As the Mac turns 20, has the PC caught up?

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Where the PC still fails

The kids over at MS churning out Windows code need to realize this rule:

The User Is God.

Tend to the User first, and then go do other things in a happy, pre-emptive manner.

I'm using Windows XP, and I go to drag a file from a remote directory to a local directory, and the mouse pointer stops. It just stops dead for several seconds, and then when it recovers, it over shoots my target window and copies the file to the desktop. This is on a clean install with no other programs running and a Gig of RAM mated to a 3 GHz processor.

All I can figure is that, instead of waiting for me to complete my action (which is the GUI equivalent of a CLI copy command) and seeing what I want to do, the OS goes off and checks *something* on the network, and when there's a delay in getting a respons, it hangs the whole OS and abandons the mouse pointer.

I've seen better coding painted in yak blood on cave walls outside Ulan Bator. The programmer responsible for that should be fired and banned in a world court from ever even *looking* at a computer again.

Now take that and multiply it by a thousand little annoynaces like it every working day, such as popup menus that show only a handful of items and force me to use a little scroll bar instead of just using the available vertical screen space. What's up with that? Another one for the world court punishment, and I want shock and awe involved this time.

It demonstrates an extreme lack of care and even hints at outright user hositility (as opposed to user friendliness). It's why I shall never take Windows seriously as a usable GUI. It's ugly. It's clunky. It's the GUI equivalent of a trailer park.

And, no, the Mac is not perfect, but you can generally sense some sort of thought went into it.

Posted by: Harvey Birdman   Posted on: 01/22/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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