing not only against a rival OS, but also against each other), their prices and components change much more frequently.
Six months ago, when the MacBook was probably near identical in specs (edit: and price), the equivilant Dell notebook was probably closer to $2000-2200.
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I've never had any problems with it. For the year and change that I've had it, I've liked it more than I ever liked Sprint.
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Cell service providers vary wildly in coverage and service from one region to another.
I know people in Florida who swear by Nextel, when it was all but useless here (in Louisiana) until two years ago. Sprint is generally loathed in the South, but my east coast friends use it almost exclusively. Cingular is very big here, but spotty in the NW (at least in the areas I've lived/visited).
Saying <huge company> sucks is about as accurate as saying "I hate blue jeans." For every one person who agrees there're probably 4 who've never had a problem with them.
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<--- desperately wants an iPhone; is having a hard time justifying spending that much to call the 3 people she talks to on her cell
Posts: 834 | Registered: Jun 2005
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IE is absolutely horrible. The only time I ever use it with pages that insist that I do so. Firefox is teh AWESOME. But I do not agree that IE is representative of Microsoft -- Office is good, and some pieces are great. I adore Outlook, really love Word, and Publisher and Powerpoint are fun.
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I'm actually annoyed with Cingular. As an old AT&T wireless user I had to deal with the merge and change of names and the confusion around that. Since the "new" at&t gobbled up Bell South and thus gained 100% control over Cingular they are changing the name. From Cingular, to at&t.
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IE is absolutely horrible. The only time I ever use it with pages that insist that I do so. Firefox is teh AWESOME. But I do not agree that IE is representative of Microsoft -- Office is good, and some pieces are great. I adore Outlook, really love Word, and Publisher and Powerpoint are fun.
Outlook is definitely one of Microsoft's better programs, but still has serious security issues. I prefer Thunderbird, and Mail over both.
I don't use Publisher, so I can't say. But with Word and Powerpoint, how often does one use all of their functions? 99% of the time, Word is bloated for what I want to do with it - write a letter, essay, story, notes, etc.
And it's so much easier to create good looking presentation grade material using Pages and Keynote than it is with Word and Powerpoint. An example of Microsoft's lack of taste IMHO: Word Art, Word's drawing tools, Powerpoint's cheesy transition effects.
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quote:Originally posted by Euripides: Outlook is definitely one of Microsoft's better programs, but still has serious security issues. I prefer Thunderbird, and Mail over both.
I'm not talking about Outlook Express, which I find annoying. I'm talking about Outlook, which does SOOOOOOO much more than just email! (And I'm not just saying that because my dad wrote a book about the previous version.)
And while you may not use most of the features in Word, I'll bet I use many more than you do. And it's a slightly different list than the ones my dad prefers -- because we have that choice.
I happen to think having those choices is a wonderful thing. You don't need 'em. *shrug*
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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On the subject of Outlook (which is an excellent productivity application in combination with Exchange, though finally there are solutions starting to approach their capabilities), apparently the next version of Outlook will use Office's (Word's) HTML rendering engine instead of IE's. Notably what this means is, unless Word's HTML rendering engine takes a quantum leap forward, CSS will not be usable for positioning elements in emails. There're a lot of designers who are not going to be happy.
Word and Powerpoint are definitely high quality applications, though they have a lot of usability bugaboos, partly because its a bigger usability bugaboo to dramatically change things (usually). While there are paradigms in, for instance, Keynote and Pages that are far more usable, overall Keynote and Pages are not as capable, in ways that matter to some people. It would definitely be nice if Word and Powerpoint were to adopt similar capabilities.
A lot of the knocks against Word and Powerpoint are against abuses of Word and Powerpoint -- using either as a layout application, for instance. My personal opinion is that a lot of what is done in some worlds with word should really be done in plain text, partly for security reasons (for instance, its much harder to spread a virus with some plain text in an email rather than an attached word document), but that's my idealism peaking out .
