sjl@amdahl.UUCP (Steve Langdon) (10/04/85)
There has been a fair amount of discussion about the relative merits
of the Amiga, ST520, and the Mac. However, little of it has covered
what I consider to be a fundmental issue - user interface consistency.
One of the most important aspects of the Macintosh is the predictable
nature of the user interface presented by applications. I own almost
all of the Microsoft products (Multiplan, Chart, Word, File, and as of
yesterday Excel), MacDraw, MacProject, MacTerminal, MacPascal, Mac C 4.0
(Consulair's fine C compiler), and I have more Public Domain packages
than I know what to do with. With some relatively minor exceptions they
all follow the user interface guidelines that Apple established. This
means that I can transfer between applications without having to learn
a completely new set of commands or conventions.
I do not plan to discuss the wisdom of the user interface that Apple
choose, but I do believe that this uniformity is vital. It allows me
to become productive with a new piece of software in a fraction of the
time that is needed on other systems.
Now coming back to the Amiga and the ST520. What will the software for
these machines look like when it is available? I do not doubt that they
currently offer more hardware bang for the buck than the Macintosh. I
also do not fault them for having a less mature set of applications -
they are, after all, much newer. However, I am concerned that they may
never offer the kind of environment that the Macintosh now offers.
I see no sign of Atari or Commodore making a vigorous commitment to a
uniform interface. When the Mac was released Apple provided MacWrite
and MacPaint. These programs, while not perfect, provided a very good
example of how the interface was meant to be done. To the best of my
knowledge no such examples exist for the ST520. As the Amiga is not
yet available I cannot determine what it will provide. Unfortunately,
I have heard comments attributed to the Amiga designers indicating that
they are not in favor of a standard user interface.
On the basis of the reasoning above I continue to recommend that friends
buy the Macintosh rather than the ST520 or the Amiga. Comments from
other users of the net would be welcome.
Sorry for the cross posting, but it seemed necessary to reach those who
might be interested. I have included a Followup-To line directing
discussion to net.micro, as this appears to be the correct place for
general discussion of the issues I have raised.
--
Stephen J. Langdon ...!{ihnp4,cbosgd,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!sjl
[ The article above is not an official statement from any organization
in the known universe. ]gus@Shasta.ARPA (10/07/85)
> There has been a fair amount of discussion about the relative merits > of the Amiga, ST520, and the Mac. However, little of it has covered > what I consider to be a fundmental issue - user interface consistency. > ... I couldn't agree with you more. In fact the current 520ST master disk already breaks with its user interface on at least two counts. The first involves a VT52 emulator DA. Launching this DA blanks the screen and devotes the entire machine's attention to the terminal, which looks little better than any simple terminal program for an Apple II. Ironically, the RS232 setup program (another DA) does give a fairly resonable dialog. Getting back to the VT52 DA, the first thing this thing does is bring up a menu which looks something like... 1) HELP - RE232 setup 2) UNDO - Quit. well, I tried typing 1, 2, pf1, and pf2. with no obvious effect. That is when I noticed that the machine did have HELP and UNDO keys. So much for mnemonic key names. Also the numbered menu items really threw me for a spin. On one of the menus on the GEM desktop were two items - view file, and print file. Since there was no printer on the machine, I tried the view file on one of the random files on the master disk. The screen blanked again and I got a weird hex dump. Well, I admitt I use FEDIT fairly regularly, but I certainly wouldn't put it in everyone's finder! I don't this thing let you EDIT the hex file, but this is just not stuff for non-programmers (ST buyers) should want to see. The Mac has an elaborate print file from finder system which basically launches the application that created the document with a special print directive. This is really the only logical solution to what DRI decided to provide a 'cheap' alternative that just doesn't work. So much for first impressions! Gus Fernandez