slopes's Profile

An interesting article Gregory. As a designer, I actually grow more depressed with each new release Mac OS X. Apple, it seems, has become something of a split personality - with its hardware continuing to embrace the original company ‘minimalist/functional’ philosophy in ways which never fail to surprise and delight us, whilst its software (and I particularly mean its OS) has been seduced onto the long slippery road of adorning every inch of the screen with useless ‘corporate’ eye candy. As the direct result of this, my work flow has slowed down to the point where I now feel the machine wants to be the master of me - rather than the familiar OS 7,8,9 sense that I was very much master of my machine. With OS X, I have to take the UI ‘prettiness’ into account on everything I do - it has become an obstacle. Whereas Apple’s previous interfaces were built to serve one direct purpose - to be perceived as ‘invisible’, practical tools to facilitate the work of a user. I think it would be a distraction to focus too closely on the merits of Quark versus InDesign here as they both - along with all other Applications - are stuck with using the Mac GUI elements Apple supplied them with. The problem isn’t so much how well these Apps function in relation to each other - it’s how poorly they function measured against the world of OS 9. There has been a misunderstanding on this site (as there has in many other similar discussions) between the more ‘design’ orientated Mac users who have traditionally made up the platform’s solid core and the programming/systems/IT community. The techies seem to mis-read the designer’s call for a return to simple, clean and visually-neutral functionality as a demand that Apple remove from its new OS all the technological advances the company has made. For the technical-minded - and, I would guess in most cases, the visually illiterate - developments in the number of ‘nice’ things an OS can actually do MUST go hand-in-hand with an ever-increasing quota of ‘nice’ visual representations to support this progress. It’s as if the benefits of OS X would (for them) be less meaningful without the reassuring crutch of additional and increasingly fantastical eye candy. The problem the designer (as designer) can see - and any user familiar with old and new environments might sense - is that a price has to be paid for each and every additional bit of on-screen prettiness added to OS X. All the unnecessary, inappropriate, ephemeral, ‘gunk’ Apple heap on to its GUI, and by extension the Applications which must use it, requires extra visual processing from the user - who is required to mentally organise, make sense of, and interact with, each piece of information in front of him and how these (often in the case of OS X, unrepresentitive) elements relate to each other. This, of course, is before he can even think about getting on with the very reason he is using the computer... to make sense of and organise his own work... or in other words... to be creative. It is without doubt that - with the GUI - Apple invented the wheel. Perhaps it’s part of the evolutionary process that the company is now searching for new places to take this still-nascent technology. Hopefully it wont be long before they realise that adding polished chrome hubcaps, inlaid white-walled trim, ‘go-faster’ stripes, 3D logos on everything etc etc, rather than improving performance, actually weighs down the tool to the point where all its kitsch becomes a serious obstacle.

OK Jeff, let's draw a line there. You're right, we're having two discussions in one (the speed/response issue and the Finder/GUI issue). At least you've acknowledged that the OS 9 GUI was more responsive - which was my point all along. You are ignoring many of my GUI points - especially as you know I haven't based my criticisms ONLY on colour - so I'm beginning to feel I'm not going to gain much ground with you on that one. As for the Finder, maybe Nathan will find a third party developer and give those of us who prefer working with a traditional Mac type Desktop the chance to have one (in its fullest sense) when Tiger arrives.

