Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!execu!sequoia!nueces!chari From: chari@nueces.cactus.org (Chris Whatley) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: What do I want to see in the Apple of the 90's? Message-ID: <1989Dec16.063930.13570@nueces.cactus.org> Date: 16 Dec 89 06:39:30 GMT References: <1636@intercon.com> <22438@ut-emx.UUCP> Organization: Nueces Inc. Lines: 106 jgreely@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) writes: >In article <22438@ut-emx.UUCP> chari@ut-emx.UUCP (Christohpher M. Whatlyey) > writes: >>Well. From "real-world" experience, I can tell you that people who find >>the Macintosh puzzling get along rather well on the NeXT. >Don't fool yourself. From "real-world" experience, I can tell you >about quite a few people who find the NeXT interface confusing, >inconsistent, arbitrary, gratuitously incompatible, and suffering from >an excess of design philosophy. Are they 'user-interface' naive or are they the types who sit around saying that things are "confusing, inconsistent, arbitrary, gratuitously incompatible, and suffering from an excess of design philosophy" all the time? (like me for instance) >If that's the sole test of ease-of-use, you may be right. If that >person sits down *cold* at a NeXT, with nothing on the dock and the >browser in its default mode, it may be ten minutes before they *find* >the word processor, let alone print a document. Don't scoff, I've >seen it happen. Yes I have too. At the workstation lab where I am a sysadmin, you would not believe some of the confusion that arises when using the NeXT. Part of the problem is that they are naive users (Math grads and professors mostly) who want to use Mathematica. They do learn quickly though. Generally, if things are set up in the dock properly, noone has any trouble to speak of once they figure out when to click once and when to click twice. > I'd love to run your Mac vs. NeXT test, and, unlike >you, I have no idea how it would come out. I've worked with a lot of >Mac novices, and I've watched a lot of people sit down at our >semi-public NeXT and try it out. I still don't know which way the >frog will jump. One horrible thing about the Mac is that there is no concept of a home directory which makes losing your files in the Word utilities folder or somewhere a much too frequent occurance. This alone, I think, would make the NeXT win. >>Really, my roomate is one of the most ignorant people you could find >>when it comes to computers and he uses WriteNow, PrintManager, Webster >>Librarian and Quotations quite effectively. >You stacked that deck. Word is not the easiest word processor for the >Mac, nor is it the default (nor does it pay more than lip service to >the Mac user interface guidelines). Put WriteNow on both machines and >try again. The naive-user friendliness of both machines is fairly >equal; where I see the NeXT's *potential* is in supporting users who >are no longer naive. Well, one major difference is that he can actually use all of those things at once in a relatively intuitive fashion! >>What on earth are you talking about? The only time I find my NeXT slow >>is when I happen to be taking in stuff at 19.2k over the modem >>and unbatching news onto an optical when I'm trying to do something else. >>Text scrolling is faster than IIcis I have used for sure. And disk access. >>Don't even try to argue that one. >(aside: why not? was that intended as a formal proof?) Please don't ask me about formal proofs. I just said bye-bye to the most horrible course of my scholastic career. Logic. I had almost forgotten. >As a dissenting voice, I find my NeXT quite pokey at times. Context >switching can be tedious, application launch is sluggish, printing (to >a NextLaser) makes the machine nearly unusable for the duration >(although I did like the 0.9 feature of being able to stop printing >indefinitely by rapidly moving a window), logging in takes a while, >and booting, even with the usually-reliable fsck-skip, is slow. >Performance is improving, but it ain't there yet. Dropping in an >extra four meg would speed things up, but again, that's stacking the >deck. Eh. Well. I guess that's why everyone is bitching about slowness. I have 13MB in my cube and my perception of its speed is that of twice the speed of an 8MB machine. The extra five megs is a significant improvement. All of those things are true in general though. It is a bit too heavily laden at times to be very responsive. It is improving and I certainly hope that they find some other method (comme lazy initialization) to speed up application launch. > When the NeXT is *finished* (a date I've arbitrarily set at October, >1990), things may be different, but right now, you're talking about a >machine that's at the evolutionary level of a 128K Mac in 1984. When >the NeXT-equivalent of a Mac+ comes out, we'll talk (that is, a Mac+ >at the time it came out, not the low end of the family as it is now). Yes. I agree. I have two hopes for speed increase. One is that NeXT comes out with the 040 version and the other is that they come out with a graphics co-processor on which you can RUN DPS so that you have a nice unladen 25Mhz 030 left over for crunching (chewing really). I'll take either one but, I'm sure I won't be able to afford both. Chris -- Chris Whatley Work: chari@pelican.ma.utexas.edu (NeXT Mail) (512/471-7711 ext 123) Play: chari@nueces.cactus.org (NeXT Mail) (512/499-0475) Also: chari@emx.utexas.edu