[JFK2000]

One issue I would like to discuss is the whole Power of Unix with the simplicity and elegance of a Macintosh.

I like OSX, and I don't think it is such a difficult system, but I wonder if it will ever be as simple OS 9 was.

I am not saying that there won't be GUIs to do everything in X eventually, but is it possible that the complexity of the system itself means it will always have a certain level of complexity that classic never had. Having to deal with permissions, setting up multi-users and deciding who belongs to what group and who has access to what files. A much more overall complex file system,etc.

Is it possible that OSX is the simplest system to run on Unix but still a more difficult one than the older Mac OSes.

This is not troll bait for a flame war. I am just curious what people think. I don't think it is necessarily a bad thing if the OS is more difficult if that is the price of greater flexibility/power and advanced features. I am just wondering if it is possible that the Mac's future has a steeper learning curve than the past.

[chuckeroo]

Well, at first I was wondering this myself, but after using X for a while and thinking about it, it is really relative. OS 9, while it could be used by almost anyone when working correctly, was not without it's complexities. The whole system of extensions and control panels was the cause of tons of problems and conflicts. I was always helping friends that weren't "power" users with this aspect of the OS, and even after problems were resolved many people still didn't understand how things were fixed. Having to manually allot memory to applications was not an easy thing to understand for some. In my opinion, OSX is just a totally different thing with totally different attributes. The finder and dock are pretty easy to use once you're used to it, much in the same way that OS9 was. Applications are much easier now to install and uninstall, and I don't think anyone who was able to use OS9 in a basic manner will have many problems with X. The thing I like about OSX, are most of it's complexities serve a purpose, whereas the complexities of OS9 were more just hassles to be worked out. I feel like most of the major complexities of OS9 have been made into simple tasks in OSX. The complexities of OSX (Unix, permissions, file sharing, etc) are mainly there for those who really need them, so those using those functions won't have a problem dealing with them. I know permissions has been a bit of a hassle for many basic users, but with all the feedback on it, I'm sure Apple is working on making it more user friendly. Just my opinion, but I actually see fewer problems for new users in the future of X than there were in 9, after X becomes a little more complete, and supported by more applications and hardware.

[gfxgeek]

I believe a good example of the testiment of the ease of use, would be my wife's reaction to OSX. She has stated the following things about OSX in comparison to OS 9.

1. Stability. She finds it so much easier to just restart
an application instead of the whole system.

2. The apple menu finally has all system functions in one place.

3. The dock enables her to have all her icons in one place
and see what is running at a glance.
(compared to application menu, which was confusing for her)

4. She likes not having system wide privelages in osx, to keep
her from deleting system and program files.

5. She likes the column view in finder for it's ease of
navigation compared to located folders inside of folders
inside of folders in os 9.

6. She likes that she can minimize things right to the dock and
the genie effect shows her right where it is going.

7. She likes the style sheets that come down right on the window
she is using, instead of having to "juggle" windows.

There are many other reasons that she finds OSX much more user friendly than OS 9 but these are a few.

I'm setting up another computer newbie this weekend with OSX and I will report on their experience as well. Maybe even a better stand point as it is someone who has never used a computer.

[smacintush]

I think OS X is fairly easy and simple to use in normal operation. I think the only complexity comes when troubleshooting or using advanced features that weren't there before. Of course, I haven't NEEDED to do any troubleshooting yet and I don't mess with the advanced network stuff.

Anyway, my point is that 16 years ago, or even five years ago for that matter, ease of use was much more important as most people weren't technically savvy. Now most people are familiar with an OS like Windows. OS X only has to be easier than Windows IMHO. Even with the Win eX-Pee easy to use hype, it is based on NT which still gives it an underlying complexity and INFERIOR uderlying structure that leaves OS X with a significant edge in ease of use and reliability.

Of course, I do think there is a steeper learning curve than the past. But the things that are more complex are things that we, theoretically, shouldn't have to deal with very much at all.

------------------
Believe me, I'm always
right. Unless I'm
mistaken.

