5 ms·

> The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right choices right from the beginning No, they did not. Off the top of my head: - No

> The user interfaces for the Lisa and the Macintosh made almost all the right choices right from the beginning No, they did not. Off the top of my head: - No cursor keys. You had to reach for the mouse every time you wanted to move the cursor. Rectified later, yes, but not the right choice from the beginning. - Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors. - One-button mouse leading to a workaround where to perform the most common operation of running a program or opening a file required clicking twice in rapid succession. Windows fixed the first problem immediately, but the second problem only years later. - Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day. Like other artifacts, the Lisa and Macintosh had their good points and their bad points. Let's not let appreciation of one blind us to the other.

Waterluvian 8y ago
I don't get the mouse one. Double clicking is like a safety. The number of times I accidentally clicked on stuff with my overly relaxed surfing hand. And how did windows fix it? Maybe I'm too young to remember. I've always been double clicking.
- wvenable 8y ago
  People cannot reliably double-click. It's both a hidden interface and one that requires careful timing -- it's hard to imagine a worse user-interface action. That being said, as a power-user I have no problem with double clicking and find that it works pretty well for me.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  I'm also curious as to how Windows fixed it.
  - rwallace 8y ago
    Windows can be set to only require a single click... I think that's actually since 95, but I'm not sure; it's definitely at least since XP. Did the default get fixed at any time, or does Windows 10 still default to require double click?
    - rodorgas 8y ago
      The default on Windows 10, Gnome, Unity, KDE and Xfce is double-click to open file. Otherwise, how would you select an file without opening it?
      - badsectoracula 8y ago
        KDE always had single click file opening/launching/etc - even from KDE1 days. In old KDEs -IIRC- you select stuff by hovering them for a second or so, in new KDEs when you hover an icon there is a "+" sign over it and if you click it, it adds the file to the selection (and becomes a "-" sign). You can also simply Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click on things to select them, only plain click opens/launches a file.
- flomo 8y ago
  Even to this day, there are certain users who double-click on everything. (e.g. on AJAX forms you always need to disable the button.) My assumption is users are confused when a single click or a double click is appropriate, so they always double-click.
  - outworlder 8y ago
    Yup, seen this with kids on windows. If an icon is on the desktop, then it requires a double click. If it is added to the task bar, then it is a single click. I understand the reasoning for the distinction, but it is not intuitive at all.
- mirimir 8y ago
  I always disable single clicking in Whonix (KDE). It drives me especially crazy in folder management.
wk_end 8y ago
I disagree on the latter two points: - The double-click isn't ideal but way less prone to accidentally triggering the slow, painful operation of opening files and programs on ancient floppy disks and CPUs. - Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life; randomly changing what you've tried to move over and dropping information would be surprising and confusing. Anyway, "almost all" doesn't mean "all". The number of correct decisions Apple made back then is astonishing and vastly outnumbers the mistakes. Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...)
- rwallace 8y ago
  > Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing. Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text. > Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...) I used AmigaOS in the late eighties, and found it better than the contemporary Macintosh, though admittedly I don't remember the details well enough to be sure to what extent that was because of the operating system versus the hardware.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    I think you're confusing personal preference with universal UX guidelines, especially w.r.t copy-paste. > That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing. Most programs which support rich text copy-pasting have "paste with formatting" versus "paste text only" options, with the ability to change the default. If an application doesn't, that's the fault of that developer, not the OS semantics. > Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text. I like having source formatting with my pastebins, and most non-technical people do as well. For example, when emailing a code snippet to somebody, I love keeping the syntax highlighting from my editor. And the option to keep the text only is always right there if I need it.
kalleboo 8y ago
> Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors Are you proposing a NeXT-style floating vertical menu? I'm trying to envision one that either wouldn't take up more usable screen real estate than a thin strip at the top of the screen or would have to constantly be re-arranged and am coming up short. > required clicking twice in rapid succession To open a file you could always select the file then choose "Open" from the File menu (or press Cmd-O). Double-click was just a shortcut. Same thing with the oft-maligned "dragging floppy disks to the trash to eject" - the standard method was selecting "Put Away" from the menu. Just as some people have trouble double-clicking, others have trouble mistaking the left and right mouse buttons. The solution isn't so clear-cut. > Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day. Every Mac app I use has a "paste and match style" option, including the system ones.
rodorgas 8y ago
Sorry but all items seem invalid. - Do you move the mouse cursor with the keyboard? The cursor is designed to be used with the mouse, controlling the mouse cursor with the keyboard is slow. - Every modern OS have menus across the top of the screen. If you think it's a bad choice, you're alone. - Double click may sound bad, but right-click is worse. Look at non-tech people using a computer, they will double click instead of right-click and run. - To paste without formatting, you use Ctrl+Shift+V in most programs.
- JdeBP 8y ago
  rwallace appears to have been talking about moving the cursor not moving the pointer.
  - outworlder 8y ago
    Or, to use Windows terminology, moving the caret.
    - JdeBP 8y ago
      In the 1980s and 1990s, yes. But not for some years, now. It was pointed out on Wikipedia back in 2008 that the cursor+pointer terminology (of Presentation Manager) has been displacing the caret+cursor terminology (of Windows) in Microsoft documentation in (at the time) recent additions to the doco. It was also pointed out that Microsoft's own style manual was (at the time) now recommending "pointer" but has "insertion point" rather than "cursor".
outworlder 8y ago
if you have to have menus, what is the preferred location, other than the top of the screen? Inside the application window (like Windows)? Menus on top waste less screen real state and are easier to hit (just slam the mouse against the border). Perhaps you mean on the sides? But then their read awkwardly. The double click is a silly anti-pattern, I agree. But in those times you needed to be really sure you wanted to open an app, that was a very expensive operation taking many seconds. With today's SSDs we tend to forget that. Attributes from the source document vs destination is something that needs to be left for the user to decide (Outlook does this). Sometimes I want to copy and paste an HTML table or excel rows, and I want them to look like the source. Other times I am pasting text and I want it to assume the same format as the existing document. Outlook lets me do both, even after the fact. EDIT: typo

