dent@unocss.UUCP (Dave Caplinger) (08/22/88)
Sure, this is a flame. Fair warning. :-) In a way, I'm kind of glad that Apple has filed against Microsoft. After putting up with the inconsistant user interface of programs like Microsoft Word, I usually wish that Apple could sue companies for making programs with interfaces that are not close enough to the Mac interface, instead of too close. A case in point: Once while creating a document in MS Word 3.01, I had reached the bottom of the page and was going to save what I had done so far. I decided to run the spelling checker on the stuff I had, and then save it. So, I moused up to the "Document" menu (and I won't even talk about fonts & the "Character" option in the "Format" menu!), pulled down to "Spelling..." and "mouseUp"ed. I missed. I moved the mouse at the last instant, and wound up in "Outline" instead. Oh well, a common mistake, right? So I clicked the close box on the window as I stupidly assumed that Outline opened a seperate window just like Page Preview or Spelling. This returned a dialogue asking me "Do you wish to save changes before closing?" Notice that the Mac didn't beep first, for one thing, and notice also that the dialogue isn't specifying what it is that I've made changes to. At this point, I was thinking, "Oh, Word must save Outlines seperately or something," since I had never used the Outline feature before, even though I've been using MS Word for quite a while. So of course, I cliked "no", and the window disappeared. The text window didn't come back. Needless to say, I was just a little upset! What I ask is: 1. Since when is closing a document without saving not important enough to at least sound a beep? (Yes, the speaker volume was above zero) 2. Why didn't the program ask me something more specific (and entirely coincidentally very common) like: "Do you wish to save changes to Untitled2 before closing?" Both of these points are almost trivial, yet they are vitally important. Let me guess: "'Real Users' don't need pansy informative dialogues," right? Something else that's only a minor annoyance for me is the fact that Microsoft used their own home-brew menus in Word. If you don't like them, you can't change them too add key-equivilants or whatever with a utility such as ResEdit or MenuEdit. We've got 15 copies of MS Word in the user rooms here at UNO, and security is hard enough with an interface like the Mac's, without pointless menu options like "Delete File" in the "File" menu. The last thing I need is a user picking "Delete File" and winding up with "Delete Finder? <Sure!> <No>". :-) It happens! Anyway, that's just a minor annoyance, and mose people are't going to be mucking around in the resources anyway and if you did, I'm sure that Microsoft's Lawyers would have something to say about it. :-) No doubt I'll get a few flames for being a "stupid user" and being dumb enough to not memorize the manual (especially the sections on features I don't use), but I maintain that the Macintosh is supposed to be /easy/ to use; even higher- powered programs like Word. If anything, the Mac should be reading my mind (or at least asking me to be absolutely sure) instead of me having to guess what it means by "Save changes? <Yes> <No>". This isn't entirely a pointless waste of bandwidth; I want to publicly implore Microsoft to make a few changes (even trivial ones like re-wording dialogues) before they release Word 4.0 as God's Answer To Word Processing. All that power would be wasted if the interface sucks. :-) -/ Dave Caplinger /--------------+-------------------------------------------- Microcomputer Specialist | Internet: UNOCC07%ZEUS.DNET@FERGVAX.UNL.EDU Campus Computing | UUCP: uunet!unocss!dent University of Nebraska at Omaha | Bitnet: UNOCC07@UNOMA1 Omaha, NE 68182 | or dc3a+@andrew.cmu.edu