[ckohler]

I'll say this much, OSX is certainly the easiest UNIX to use by far. The "Simplicity of the Macintosh" is well in place. I visited my brother's house yesterday and he was showing me the new Mandrake Linux install he had. He was telling me that it was "as easy as OSX". Well, it wasn't.

I wanted to show him my new OSX desktop wallpaper picture I made so I decided to try and install VNC Viewer in Mandrake Linux. I figured "Eh, VNC started out on Unix. The viewer should be easy to install." Forget it. It was a flipping pain in the arse to figure out and I consider myself a semi-compitant computer user. You had to do everything with the command line and even then I only ended up getting "Permission denied" errors... even when I was logged in as ROOT!

OSX is the 'any users' unix.



[This message has been edited by ckohler (edited 05-30-2001).]

[rogerkylin]

Although I haven't tried it. It seems that OSX with one user, automatically logged in, removes all of the 'complexity' of user, groups, permissions (except root), etc.

[ink]

Another gripe with OS9 was the Chooser. That damn program causes more grief for new users than anything else; to configure most parts of an OS9 system, you must use the control panels (sound, monitors), but for some reason the network drives and printers are in the Chooser. I like OSX's new way of doing things (even though it took me a half hour to figure out how to change my desktop picture... they need to bring back the Appearances control panel somehow).

Enough rambling; suffice to say that OSX is fairly easy to use and it will only get better.

Originally posted by ink:
[snip]I like OSX's new way of doing things (even though it took me a half hour to figure out how to change my desktop picture... they need to bring back the Appearances control panel somehow).

LOL! I had the same problem the other day - I was getting sick of the default wallpaper and went into System Pref to change it - but where? Sheesh, I can't even remember where it is!

I installed OSX on the wife's Pismo 400 and she's pretty lukewarm about it. Her biggest gripes so far?

1) It's not OS9
2) Whadya mean? I have to go to this Startup Disk thing and reboot into OS9 to burn CD's? Could you write that down for me so I can remember this?
3) It's not OS9
4) I can't print my email from the new OSX Mail Program?!
5) It's not OS9
6) The screen is too cheesy...all these little glowing buttons and crap!
7) It's not OS9

She has been using Macs a lot longer than I have, she started back on System7, and is pretty set in her ways on how her computer should work. Most of what she says about it are "bugs" right now and will be ironed out in future revs and then she might grow to like it. I told her to not worry about it using it full-time now - boot into OSX at least once a week and play around and get used to it so that when (who knows?) we will need to run OSX full time for app support, she'll already know what to do.

And her favorite thing about OSX? "The icons are pictures? How cool!"

-s'fit

[fatblackcat]

the OS9 GUI was the definition of elegance. It always made me smile when I wondered how to do something and it was always 'that simple'. It was space efficient, flexible and everything was based on drag and drop- no cutting or pasting or round the houses way of doing things (that I always used to laugh at my Windows uising friends about).OSX could have taken a large portion of the interface and built on it, obviously removing things like extensions etc., but the dock (read 'taskbar') came along... The interface elements of X mentioned above all need to be credited as advancements, and have rightly been brought in. Apple has finally realised that they don't need to be the best, it's not about beauty, it's just about being better, or as Bill says 'good enough'...

$0.02

[cpt kangarooski]

Ink-
Although I hate the thing too, the Chooser was one of the oldest damn UI elements still hanging around. (having evolved from 'Choose Printer�') Eveyone's known it had to go for over a decade. Yes, it's a fault of MacOS 9, but to be fair, there have been some decent workarounds in recent years, e.g. desktop printers.

If you want to know why it is where it is of course, check out the System 1.0 Control Panel - it's also good for proving that icons without labels are bad.

Personally, I find myself more attracted to having a 'Computer' icon (well, a contextually appropriate one wrt icon, name, etc.) that could contain both drives and controls for peripherals, rather like Win95. As long as pretty much any of it could still be dumped onto the desktop, I don't think that such a thing would be the most terrible thing in the world.

[Milio]

I think there are some fundamental questions at hand here:

What is simple? What is the "simplicity of the Macintosh"?

The first several versions of the Macintosh system were inarguably simpler than later revisions. While I like OS 9, I do not consider it a masterpeice of ease-of-use. Neither is OS X.