Waterluvian 8y ago

I don't get the mouse one. Double clicking is like a safety. The number of times I accidentally clicked on stuff with my overly relaxed surfing hand. And how did windows fix it? Maybe I'm too young to remember. I've always been double clicking.

wvenable 8y ago
People cannot reliably double-click. It's both a hidden interface and one that requires careful timing -- it's hard to imagine a worse user-interface action. That being said, as a power-user I have no problem with double clicking and find that it works pretty well for me.
jccalhoun 8y ago
I'm also curious as to how Windows fixed it.
- rwallace 8y ago
  Windows can be set to only require a single click... I think that's actually since 95, but I'm not sure; it's definitely at least since XP. Did the default get fixed at any time, or does Windows 10 still default to require double click?
  - rodorgas 8y ago
    The default on Windows 10, Gnome, Unity, KDE and Xfce is double-click to open file. Otherwise, how would you select an file without opening it?
    - badsectoracula 8y ago
      KDE always had single click file opening/launching/etc - even from KDE1 days. In old KDEs -IIRC- you select stuff by hovering them for a second or so, in new KDEs when you hover an icon there is a "+" sign over it and if you click it, it adds the file to the selection (and becomes a "-" sign). You can also simply Ctrl+Click or Shift+Click on things to select them, only plain click opens/launches a file.
flomo 8y ago
Even to this day, there are certain users who double-click on everything. (e.g. on AJAX forms you always need to disable the button.) My assumption is users are confused when a single click or a double click is appropriate, so they always double-click.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Yup, seen this with kids on windows. If an icon is on the desktop, then it requires a double click. If it is added to the task bar, then it is a single click. I understand the reasoning for the distinction, but it is not intuitive at all.
mirimir 8y ago
I always disable single clicking in Whonix (KDE). It drives me especially crazy in folder management.

wk_end 8y ago

I disagree on the latter two points: - The double-click isn't ideal but way less prone to accidentally triggering the slow, painful operation of opening files and programs on ancient floppy disks and CPUs. - Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life; randomly changing what you've tried to move over and dropping information would be surprising and confusing. Anyway, "almost all" doesn't mean "all". The number of correct decisions Apple made back then is astonishing and vastly outnumbers the mistakes. Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...)

