Well, I'm someone who gets bored fast, I need change in my life every so often. I'm that kind of person that moves everything in it's room to another side about once every 4 months. I have upgrade stuff, I have to make it different. I don't know why, it's also not obsession, it's just, I get bored. And the 15 year consistent UI, hell, it kills me. I wasn't very happy with the Metro theme, but I got around it in a few days. Inconsistent things are so much more fun, gives me the option to explore and not only gives me the chance to explore, it gives me the chance to learn new things.
That's fine, but you have to realize you're not the typical user. The typical user is using the OS as a means to accomplish an end, and if you want the user to be happy, you need to let them accomplish that end with as few difficulties as possible. That includes difficulties like learning new stuff unless it's really, really important.
I'm not portraying Windows as the best OS, it's just it pisses me off to see people kill W7 and W8 just because it looks different. When did schools stop teaching the "Don't judge a book by it's cover" thing? Different is not bad. Change is not bad. They haven't even tried it!
Change is not inherently bad, but change for the sake of change is when your goal is to facilitate accomplishing various tasks. It's not that it looks different (people change their desktop background all the time), it's that it's functionally different, and that requires relearning. And users don't like to have to relearn when their set of tasks hasn't changed.
Windows has a lot of problems and things that could be better, but W8 does not deserve to be thrown like that. If anything, do it to Vista.
Not all problems have to be related to the stability and performance of the system. If a user can't figure out how to do something they need to do, that can be just as frustrating as having the system lock up or losing some important data, especially if it's something important that needs to be done quickly.
I do understand that Windows did a TERRIBLE job with the transitioning, and they didn't even give the user the option to enable the old UI, which really was a mistake if. If Metro wasn't a core function and you could choose to use it, I'm sure people would've upgraded to W8 and wouldn't have made a big fuzz about it.
Quite right, and it's a shame Microsoft cares more about gaining market share on phones than making a solid desktop product (the whole point of Metro on the desktop is that Microsoft wants to force desktop users to get familiar with Metro so they'll be more amenable to purchasing a Windows Phone).
And I don't mind having my grandma having XP, my grandma rarely uses the computer for anything and when she does it's to use Skype, done. I believe having our of all grandma's stick to XP is not bad,
I disagree, I think it is bad. XP is ancient, unstable, bug-ridden, unoptimized, and overall just a pain. What I do think we need is a Windows OS that looks identical (or nearly identical) that receives maintenance. There's no reason to force grandma to learn Metro when all she does is check her Facebook. They can even add new UI features, so long as the underlying UI functionality and way of doing things remains in place.
but I'm sure my grandma's not all over the internet saying nonsense about W8 being the worst OS.
Probably because she's not using it.
The excuse about having no time to learn how to do X, Y or Z on windows 8 because it looks different from XP is absurd. It's still windows, you install the software and you double click on it, if we are talking about the casual consumer and college/school students, then they are most likely using the computer for playing video games, surfing the web and the casual MicrosoftWord file. Same goes for a large % of people that works, they use Excel, some might have to deal with databases and specific software but there is really no difference between using Windows8 and WindowsXP, you still have your desktop where all your icons are at, you double click it and that's it. Metro's annoying, yes, I get it, but it's not that big of a deal. I know that most people don't care about the under the hood features, but not telling them why I think it's better? It'd turn to a "no 8 is better because it looks cool" thread.
I wasn't just referring to Win8 with that. Fundamentally, the overall way of doing things hasn't really changed, but Microsoft keeps changing small things here and there, and those add up. Most of the changes probably are for the better, some might not be, but regardless, the user doesn't like learning new things. That's not to say they shouldn't have to learn new things (let's not get stuck in the stone ages), just that if you're going to change what happens when a user does something, you need to let them know how to do what they expected. For instance, if you've moved some feature X to a new location, either make it blatantly obvious where the new X is or cue them in as to where it is now.
I personally don't use it, I love how they allowed people to turn the UAC off, it get's on my nerves to have my computer ask me if I'm sure I want to do stuff. I do agree with you on the WiX, MSI improvements that could be made tho. I know there is people that uses UAC for a reason, I have mines not to.
UAC's really important and it's fine if you, as a power user, don't use it on your own machine. However, it's an important security tool for users. And part of changing it from "annoying thing that interferes with my work" to "important notice that this may be dangerous" is reducing the number of prompts for legitimate activities, like an install that you solicited. And part of THAT is allowing per-user installs to make elevation required only when absolutely necessary.
Like I said before, they did mess up the whole transition thing and they should have enabled the option to get rid of Metro, that would have made W8 a better OS. To my eyes, this has been one of the best Windows products.
Indeed they should have. Win8 may be an improvement in a lot of ways, but nobody's going to switch when they hear about this Metro thing that might interfere with their work. It doesn't even have to, they just have to think it's going to and that's enough reason for them to stick with what they have.