The original Macintosh was designed specifically to not be a "computer". It was an "office appliance", intended to be as easy to understand and use as a filing cabinet or a typewriter. As such, it used a strong metaphor and its capabilities were extremely limited.

But Mac users wanted the Mac to be accepted as a "real" computer. However, every time capability was added, simplicity was lost. Nested folders are more complicated than single-level folders, running multiple applications is cognitively more complicated than one-task-at-a-time, TCP/IP is more complicated to configure than AppleTalk, etc...

OS X continues this tradition of sacrificing simplicity for capability. There are aspects of OS X which appear to be simpler than OS 9, but in reality they are immature complexity. Take the Dock for example. Originally it wasn't organized at all. Very simple. Now we have apps vs. documents/windows/whatever else. And every comment regarding the Dock is that it needs more. More organization, more differentiation of running apps vs. non-running, even more docks.

We will need this complexity in order for the one OS to function for as many different uses as possible. And that's the death knell of simplicity. OS X is a workstation OS.

Now take the counterpoint to that: a true consumer OS. Palm comes very close, TiVo is even better. They are very targeted devices. They are limited in capability, but powerful in simplicity. With the Palm, most users simply push the notes or schedule buttons and enter their information. They don't look at files, they look at information. The simplicity of the Palm most suffers when a "power user" adds additional applications. TiVo works even better. It only does what it does. Very simple. (And the fun thing is that it's true simplicity with the power of unix.)

For what it is and for what the Mac became, I guess that OS X has the simplicity of the Macintosh. But it caters to the workstation mentality, and I've just come to accept that it's not what I consider to be a consumer OS.

(I do work in the field of consumer computing, so I spend too much time thinking about all of this.)

[Deicide]

ink:

You only have to use the chooser for printer setup and thats it. You can use Network browser to connect to any AppleTalk or FTP server. It's not any harder then clicking the "Go" menu and selecting connect to server and waiting for the IP address of the mac to show up. Under MacOS 9.x to switch printers you can use the control strip or the printing menu when you click on a printer icon. The print center isn't any more intuitive then the chooser either. Apple just replaced one stupid widget with another.

[JFK2000]

Originally posted by ckohler:
I'll say this much, OSX is certainly the easiest UNIX to use by far. The "Simplicity of the Macintosh" is well in place. I visited my brother's house yesterday and he was showing me the new Mandrake Linux install he had. He was telling me that it was "as easy as OSX". Well, it wasn't.

I wanted to show him my new OSX desktop wallpaper picture I made so I decided to try and install VNC Viewer in Mandrake Linux. I figured "Eh, VNC started out on Unix. The viewer should be easy to install." Forget it. It was a flipping pain in the arse to figure out and I consider myself a semi-compitant computer user. You had to do everything with the command line and even then I only ended up getting "Permission denied" errors... even when I was logged in as ROOT!

OSX is the 'any users' unix.



[This message has been edited by ckohler (edited 05-30-2001).]

I guess in starting this thread, I was thinking. OSX is the simplest unix based system to use, but just being a multi-user unix based system adds a whole lot of complexity.

So yes apple has done a great job making a unix based system as simple as possible, but because of the advancedness of the system has created a system more difficult than previous systems with issues such as permissions, a unix like file system, root, system log files, back up issues,etc.

Mac OS 9 is NOT simpler than Mac OS X.

Sure permissions in Mac OS X are a little bit confusing at first, but they are quite similar to File Sharing/Users and Groups in Mac OS 9. When you select "Sharing..." for a file, it's the same exact thing, read-only, read-write, owner, others... That's not exactly simple.

Also, Network settings are just as easy to configure in Mac OS X than in 9. To get my DSL connection up and working, i just need to enter 4 IP addresses and the domain name. Pretty easy if you ask me.

My only concern is the speed of Mac OS X, but, i'm running this thing on 64MB of memory, so I guess I'm asking for it

Oh yeah. And I think Apple did a pretty good job at hiding the Unix File Structure from us. (/etc, /usr, /var, ,,,)

When I saw the Public Beta, I thought "Oh my God, this is UNIX!! It's so complicated!" And when I saw the final release, I thought, well, they hid it well. Now, MAC OS X is contained in a "system folder", just like MAC OS 9 was.

