Since this is an inaugural post from a computer elite philosopher let me start things off with a discussion on the three major desktop environments that people may be using in order to get here. This means I will be discussing the Juggernaut that is Microsoft Windows; Apple’s Mac OSX, including their interesting thoughts about how a computer should be sold; and finally GNU/Linux, which I simply refer to as Linux. So let’s get things rolling with and start with Windows.
Window’s main problem is that it was never designed to be exceptional. It is designed to work and that’s about it. Those of us that can remember Windows 3.1 will remember a kind of sub-standard System 7 (Macintosh). The revolution came with Windows 95 and the fact that computer prices plummeted around the same time. Again, I would like to remind all Microsoft fans that I am not discussing things that the user does not see like the NT kernel. So although there were pretty amazing advancements at Microsoft at the time it is outside my current scope. The revolution that I am referring to is the Start menu and task bar. This was completely different than anything else in existence. All of your programs were placed in one convenient location and you would always know where new programs went. This idea is found today in both KDE and Gnome and it is arguable that the Leopard stacks is a more versatile version of the same idea (Just try putting your application folder in a stack and it is more or less the same) Microsoft then made a lot of money on this idea and has simply sat on the side lines for many years in the User Experience (UE) field for many years. There has been some minor changes , i.e. the ribbons in Microsoft office I find to be much more appropriate given how Windows treats programs but there has been no major changes to UE for many years. There are two reasons for this. The most obvious one is that Microsoft is afraid of completely alienating their user base so they are stuck with the ideas which came with their popularity. The second is that Microsoft has around 90 percent of the desktop market so they do not need to be exceptional. This saddens me because given the sheer girth of the company you think they could be on the forefront of UE but then again keeping the monopoly is more of concern. They do this by less than savory methods which I am sure is distracting. It is now time to move on and to stop ragging on Windows.
The Macintosh operating system is really the antithesis of Windows. It is designed to be the best thing since sliced bread(I am not sure why sliced bread is so innovative since I always seem to own a breadknife but that is besides the point). They do this by synthesizing hardware and software into one unique device and consider that to be their product. This caused by the infulence of the two founding members of Apple that are named Steve. Steve Wozniak (The Woz) is a man that makes stuff. He does interesting things while making stuff that makes it hard to be versatile. Anyone that has a Lisa with the Twiggy drives might be aware of his genus. Steve Jobs is to be honest an insane tyrant. Any glance at the stories on folklore.org will show this aspect of his personality. This is not to say that he doesn’t have good ideas but this rather to say that any idea he does have, or heard about somewhere, is pushed through to the system. One of my favorite stories is how rounded rectangles ended up on the first Mac when they didn’t hit Photoshop until 5.5 or 6. His way goes. The Macintosh product line is the object of his tyranny. The combination of hardware design that is not versatile and the lack of versatility of tyranny have yielded some interesting results. First the UE concept that is unique to Apple is that it extends beyond the screen. The command key (oh how I miss you Apple key{I know that it was always the command key but still:(}) is placed where the thumb can get at it. Since to a person that actually types, the thumb is useless linking the major keyboard shortcuts to the thumb is a great boon for efficiency and comfort. No emacs pinky here! Global Menus refuse to leave the system and are very useful so I always look at the same spot to get to special commands. Spatial browsing concepts attached to all windows is great even though that there has been some loss there over the years. This is just the old hat stuff but since OSX there have been some changes. The Dock sits in my neither good nor bad category. It is similar to the windows taskbar but the magnification feature annoys me and I usually have it turned off. Now that Spotlight launches programs quite well, it is, simply put, fantastic and has been ported by third party developers to both Windows and Linux. Smart folders are okay but more can be done with such a concept which I will discuss later. Finally the machines themselves are usually fairly good looking. All of this goes in the Apple good book but is impossible with large amount of first oppression and then indoctrination. This is Cocoa’s primary function. It is dead easy with Cocoa to make an application that looks good on Mac at the cost of breaking compatibility with other Operating Systems. That is the rewards for developers playing ball. Read Foucault to get at my meaning here. All of this said the tyranny here is not so much a bad thing in my case because I don’t care that much about freedom for my tools. I just need my stuff to work properly and quickly. If freedom is your thing, then we shall move on to Linux.