I haven't had a chance to use Win8 myself, so I can't comment, but if Metro is something that only really gets brought up under specific circumstances and people are saying otherwise, that's something you should correct when it comes up. Misinformation like that is bad for everyone.
Yeah, a closed system that allows nothing that hasn't been reviewed by Apple and forces you to certain options and doesn't let you modify core options certainly isn't user-friendly.
Which options are you talking about? OS X has an equivalent to the control panel and I believe most applications have to have their own settings dialog to be compliant.
I call that casual-friendly.
Call it what you will. One of the big things OS X does right is not burden the user with a plethora of options they won't care about. Non-trivial settings can still be changed at the user's discretion and things that are really important still usually require user input (perhaps with a sane default value).
For instance, take this old, old example from over ten years ago. Microsoft got rid of this specific dialog, but they still failed to learn the principle behind it: don't interrupt the user's workflow with trivialities and only present the user with important settings.
I do count as a user, why can't the software be friendly to me as well? I'm not saying they should please me or anything, but that's one of the reasons apple lost me. And for believing they are giving "premium" software.
Without knowing what irritated you, I have no way of knowing whether your problem was something they did wrong or just a cost-benefit sort of thing.
Sorry, I should've been more specific about this, I obviously didn't mean to say basic things need of the terminal, but there are customization options that can only be reached through terminal and I like customizing about EVERYTHING.
"EVERYTHING" is vague. Too many choices just confuse most users (look at Linux distributions like Gentoo and Arch Linux for an example of where too many choices can be a bad thing), so it's going to be a cost-benefit issue; most users are going to want to accomplish a set of tasks and not tinker with how the system works. Part of being a developer is realizing you can't please everyone (nor should you try) and figuring out what you can do to make the common case run smoothly while still making outer-boundary cases functional (if maybe a bit less smoothly). And knowing your target audience plays into that; OS X is designed to let people accomplish their set of tasks efficiently and it does that well.
Are an attempt to prevent the average user from screwing things up.
getting rid of some animation effects,
If you can't turn animation effects off, that's a design defect. They're designed to cue the user in to important things happening in the UI, but it's plausible that a user might want those off and that should be a tickable setting somewhere.
I don't know what you mean by this.
how about I don't want the backup to run every hour?
Backups are probably low-priority, which means their running isn't going to interfere with the operation of the system. Apple probably decided allowing the user to tweak this wasn't necessary, since backups are supposed to happen without the user's knowledge anyway (the only time the topic is supposed to come up is once something has already gone wrong and they need to restore).
say you are playing with stuff and the desktop freezes, you have to go all the way through the terminal to kill the desktop,
I don't know about that. I thought they had a force-kill prompt when something freezes and, if that thing was the desktop, it would automatically restart. But I don't know for certain.
the windows task manager saves me from going all the way through CMD to do that and most things you can customize in the control panel.
One of the things they did with Lion was get rid of the notion of running and stopping programs. Instead, they have it so that when a user "puts away" an application, it closes on its own after a while if it's not doing anything and saves whatever state data is necessary in order to resume. The idea is that a user shouldn't have to worry about what's actually running and should only have to worry about what's showing up on their screen. I don't know if I like that, but it was a design choice to make it so the average user doesn't have to understand yet another concept they shouldn't need to care about. On the other hand, that takes away fine-grain control of program operation from us. Again, that was to make things better for their target audience. And it's another reason I don't use OS X: it's not made for me (also it's way too expensive and a lot of older games don't run on it).
Also, having to pay for AppZipper because you don't want to go on deleting folders of apps you no longer want... It's easy if it's just one folder, I've had to uninstall Photoshop from my fathers computer a couple of times, not entertaining.
I don't know much about that, but it sounds like a problem with Photoshop if they're leaving significant amounts of data behind after you get rid of the application.
UNIX does not necessitate open source.
- Apache does not use PHP out of the box - PHP is integrated but you need to edit the config file, which is non-trivial given how locked down OSX is. My early years learning programming was PHP, needless to say, my father's apple wasn't very friendly to me.
That sounds like a problem with Apache.
- Developer tools need to be installed separately
That is true, but I do not believe that is part of the One UNIX Specification. And since most users will never need them, and they're still readily available online or from Apple, it's not that big of a deal.
- File system difficult to navigate via GUI imo
The parts your typical user is going to need access to are easy to get to. I think you can also add / to the list of locations in the browser, not sure on that though.
- Can only legally run on Apple hardware
I agree that is a very bad thing (one of my biggest gripes), but that doesn't really make it a bad UNIX system.
Same as above.
- No freedom to choose because Apple decides what they sell on the Apple Store.
I am almost certain you can install applications from outside the Apple Store. It may now require a setting that didn't used to be required, but I'm still pretty sure you can do it. But again, that doesn't really play into how it operates as a UNIX system. It conforms to the Single UNIX Specification (either entirely or for the most part), so it's UNIX.