Go Apple!

[moreno]

a slow Operating System is not too simple to use. also
i don't know if Apple knows that its "best operating system in the world"
is a snail, because sometimes the bad publicity makes the products worse.



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[akebono]

Originally posted by Milio:
I think there are some fundamental questions at hand here...

Milio, you make some great points.

My feeling about OS X is that it reduces clutter. That goes a long way in enhancing ease of use. MacOS 9, et al. is well organized (relatively) and had a lot of usability enhancements, but they have a bit of a learning curve. Teaching a newcomer the meaning of option-drag, open-apple-option-drag, etc. doesn't "take" the first time. I look forward to getting some of these system enhancements back, but I find quite often that a task that would litter my desktop with windows in OS9 only takes 1 in OSX.

YMMV. PS. NewtonOS rocks Palm's world... Except for the extinction part.



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[unimacs]

My wife is a casual mac user. She uses quicken, Netscape, appleworks and palm desktop (oh, - and solitaire).

She's used a Mac for years but is just now remembering how to use the application menu after I've showed her countless times. I put dragthing on her ibook to make it easier for her to find and launch applications.

She creates new appleworks documents by opening old ones and just changing the contents.

For all the griping about X's UI, -especially with respect to the Dock, I'm convinced she'll have an easier time in X at least partially because of the Dock.

[macmicke]

After OS X was released I decided, a bit selfish. That it was time to move the family Cube from OS 9 to the future. I have one girlfriend and her two daughters (9&11 years), whom make up my family. They use the computer for writing, playing games, mail and crawling the web. I feared the scenario were I would be called at work ever so often to help out on computer questions. But the result is the opposite, I have only ones had to answer a family support question ( and it had to do with the iTunes window disappearing ). In my experience this is a testament to the ease of use of X. I think those who will suffer the most are long time Mac users who will have a hard time changing old habits (we all know they die hard!). And I think its no surprise that a lot of those are the ones complaining the most.
I agree with most of the posts in this thread, and especially Chuckeroo: "The thing I like about OSX, are most of it's complexities serve a purpose, whereas the complexities of OS9 were more just hassles to be worked out."

Complexity has indeed grown in all operating systems, because people get better at "computing" and they want to do more things with it. After all, you pay a lot of money for a machine, of course you want it to be as effective as possible...

nice with a flame free thread..

[gunnar]

I think one of the main things missing in this discussion is the connection between underlying system structure and GUI development. The Classic Mac OS was built in tandem with the GUI on a unique and targeted codebase. Its problems related to extensibility because the underlying structure had to grow as the GUI became more complex. Given this there was always a type of parity between them (although some would argue a stifling one). Problems were always limited to the lack of extensibility (extensions/control panels/patches/co-operative multitasking) and not to any inherent relative weakness BETWEEN the layers of the OS.

OS X is a radical departure. It's built on a functionally extensible and stable base with a whole lot of bridging to the higher levels such as the GUI. As the first poster points out, the GUI is and will become extremely easy on the surface but the connection between the GUI code and the processes working beneath it will be the real trouble points for OS X.

On the most superficial levels, the dock, the apple menu, the finder, etc. can easily be improved over OS 9 but the real challenge will to be to hide, massage and finesse the intermediate systems into making the GUI function reliably and how we would desire.

We now see speed problems, inconsistency in Finder and file actions and even preference loss. When hardware interface really gets rolling, or when audio and video apps with extensible frameworks themselves begin to be ported there will be many more of these orphaned GUI elements. This is what will trip up most users, especially the recreational people don't think past the GUI.

OS X can be amazing and it will be. It may even seem to be exceptional to some but it will be a while before it is as functional in any where near the cohesive range that OS 9 was. Parity must return. The one really good aspect of this process is that due to the Internet age, Apple can easily patch many disparate areas of the OS in incremental updates as we have seen.

I for one am excited to have such a closeness to this process where I can see the OS evolve in the most minute ways.