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  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
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Monday, September 23, 2002
09:30 - With experts like these, who needs the clueless?
http://www.cmug.org/pulpit/Komando.html

(top) link
David Lang has a withering article in CMUG that demolishes Kim Komando's lame-ass iMac review from a few days ago, the one in which she spends two months trying to get used to using Word on a Mac instead of on Windows XP, and at the end grudgingly acceding that it's competent at word-processing, though bringing nothing to the table that Windows doesn't already.

Lang quotes Steven Levy regarding the one-button mouse:

When Apple tested a two-button mouse, Tesler recalled, "people made a lot of mistakes. With two buttons, people would constantly be turning their heads from the screen and looking at the mouse. . . . When we did experiments with identical everything, except the number of buttons on the mouse, the people who used a one-button mouse said it was easier to pick up. I realized that when you used the mouse, they were pointing. Pointing, and tapping with the finger they were pointing with. There was no mental model for pointing with more than one finger. So we got rid of the second button. . . ."

In a world where Apple is ridiculed at every turn for stubbornly continuing to include a one-button mouse with their computers, even though they've spent the past twenty years fine-tuning the OS interface and applications so users won't need more than one button, and where it's generally assumed that a one-button mouse is significantly cheaper than a two-button one and therefore Apple is just being "cheap", I happen to think that it represents consummate purity of purpose for Apple not to bow to the misguided pressure and go to a multi-button mouse. Even though it's obvious in every other aspect of the computer (well, except possibly the power supply) that Apple uses no cheap parts and spares no expense (just compare the LCD screens of the iMacs to those of, say, the Profile 4), people still assume that the mouse is just a way for them to cut corners. Doesn't it seem just a little bit strange that a company so focused on User Interface would skimp so visibly on the mouse, and nothing else? Is it so hard to imagine that there's a reason behind the single button?

It probably isn't of interest to a huge number of people, this retort by Lang; but if you happened to read the Komando "review" and found yourself seething, go check this one out. You'll feel a whole lot better.

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© Brian Tiemann