g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

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Cold Fury
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.clue
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Cartago Delenda Est




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Saturday, November 25, 2006
16:13 - Fifty ways to leave your laptop

(top) link
Joel Spolsky has discovered that there are fifteen ways to shut down his Vista laptop.

In response, Microsoft developer Moishe Lettvin offers some insight into the Microsoft development culture, which makes it sound as though we ought to be amazed that Microsoft ever gets anything out the door at all. We're talking Mythical Man-Year here.

Spolsky's original point, though, is worth some pondering. Anyone reading through his proposals can come up with rebuttals; but as he says:

Inevitably, you are going to think of a long list of intelligent, defensible reasons why each of these options is absolutely, positively essential. Don't bother. I know. Each additional choice makes complete sense until you find yourself explaining to your uncle that he has to choose between 15 different ways to turn off a laptop.

This highlights a style of software design shared by Microsoft and the open source movement, in both cases driven by a desire for consensus and for "Making Everybody Happy," but it's based on the misconceived notion that lots of choices make people happy, which we really need to rethink.

A little while ago, Aziz was taken aback by the dichotomy of the Mac having "one way" of doing things, while at the same time billing itself (or, more appropriately, being billed by its users) as the platform that best fosters creativity and individuality. Doesn't make too much sense, does it?

My response was this:

Well, there's a bit of a schism... a lot of people assume that the creativity that Apple fosters is the kind of "creativity" that leads people to mod their cases and skin their OS. It's really not the same thing.

What Apple's design ethos is is that the interface fades away into the background, because what you're creating is the media that comes out of apps like iMovie and iPhoto, not the tweaks of the environment around it. To borrow the "car" metaphor, many people sink hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into adding spoilers and decals and stereo equipment to their cars, whereas I would prefer to spend that time and money driving to Alaska.

With that in mind, it ought to make more sense that the customization options of Mac OS X are more limited than in Windows—because you're supposed to not have to think about the interface. It gets out of your way. People who fixate on the twiddly details of the interface and spend hours trying to make it behave like Windows does, like this article's author apparently did, are bound to be stymied and then they'll complain about things like Word not having a "File > Delete" menu option. If he were a Mac user, and used to the idea that file operations are supposed to take place in the Finder and not in random applications, he wouldn't have been so surprised by this.

A Python-programming friend of mine often chants "TIMTOWTDI Must Die!" (There Is More Than One Way To Do It.) Yeah, it makes things less flexible to give you fewer ways into some action. But it also means you spend less time thinking about it and more time thinking about getting work done.

People aren't buying iPods because they were the first such products to market (they weren't), or the flashiest (they aren't), or even objectively the best (that's debatable). They're buying them because they do the best job of projecting that they are the definitive solution that people need. When you use an iPod, you feel like you're in good hands. You feel like the features you need are being provided in a straightforward, no-fuss manner, without more focus than is necessary on gratuitous flash or features that aren't useful to more than a small minority. It's reassuring to think that you're using the thing that everyone else is using—because you know that you're going down a path that everyone else has gone down already. It's the same critical-mass advantage that Windows has long enjoyed. These technical gadgets are every bit as mysterious and alien as the stuff under your car's hood, and if your goal is to listen to music, you don't want to have to worry about wrestling with the technical details of your MP3 player, just as you don't want to spend your road trip worrying about the innards of your engine. There are sights to see.

People using the iLife apps on the Mac likewise find it reassuring that the free programs provided by the computer's manufacturer serve their needs so well. It's great to have that kind of support for one's creative pursuits built right into the computer; it means we don't have to spend our time testing out different applications, installing and uninstalling, worrying about spyware, dreading Registry conflicts, paying license fees, or what-have-you. We just plug in our cameras and keyboards and off we go. That is what makes Macs the "creative" choice: as perverse as it sounds, the lack of choice encourages one to be more creative with one's content, because we're not sinking our creativity into choosing our tools. There's even an element of wanting to be led down a certain path, of being told what to do—because if our infrastructure is being dictated to us, then it spurs the old creative juices and the desire to break free and express ourselves. If the company doing the leading is actually competent, then we might actually enjoy the position we're in. Like the sensitive artist who lives in a sterile, corporately Imagineered quaint tourist town: it's all so fake, maaaan, but at least it's pretty, and it does inspire one to paint.

The problem with this line of reasoning is when you look at a platform where the free, built-in applications are woefully inadequate to the task. If that's what you're used to—if your presumption is that the basic tools are there merely to fill checkboxes, but nobody actually uses them—then your "natural" condition is the one where you do have to do all that preliminary experimentation just to find a system that works. And what works for one person doesn't necessarily work for another; so you end up being an App A user whereas your friends might all use App B or App C, and you find yourself lacking the community of support that you would otherwise hope to enjoy. That's the downside of choice: fragmentation of the community, and all the additional overhead associated with making those choices.

Too much choice, itself, is really only a problem when choosing is necessary in the first place. If you find that the system has been designed for usability and dependability, and that the built-in technologies are sufficient to your needs, then the lack of choice of competing tools doesn't bother you. It doesn't mean it restricts you to only using certain unimaginative functions; that's hardly what iPhoto or iMovie demand of you. They're not video games. They're creative apps. The real content, the real game, is what you provide. Any lack of imaginativeness one experiences on the Mac, then, is one's own fault. It's a poor artist who blames his tools, as the saying goes.

It's awfully easy to smirk at how Mac users have all succumbed to the siren song of Steve Jobs' One True Way. The really damnable thing, though, is that it works. What can we say? The proof of the pudding, and all that.

When CNN says things like "Why don’t [Microsoft] get some decent design people that can make things look better?", sometimes what they really mean is "Get some autocratic control in there to break the logjam of developmental bureaucracy". Because if what Lettvin is saying about Vista's development model is true, that's pretty much their only hope.


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© Brian Tiemann