One more reason XP is better 33HumfHSaKlA~jG9gd* 1091

Alan Baker wrote

Actually, it is, but I see you require more.

Not at all. What I do need is an OS that has the ability to work efficiently and quickly when schooled in its operation.

Far, far too often applications and-or windowing environments that are super easy to use wind up being super-un-powerful when used.

The early Gnome implementations were an example of this, especially when compared with KDE at the same time period.

An easy example for most people is the difference between iPhoto and Photoshop. iPhoto is probably much easier for your Aunt Dolly to get started with, but few professionals would use it despite that easy learning curve, because it has *much* more limited functionality. A side-effect, not ideal, but up until now unavoidable in most cases, of complicated software with a lot of 'horsepower' is a more complex GUI. In fact, most real software requires you to either RTFM, go to training clbuttes, or spend a lot of time reading or watching tutorials, or brute force self-teaching to become truly fluent. For example, there are entire books (plural) published on a single subset of Photoshop, such as the channels palette, or how to use LAB color mode effectively.

The real mistake here by Apple is they seem to have forgotten than an entire OS is quite complicated if it works well and has needed contemporary, modern features. As such, they should ship a manual that actually exposes those features. Pogue is entirely right when he claims that Apple should be shipping the books that he writes (or others with similar content) on OS X, iLife, iWork, etc. with those products. It's lame that they don't. Of course, Microsoft does the same thing, so that "makes it okay" for some.

No, it's not. Imagine how you would edit a photo from a CLI. GUIs are method of getting visual feedback and working with multimedia content. The fact that people find that easier than working from a fixed font table and a keyboard only does not mean the point was to throw the manuals away.

Look at the number of books available for OS X. Look at the "whole point" of the GUI was to eliminate the need to RTFM, then the experiment has been a dismal failure. On the other hand, if the purpose was productivity, than apart from smart remarks about blue screens and such, it has been a success.

And more and more powerful, for those that use them for operations outside of the mbuttes' need for love, email and music.

Sure. Any sufficiently broad and complex suite of product offerings will be difficult to keep shoe-horned into a fixed interface guideline, especially as things evolve over time. I don't expect Apple to be any more perfect than the next fallible company down the road.

There is a way to discover it. I discovered Expose without a manual. The difference is, should EVERY OS feature worth discovering be cluttering up the desktop under normal use? Again, if the OS has a lot of features, putting them all in an obvious place all the time can be annoying. Also, Expose isn't exactly necessary. You can live without it. If critical items can be determined easily, and the rest found through use and time, that's ok. I don't see any need at all for Aunt Dolly to know the entire contents of "OS X: The Missing Manual" within 5 minutes of booting up her compute the first time. She won't *ever* care about most of it, so dressing up the GUI with pointers to features she doesn't need is more likely to confuse than to help.

Sure. I rarely use Expose, probably because I have dual monitors, and because I usually just use cmd-h to get rid of something I'm not going to be using. I don't tend to like having dozens of windows open simultaneously. Others may see it differently of course.

-- Lefty All of God's creatures have a place.......... .........right next to the potatoes and gravy.