Publisher is a scary story graphic designers tell each other around the campfire .
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A blogger has speculated that there will be 3rd party iPhone software, but that it will be vetted by Apple and sold through the iTunes Store, much as the only 3rd party software for iPods (games) are now.
This seems quite likely, actually. I am less annoyed, though still annoyed, and hope the situation will be loose enough to allow for the applications I am interested in to be developed (I want a chat application and ssh, in particular; I'm amazed iChat isn't included on the list of included apps already).
I'm not the biggest fan of their iPhone Shuffle idea (half in jest though it might be). Speech recognition would be neat though, and they have a point about phasing out SMS.
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quote:Originally posted by Euripides: JT, They're meant to ridicule the computer, not the person using it. Also, PC users who are perfectly happy with their computing experience are not the target audience. PC users who find their computers frustrating, or want something more user friendly but have never considered switching; they're the target audience.
Thank you. That's true. Sorry to go back into the thread, but this is the heart of it for me, this is the whole thing; I don't care about anything else as much as this. I had a PC for three years, and in that time I spend countless, countless hours trying to fix things and do things and go back and figure things out and solve problems. Whatever the benefit was, I don't know. I've got a mac now, and I don't seem to be spending any time fixing things. Great. If I had to give up my ability to do stuff I didn't ever do anyway, that's cool.
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quote:A blogger has speculated that there will be 3rd party iPhone software, but that it will be vetted by Apple and sold through the iTunes Store, much as the only 3rd party software for iPods (games) are now.
This seems quite likely, actually. I am less annoyed, though still annoyed, and hope the situation will be loose enough to allow for the applications I am interested in to be developed (I want a chat application and ssh, in particular; I'm amazed iChat isn't included on the list of included apps already).
This was my original understanding, and my original comment stands. This will keep me from developing for the thing, so I don't want it.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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And the battery life is like 3 hours? No thanks. And if you lose it you basically lose your whole life. As a wise man once said "With great power comes great responsibility". I believe it was Ghandi. Or was it Yoda?
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And why would you lose your whole life? It'll sync everything to your mac, just like everything else Apple makes, and like they explicitly state.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Battery Up to 5 hours (Talk / Video / Browsing) Up to 16 hours (Audio playback)
...
Up to 16 hours of battery life refers to music playback. Up to 5 hours of battery life is based on H.264 1.5-Mbps video at 640-by-480 resolution combined with 128-Kbps audio.
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That's the Cisco iPhone that FG brought up earlier in the thread.
Anywho, I just found out about the Apple iPhone and I'm tweaking out. I think I'll get one in around September, when some bugs are worked out. I'm excited!
Posts: 1156 | Registered: Jan 2004
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This really is going to be the next ipod, isn't it?
"Well, it's Apple, so it has to be the best."
Meanwhile, other manufacturers are offering far more intuitive and feature-packed solutions at a fraction of the cost. This iPhone fad will be no different. LG's first attempt is already putting it to shame.
Posts: 1945 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I stand by my earlier post. I recently upgraded my Siemenns SX-66 to a T-Mobile MDA, and I love it. (I loved my old phone, too.) There is very little--if anything--that iPhone can do that my phone cannot, and my phone cost a lot less.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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The iphone will probably be succesful because it will be a bunch of innovation and interface improvement, packed into a campaign and a design which accomplishes that certain jay-nay-sais-something, that appeal, and holds a dominating share in a market that it is essentially revolutionizing.
That is what it means if you say that it is going to be 'the next ipod.' A smash success from any business angle. It does seem likely, too.
Cost is really the only issue. It's a lot of money to pay for something that is just a drop-in-the-toilet away from being a designer paperweight.
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(Ic, I was gonna get an MDA, too! You and your excellent taste in phones...)
The one thing the iPhone has that no other phone I've seen yet is offering is the voicemail system. The ability to browse your voicemail like a computer folder and manipulate them the same way...oh man, delicious.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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So, someone had to do it. I bought one. Bwahar. Thank my boss for being such a huge iPhone proponent that he offered me a $150 bonus on my next paycheck if I bought one.