rwallace 8y ago
> Cutting and pasting ideally should consistently work exactly like that operation in real life That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing. Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text. > Fire up an emulation of the original Macintosh sometime and it feels surprisingly modern and intuitive - far moreso than its contemporaries (Windows 1.0, AmigaOS...) I used AmigaOS in the late eighties, and found it better than the contemporary Macintosh, though admittedly I don't remember the details well enough to be sure to what extent that was because of the operating system versus the hardware.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  I think you're confusing personal preference with universal UX guidelines, especially w.r.t copy-paste. > That sounds intuitively reasonable, until you look at the current situation where every time you copy paste text between programs that support formatting, you have to cleanse it by pasting and copying through Notepad, or it will do the wrong thing. Most programs which support rich text copy-pasting have "paste with formatting" versus "paste text only" options, with the ability to change the default. If an application doesn't, that's the fault of that developer, not the OS semantics. > Note that fixing this would have negative cost: just don't bring any formatting information with copied text. I like having source formatting with my pastebins, and most non-technical people do as well. For example, when emailing a code snippet to somebody, I love keeping the syntax highlighting from my editor. And the option to keep the text only is always right there if I need it.

kalleboo 8y ago

> Menus across the top of the screen, inherited from Xerox Alto whose portrait format monitor made vertical space most plentiful, did not make so much sense on the Macintosh landscape monitor, still less so on today's letterbox monitors Are you proposing a NeXT-style floating vertical menu? I'm trying to envision one that either wouldn't take up more usable screen real estate than a thin strip at the top of the screen or would have to constantly be re-arranged and am coming up short. > required clicking twice in rapid succession To open a file you could always select the file then choose "Open" from the File menu (or press Cmd-O). Double-click was just a shortcut. Same thing with the oft-maligned "dragging floppy disks to the trash to eject" - the standard method was selecting "Put Away" from the menu. Just as some people have trouble double-clicking, others have trouble mistaking the left and right mouse buttons. The solution isn't so clear-cut. > Copy-pasted text bringing attributes from the source document where it should take them from the destination document. This problem still has not been fixed to this day. Every Mac app I use has a "paste and match style" option, including the system ones.

rodorgas 8y ago

Sorry but all items seem invalid. - Do you move the mouse cursor with the keyboard? The cursor is designed to be used with the mouse, controlling the mouse cursor with the keyboard is slow. - Every modern OS have menus across the top of the screen. If you think it's a bad choice, you're alone. - Double click may sound bad, but right-click is worse. Look at non-tech people using a computer, they will double click instead of right-click and run. - To paste without formatting, you use Ctrl+Shift+V in most programs.

JdeBP 8y ago
rwallace appears to have been talking about moving the cursor not moving the pointer.
- outworlder 8y ago
  Or, to use Windows terminology, moving the caret.
  - JdeBP 8y ago
    In the 1980s and 1990s, yes. But not for some years, now. It was pointed out on Wikipedia back in 2008 that the cursor+pointer terminology (of Presentation Manager) has been displacing the caret+cursor terminology (of Windows) in Microsoft documentation in (at the time) recent additions to the doco. It was also pointed out that Microsoft's own style manual was (at the time) now recommending "pointer" but has "insertion point" rather than "cursor".

outworlder 8y ago

if you have to have menus, what is the preferred location, other than the top of the screen? Inside the application window (like Windows)? Menus on top waste less screen real state and are easier to hit (just slam the mouse against the border). Perhaps you mean on the sides? But then their read awkwardly. The double click is a silly anti-pattern, I agree. But in those times you needed to be really sure you wanted to open an app, that was a very expensive operation taking many seconds. With today's SSDs we tend to forget that. Attributes from the source document vs destination is something that needs to be left for the user to decide (Outlook does this). Sometimes I want to copy and paste an HTML table or excel rows, and I want them to look like the source. Other times I am pasting text and I want it to assume the same format as the existing document. Outlook lets me do both, even after the fact. EDIT: typo