At Home with John and Debbie

If, like me, you’re curious about what’s happened to the Macintosh user interface in the last ten years, but not quite curious enough to spend £340 (the cost of a Mac Mini — at the moment second hand Macs don’t seem competitively priced against a new Mini) on the experience, here is a PDF buried within Apple’s website that explains things like the Dock, the cryptic minimise, close, “enlarge or reduce” buttons, what a “digital hub” might do, what a “finder” is, and so on. I think this is for a previous version of Mac OS X, but everything else I’ve found is a delta for people who already know the OS.

It doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I’ve learned that the menu bar is still in what feels to me like the wrong place (at the top, and it changes depending on what application currently has focus). I know the idea is that you have a massively sensitive mouse, so a flick of the wrist sends your pointer to the top of the screen, but with displays — and especially Apple displays — getting so big these days, it seems more wrong the longer it persists.

I’ve learned that the wastebasket is still bonkers (Drag a file in, it’s deleted. Drag a disk in, it’s ejected. Drag something else in… who knows!?)

I’ve learned that the button mapped to “enter” at any one time pulses. I hope it pulses subtly.

I’m still curious though. When the Apple Store opens in Birmingham, I’ll probably see if I can spend half an hour or so playing with one. Things to find out:

To what extent can the look be customised? Can I straighten out those curved corners and get rid of that brushed metal and those faint horizontal stripes?

Why doesn’t the Dock extend to the whole width of the screen? Can it?

All those icons look terribly big a chunky. Like a Duplo user interface. Can smaller ones be configured?

What’s the command line terminal like? What command shells are available? How well does command line “world” interoperate with GUI “world”?

Does everything happen so instantaneously and smoothly, and is everything so well placed where you expect it to be, that all my doubts will evaporate? Picasa has been a revelation to me, as to what a user interface can be — that flashy effects don’t necessarily get in the way of usability. Could Mac OS X do the same? iTunes for Windows did nothing of the sort.

Finally, the idea of GarageBand still excites me: though I suspect I’ve neither the time nor the talent to make £340 worth of use of it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 15th, 2005 at 17:28 and is filed under Apple, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.