Some iPhone plusses:
* Visual voicemail is...yeah. I cannot and will not stop raving about it. All of the web's naysayers who decry the iPhone as a 'retarded smartphone that does nothing new' are effectively forced to eat their words in the face of visual voicemail, period. I would pay an extra $200 for a handset for this feature alone.
* Dual-touch screen is about as you'd expect it: sexy. Quality is significantly better than a video iPod and the surface appears to be more scratch resistant.
* Camera is surprisingly good quality, even in relatively poor light.
* The on-screen keyboard is significantly easier to use than I'd anticipated. At first I was put off by the inaccuracy involved in a touch-screen keyboard: without the feel of the keys beneath my fingers, I'm much more inaccurate. Thankfully, the iPhone is obnoxiously good at figuring out what you meant. I can misspell "head" as "gwwf" and it will correct me. As a result, I actually type faster on the touch screen than I do using a standard qwerty interface - and MUCH faster than I can use handwriting recognition software.
* The integrated version of Google Maps is a godsend.
Some iPhone minuses:
* No voice dial? Are you serious? The iPhone even has a mic!
* No MP3 ringtones, despite being an iPod?
* The headphone jack is designed specifically to make plugging in any normal set of headphones impossible, thereby allowing Apple & their butt buddies Belkin to make and sell a $9.95 adapter, not unlike Nintendo with the GBA.
* The OS and whatnot take up enough space on the unit that my 4 gig is actually a 3.45 gig.
Beyond that, it's exactly what it looks like: standard smartphone features in a UI that many people (myself included) prefer, and others will sneer at.
Posts: 4313 | Registered: Sep 2004
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I remain completely uninterested in the iPhone. It's second-tier technology in a Gucci bathrobe.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Absolutely. But for a lower price than you'd pay for the iPhone, you can get first-tier technology and a more useful form factor.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I got one too, and I agree one hundred percent with your assessment Eros. The iPod functionality, while very pretty and more advanced than anything we've seen in the past, loses some of the convenience that makes an iPod with the lack of a four button wheel. However the integration with the apps on my mac, and within the phone between the internet, mail, and phone applications is nothing short of revolutionary.
Realistically I don't need an iPhone, but I've been saving for one since I heard about it, and I can justify it by saying I'm making the Apple stock I own go up by buying it.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Oct 2005
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I got an iphone too. In fact, I'm posting on Hatrack using the iPhone right now!
I love the web browsing capabilities. Whatever anyone else may say, I simply don't see other phones working as well online as does my new iphone. For instance, my Treo 680 wouldn't let me post on forums. The phone, maps, voicemail, iPod, and contacts features work excellently. Even surfing the web via EDGE isn't terribly slow (though wifi is much faster) and is a huge improvement over the speed of my old smartphone (which also used EDGE).
OTOH, I find myself missing several key features, such as:
eBook reader - Given the beauty of the interface, the iPhone would be a natural and effective way to read ebook. Apple could even theoretically manage ebook sales through iTunes. But as of now, I can only email myself .txt or .PDF files to be opened as attachments and don't remember places in the document.
MMS - no ability to send/receive multimedia text messages. Hopefully, this feature will be added in a future update.
Video - the excellent camera only takes still shots.
Document Creation - one can only view MS Excel or Word docs, no editing available.
No copy/paste - this is annoying when, say, copying text from a webpage to a memo or contact info would be needed. The lack of copy/paste is particularly odd given that Apple originally innovated this.
No built-in file browser - for saving, opening, editing, or creating documents or files.
No iPhone to iTunes access - you'd think that it would be in Apple's best interest to allow iphone users to download music directly from their store to their phone, but this feature is not available.
Despite the missing features, the iphone is a thrill to use, and many missing features may well be added in a future update. In the meantime, I'm having fun playing with my new toy.
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