Jeff - whether or not you think I’m genuine is something you’ll have to work out for yourself. It strikes me I’m being genuine when I address my thoughts and ideas directly to the person I want to hear them - rather than furtively using a third party. Anyway, I’ll to attempt to answer your concerns. From all your replies - both in this and the previous article - I get the impression you’re not really a busy Mac user. People who use Macs seem to fall into two groups - those who use them as tools for creating (producers) and those who use them as a receptacle (consumers). It seems to me from the all examples you’ve provided of what want from a ‘good computer’ - looking at pictures of your dog, downloading from the internet, listening the your Bach records, helping your old Dad open his emails and dabbling around with UNIX command shells (whatever they are) - you fall very much in the second camp. For those of us who are in the daily hothouse of leaping between QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Photoshop, Word, GoLive etc, creating and hammering out our work for busy deadlines, the appalling inability of the OS X Finder to simply update itself as I save, replace, export, open all my various files (like OS 9, OS 8, and OS 7 used to do) is a VERY REAL frustration. Your being puzzled over anyone having a preference for the simple grey GUI of OS 9 also appears to reveal your lack of any broad experience of the Mac platform as a creative tool and its user-base. When used in a design sense, the words ‘Functional’ and ‘Minimal’ usually refer to absence of decoration, simplification of form, or the smallest amount or degree of formal elements needed to make an object useful. “People who stare at their computer all day long” (if they are working) are usually staring at their work which is the focal point of their concentration - so they don’t really want Apple competing with them on all fronts by throwing in distractions such as bits of 1980’s brushed-metal effect here, a few sets of 3D traffic-light effects there, over-the-top drop shadows around everything, throbbing 3D liquid buttons, stripy boxes all over the place, plastic window strips (if you’re lucky), multi-coloured folder labels stretching across your finder windows, bevels on everything, psychotic Docks, etc etc etc. Mac OS 9 GUI was decorated too of course - to the point of austerity. Because the people who made it had the sense (and the self belief) to KNOW that a good GUI should very much sit in the background and play second fiddle to a user’s work. Any decoration they added to the neutrally colour-valued GUI was minimal and there for a PURPOSE - to provide a helpful visual prompt as to the function of the element it was applied to. Perhaps you should give it a go Jeff - it might make your dogs look even more attractive.

Nathan - John Siracusa's article is a very interesting one (which I am familiar with). His lucid introductory overview of the Mac GUI is based very much on (or holds remarkable similarities to) the seminal work done in the 1940’s and 50’s by British psychologist D.W. Winnicott. Winnicott developed a theory of ‘Object Relations’ after closely observing young infants in an effort to discover the root process of ALL human interaction with its external environment. He was interested in what made these interactions successful - leading to stimulated child/adult who develops a capacity to fully organise, manipulate, and take responsibility for his own environment; or what makes the interactions fail - leading to despondency, frustration, and dependency on his environment. What Winnicott discovered is that all our objects must remain inert - meaning that they must be felt by the child to have no life of their own beyond that of what he invests in them through his own will and action - initially through the process of ‘play’ which, if successful, carries on through into his adult ‘working’ life (ie: organising, grouping, transforming, placing etc). Winnicott found that one of the main obstacles to the success of this ‘project’ is either a ‘not good enough’ parent (unable to participate) or a ‘too good’ parent (over participating). Of course for our discussion here - as we debate how our virtual objects can best be used within the computing environment - we can replace the word ‘parent’ with ‘Operating System’ (after all both, in different areas of our life, represent authorities). If Apple is going to insist on becoming the ‘over-participating parent' by removing the dependable inert space we rely on to naturally interact with our objects, and if the company demands it takes control of (or interferes with) how we choose to arrange those objects... or even if we can meaningfully take the responsibility of arranging them at all..., then Apple (like an errant, do-gooding, and attention seeking (read: ‘eye-candy’) parent) is heading for real problems.

To Winterbear, You don’t say if you were involved in the Human Interface Team at Apple - it sounds, from your knowledge, that you might have been. But I’d like any one of those experts to know that their many hours of hard work did not go unappreciated. OS 9 had a superb, refined, highly tuned and intuitive GUI which ‘drove’ like a Ferrari. I’ve been on its replacement for nine months now (by far enough time to internalise its routines) and I can say, in comparison, it handles like the local bread-delivery-truck (albeit a heavily decorated one). I have to return to my old G3 every once in a while to use certain software/hardware configurations. Each time I do I am reminded - with a mixture of pleasure and pain - of what a beautifully responsive and well-crafted tool the OS 9 GUI was. ‘Pleasure’ at its ease of use and the dawning realisation that “it’s not ME after all - its the bloody OS X GUI” and ‘Pain’ at knowing I will have to return to the daily frustrations of coping with something inferior. As a graphic designer I am dedicated to reaching down to the core values of any process and building upon these values (through appropriate and concise symbolism and metaphor) as an essential, solid, foundation. So I find it ironic, after the years Apple dedicated to revolutionising the PC industry around its classic Human Interface metaphor, that the company is now complicit in encouraging a ‘user’ evaluation and comparison of its two GUI’s as: Colourful baubles and dancing party tricks = GOOD, Neutral Grey = BAD. Still, the HUT (or HIT?) team will surely take heart from recent research which revealed that a staggering 50% of the millions of Mac-owners are STILL happily using OX 9 as their chosen GUI - FIVE YEARS after OS X has been available to them! This is clearly such a worry to Apple that its stated primary reason for introducing the cheap MacMini is to encourage its own user-base to ‘switch’.

