Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux: Usability and Design

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There is just too much goodness to share in this essay at Daring Fireball (source rc3.org).

Some things are worth repeating:

  • UI development is the hard part.
  • UI development isn’t cheap.
  • Windows and Mac trump Linux in usability because they have talented, dedicated people who get paid to do it.
  • “Fast, good, cheap: pick two.” can’t be avoided. It is a software project’s destiny. Reminds me of the four “levers”, the four factors in every project, that are mentioned in Extreme Programming; Cost, Quality, Scope, and Time. If you move one of those “levers”, one of the others is going to change.

    • Life In The Fast Lane And Taking Time To Listen

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    …The supermarket is a great place to study human behavior, Trinkaus says. In a 1993 report, he described 75 visits in which he watched the same checkout lane for 15-minute stints.

    …”all my studies point in the same direction?that things are changing for the worse” in terms of courtesy and civility. “We?re seeing more selfish behavior, more people looking out for themselves,” he notes. He suspects that Americans? infatuation with technology?cell phones, MP3 players and the Internet?has led to a lack of communication. “People interact less with one another these days and more with machines. That can be isolating, possibly contributing to antisocial behavior.”

    Read the rest in Scientific American.

    …there is indeed a clear link.
    … a teenager who thinks his or her complaints are not being taken seriously by the parent loses some self esteem, and loss of self esteem has been shown in many other studies to be related to drug and alcohol abuse.

    So when a father laughs off a request from a son who wants to date more, as one father did during the study, the teenager is left diminished in his own eyes. In this case, as in many others, the teenager whose request was not taken seriously admitted using alcohol and drugs.

    …Teenagers who thought their parent wasn’t listening, or taking his or her concerns seriously, were far more likely to turn to dangerous substances. The parental plea that they not do so was not taken seriously by the teen.

    “I think what happens is if the parents show the teenagers that when an issue comes up, it’s OK to withdraw and not really talk about it, teenagers pick up on that and they see that as a legitimate way to deal with an issue,” Caughlin says. “They will turn around and do the same thing to the parents.”

    … If a parent doesn’t listen to a teenager who wants to talk about a complaint, no matter how trivial, it’s unlikely the teenager will listen to the parent when it comes to life or death issues.

    Read the rest in this ABCNews article.

    The more television children watch between the ages of 1 and 3, the greater their risk of having attention problems at age 7, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

    … They found that each hour of television that preschoolers watched per day increased the risk of attention problems such as attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, by almost 10 percent later on.

    Read the rest at Yahoo!.

    Pay attention. Listen. Don’t use the TV to replace person to person time.

    George Carlin: I’m a disappointed idealist

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    …When people say, “What are you so angry about?” Well, that’s a terrible oversimplification because I don’t live an angry life as people who know me for five minutes or five years will say. They rarely see me in an angry mood. I get irritated like anyone else, in traffic or in a long line that’s not moving. But I don’t carry anger around. What I feel is a sense of betrayal by my species and by my culture — that they lost their way and misled me, too, to a degree.

    I’m a disappointed idealist. I think of myself as a skeptic, a realist. I think the cynics are the people who left the gas tank on the Ford Pinto, companies that kill people and just cross them out because they can’t afford to retool. That’s a cynical position. But the saying goes, if you scratch a cynic, you find a disappointed idealist, and that’s what’s going on with me. Down deep and underneath, the flame still flickers. I wish for an idealist, utopic world but the realist in me says it’s never gonna happen because of the way they’ve structured power and money and control and the hierarchies they’ve established.

    Read the rest of George Carlin’s interview in Salon.

    The Big Hard Drive In The Sky

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    If it is as economical as they say to give people a gigabyte of e-mail storage, expect them to provide you with storage for other reasons down the line. Imagine having all of your mp3s stored by Google. Searchable and reachable, only by you, on various devices. Forget needing a bigger iPod hard drive. You just need a wireless connection.

    It’s the ‘big hard drive in the sky’.