Because people have different needs, expectations, and preferences. It’s part of what makes humans interesting.
Computers should be made to serve people, not the other way around.
Computers should be made to serve people, not the other way around.
I'm not sure there can really be any reasonable requirement to move the clock. I think that's just being fussy.
For every wacky feature or option someone wants, that has to be built, maintained, tested. Every boolean option you add doubles the state space of the application!!
Less is more. This blog post is a set of requirements for a Homer car, not a sensible professional tool.
Sensible defaults are great, but after spending most of your day glued to a screen, you start noticing little improvements to your workflow. e.g. i dont want to turn my head all the way to the right to look at the clock (using external monitors)
Thats not a big change, but I believe the sum of all those little changes add up
> This blog post is a set of requirements for a Homer car, not a sensible professional tool
"Professional" is a wide category for sure, but I would argue professionals are the ones who need more customization, not less. They are the ones with esoteric tools and workflows, and where customizing their environment to match how their mind works allows them to focus on the problems at hand and not their tools.
> For every wacky feature or option someone wants, that has to be built, maintained, tested
True. However, these are trillion-dollar companies. Look at all the options for cars, or refrigerators, or whatever. And all these have the constraints of the physical world. And all made by companies with a heck of a lot less cash than Apple and Microsoft.
This does seem to be the basic philosophy Apple has adopted for its devices. Which is why I don't use them. I don't like their defaults (which means the whole concept of "sensible defaults" doesn't really make sense except in reference to some particular set of users, and there are many such sets with different preferences), I like being able to customize things (because my idea of how I want to work is never the same as some designer's idea), and I'm going to be doing things that the OS designer didn't think of (particularly since I'm a developer). In short, my experience with Apple devices is that they don't let me work the way I want to work. So I don't work with them.
No, it doesn't. We seem to have forgotten that there are more general ways to think about software and engineering and math and the world.
You can just design a system that is guaranteed to work fine:
- regardless of where widget X is positioned
- regardless of what font and font size (from an interval) and color is selected by the user for a certain UI components
- ...and you can have all UI on all apps on the whole computer be customizable in the same way without having to write any (zero!) extra lines of code by just inheriting functionality for some common components
- etc.
You don't have to just dumbly test all scenarios to guarantee sane global behaviors of systems.
And you don't get the burden of maintaining the "test cases for all possible scenarios" because you just don't write those tests in the beginning, they are useless in a well behaved system that follows LAWS and properly preserves INVARIANTS and just burn money through their tests-maintainance costs! (Like lots/some of pre-web systems actually were!)
We've now built for ourselves a crazy computing world where there are no longer stable (across years and decades) contracts, laws and invariants in software, so we have to defensively code and over-test everything! We could've had-the-cake-and-eaten-it too if we would've just put the effort of building more solid software foundations for ourselves, but instead we're torturing ourselves building Electron web apps on desktops in languages with lacking or handicaped type systems and run them on operating systems that offer no sane components with contractually guaranteed interfaces...
</rant>
...imagine if physics worked like that, you'd have to re-test the laws of physics every time you wanted to build a house because the laws could vary by neighbourhood and not even basic invariants like the conservation of energy were guaranteed to hold. Oh, you can't just ask for more than a 1-room rectangular uncostumizable house of standard size, because properly testing anything else doesn't crash on you in our universe with non-uniform physics is just too expensive! Just get used with you sensible defaults citizen, stop questioning the party and the world!
I'm saying he'd get more out the tool by learning and embracing the design of it, rather than wishing it was something that it isn't. Go with the flow, rather than fighting it. Reduce entropy not create it.
I was recently playing the remastered Dark Souls on Switch. For some reason, they used the Japanese button mapping of B and A rather than the usual mapping in the US. And you couldn't change it.
I mean, no big deal, I can learn the new mapping. And I mostly did. But even after 50-100 hours, I would still occasionally press the wrong button (accepting rather than cancelling). The previous configuration was so ingrained in me that I could not overcome my muscle memory without conscious thought.
So even when I really try to "go with the flow" there is friction. People come from different backgrounds, using different software and different paradigms, and it's not really easy at all to remap their way of thinking, even if they want to.
You're asking "but why not let the tail wag the dog?"
The tool works or it does not.
That's the point. macOS works just fine without wobbly windows. We don't need the extra complexity of wobbly windows.
Decades ago a Linux window manager drawing engine added wobbly windows just to show off that with their new system was trivial not because anyone needed it or wanted it! This is the kind of software and attitude I love and want to see everywhere! Doing something so well that the cost of a "luxury" feature drops to almost zeros and you just add it to show off in some free time :) Unfortunately not all of Linux is build like this and most of its parts are not really compatible with each other so they need to be forcibly ducktaped together by layers of glue code to resemble a full system, but that's a different story...
There's different ways to think about software and do software than our hellish local maximum we're stuck in... you're just going full "stockholm syndrome" and justifying the badly designed an non-extensible non-generalizable systems we're stuck with because doing things differently would've generated 5% less profit in the last quarter :)
Deciding that the platform that doesn't meet your needs is somehow illegitimate, "not a computer," or somehow morally unacceptable is juvenile fanboy crap.
Truth be told, a Macbook does expose itself as a general computing device all right.