It sounds - from Jeff's description of what we can expect from Apple - that the 'Golden Age' of Mac human interface design is over. It seems like an irony to me that the 'Mac' name which set the ground rules for an intuitive, flexible, and metaphorical GUI - and originally promoted this (with great success) by focusing on the overly complicated and dictatorial routines of its predecessors, are now themselves in danger of moving towards a position of "you do things OUR way or not at all"... all blurred over with lashings and lashings of eye-candy. I could see this coming with the advent of the Dock... for the first time Apple had bullied its way into encroaching on my sacrosanct Desktop. Yes, I work FAST (or used to), perhaps users here like to cruise along at their own speed, but - even working within applications - OSX is far far slower than OS 9. Something interesting caught my eye when watching the Steve Jobs Keynote speech in January where our great leader sat at his onstage Mac to demo various new Apps (GarageBand etc). At first it didn't quite sink in... then I realised... as he navigated his way around OS X, Steve movements too revealed those subtle but familiar tell-tale signs of hesitancy, awkwardness, struggling to accurately pinpoint the cursor and - ultimately - trying to 'beat the unresponsive OS'. I'm not saying Apple shouldn't implement new technology. I'm saying there is a BETTER way of doing so. It's sometimes a pity that Mac enthusiasts don't feel confident enough in the Company to feel able to criticise it.

Jeff - your attempted correlation of Screen and Desktop makes no sense and confuses two different environments. Of course a screen is a material part of a computer which is a physical object in the real world. What takes place within the boundaries of the screen is a completely separate environment with its own set of rules and its own limitations - all of which are made comprehensible by being closely based on object relations in the real-world. A necessary starting point for that relationship is that the primary object is a representation of a surface area called the ‘Desktop’ onto which any number of symbolic objects - ALL representing the containers you mention (bookcases, filing cabinets, trash cans etc) - are placed. To simplify matters, most of those containers are represented as identical ‘Folder’ motifs, differentiated only by their titles. And, yes, we can choose to swap between any number of desktops BUT they still remain (and function as) Desktops. Ceçi n'est pas une pipe A blank piece of paper - like a blank screen - is of no interest (and of no use) until an image is rendered upon it, thereby transforming it into its own illusion of an environment. It is how those images are rendered and organised which determine how suitable they are for our interaction with them. This is what we are interested in here. I believe that it is the growing prevalence of the kind of (mis)understanding you articulate here - of what a computer GUI can and can’t be - which is weakening the Mac platform.

As this discussion is about GUI and not about how often a OS crashes - it concentrate on the topic. Jeff - ‘Fonts’ is a good example. A simple (single window!) search on OS 9 would reveal ONE Fonts folder for the whole system (not THREE). How much simpler can you get than that? The OS 9 GUI worked as a design because it emulated a dependable real-world environment in which the ‘Subject’ (the user) had complete freedom of choice in the way he related to ‘Objects’ (his hierarchical organisation of containers and their contents within that space). Apart from a few (non-intrusive) system utilities within their own fixed containers, the space OS 9 offered the user respected this fundamental ‘Subject/Object’ relationship rather than make itself an ‘obstacle’ by attempting to interfere in, pre-empt or otherwise influence the user’s organisation of his environment. Compare that to the barmy OS X world where the ‘Desktop’ container holds a ‘Mac HD’ container, which contains ‘My’ folder, which contains... wait for it... the ‘Desktop’! Click on that ‘Desktop’ and it contains all the objects I’ve left there... except, bizarrely, the ‘Mac HD object’. Metaphorically, this Esheresque maze is like me entering my house, walking into the kitchen, opening the cupboard and finding...my house (with it’s kitchen, for some reason beyond me, GONE). Another way in which OS 9 had its boundaries very clearly defined (you know where you are with boundaries), is that its graphical elements always did what they illustrated. A clearly demarked window let you know - for example - where the scroll area begun and ended and its boarders both separated it from other information as well as giving you (literally) a useful margin for error when pointing the mouse. The scroll tab clearly indicated a tactile ‘grippable’ object - rather than the completely inappropriate (slippery-looking) liquid lozenge of OS X. As I have already said, these ‘faults’ (and many, many more) on their own don’t really seem that vital (just minor irritations) but added together they represent a seriously inferior GUI.