Linux for desktop users is the new kid on the block and talking about UE is difficult consider the large amount of choice with the various desktop environments and I do not find much innovation on that front except that the AWN dock has some animation features that are both impressive and less annoying than the magnification dock. Instead I want to talk about the problems that Linux is faced with. The first problem is the emulation issue. GNU and Linux was developed to emulate Unix. No one argues with this point and to be honest I can rarely tell the difference. This is not to say I can not tell the difference I occasionally use seq or something else in my scripts and forget that it is a gnu thing. While this is not much of problem on the command line, in fact it is very good thing on the command line, the concept has been magnified onto the GUI front which is a problem for innovation. Both Gnome and KDE emulate the start bar and there are various hacks to get each system closer to either Mac or Windows. Sure stuff can be more stable and have the occasional feature which is better than all the other counterparts but what about a whole new UE that will change the way I think about using my computer. I do not think this will happen in Linux for both this reason the next one. Linux is Free. Woohoo. It is a free system and allows for people to see how it is built and spread it around. This is great but there are various benefits lost from the other models which most Terminal Heads I meet tend to forget. I shall use a recent example from Gnome to make this point clear. In the newer version of Gnome you can shut down from the usual spot or from the user bar. My first response was why to which my Terminal Head friend responded some people want to do that and wrote the code. This is not good UE because it allows for the option even though only some people want it. Shut down is one process with a few options like restart and hibernate, yes Steve I am wondering why you let that one slip by you. In order for you to become efficient with this process there must be one and precisely von way to do it. Besides my own tyrannical ideals it is also conceptually confusing. The user menu should only have actions that are associated with what the user can do, like logout, but the shut down process is sending a signal to the hardware and not just the operating system. This should have a different menu all together. I know this is not a big problem but it still a problem that shows that the very freedom Linux advocates adhere to is slowing them down. It’s fine if you hack something to best set your needs, in fact that is great, but when that filters to the binaries of major distributions this is major problem. Linux needs a better tyrant than the GNU license. It needs it to innovate and quiet some of the voices screaming in its UE.
So where do we go from here. So where do we go from herrre Is Linux forever doomed to be cluttered with multiple personalities? Is Microsoft ever going to be innovative again? If Steve Jobs ever retires from his tyranny will Mac become mediocre? Well I do not know to be honest but there are some glimmers of hope. I believe that perfect mix of desktop users would be to split everything into thirds. One third using Windows, another using Mac, and the last third using Open Source and/or Free Software(I include BSD and OpenSolaris here). This would create a competitive environment for UE which would make want to design better systems to attract both users and developers to build good systems.It would also drop the idea that a computer is just like any other. They are not. You should pick the best that suits you but also the makers of UE should be competing to make the best UE for you. Google may be the forth column here. The Gmail interface, more than any other Google product, has shown me some hope. It stores everything in the unimaginable cloud but its UE allows me to type out my email and label it efficiently. Smart Folders are similar but tagging is more versatile. I can move some of the stuff around to suit my preferences, e.g. I have my labels on the right side, and never have to waste my time looking for things. This is not to say it is perfect. Far from it but I think this is the appropriate mix of tyranny and freedom for a release that has not be hacked by me. And who knows maybe Windows 7 or the upcoming newer kernel may be the best thing ever, maybe Mac with continue to make little addenda to their formula to and continue to be good, or maybe a new Desktop Environment will follow the Cathedral OpenSource model and create some new and better which will leave the rest of the systems in the dust. I have no idea what is on the horizon but one thing is for sure. I will probably end up using all of them.
(As a note I wrote this a long while ago and this no longer represents all of my views.)
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