azurelunatic | An appeal to Mac-only users who have found themselves faced with a Windows machine

Dear Mac user,

I write this letter to you because of the situation that you currently find yourself in. You are a Mac user through and through, and circumstances have been kind enough that you have had little to no experience using a Windows machine, at least, not really within the past decade, not for longer than it takes to check your webmail on someone else's running, logged-in machine.

Unfortunately, the two things you have in front of you now are terrifying: a Windows machine, and a set of instructions that make no earthly sense. I mean, it's telling you a procedure to carry out, and there are forms, widgets, and labels on the screen in front of you that are as described in the instructions, but the things that the instructions are telling you to do are so ever-loving stupid and counter-intuitive that your every computer-using instinct is telling you that this is Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! and there is no earthly way that the instructions could possibly be correct, because who the fuck would design such a system?!?!

My appeal to you is simply this:

The instructions, while almost certainly wrong in every particular of intuitiveness, usability, and/or earthly logic ... are probably correct in the absolutely piddling detail that this is how you have to do this thing to make that work on Windows.

I'm very sorry.

Please follow the instructions exactly as they are written if you don't have a Windows expert around to ask.

If you do have a Windows expert around to ask, follow their guidance and that of the instructions, even if feels wrong in every possible way.

I'm very, very sorry.

Regards,
the administrative assistant who had to play tech support for the usability contractors this morning

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The answer to the question asked by the icon is: 7. Not even 95 or Vista.

Yanno, I think I have a .wav of a few of the mac OS startup chimes, with which one could replace the windows startup/login sound.....

And yet the first five results on Google for “OS X boot chimes” are all ways to switch it off or make it quieter. :-(

There used to be a Mac app that provided you with boot chimes of, um, every Mac ever. But at some point this was removed. :-(

eh, I always replace the start up sounds anyway on every machine I make mine... the HAL phrase "I'm completely operational and all my circuits are functioning perfectly" usually causes consternation.

... kind of tempted to do that now.

(If I were truly devious, I would do it to the laptop my mother, not a terribly big fan of computers, will be inheriting from me come Christmastime.)

That would freak me out when I opened my computer in the morning. AHH! Talking computer! At me!

This is a beautiful idea.

Thanks for reminding me, I need to actually implement some of my old sounds on my new computer :) As soon as I figure out how to do that on a Mac. (Have just moved over from a dying WinXP netbook.) It's tradition by now for my computer's shutdown sound to be Mulder's "The truth will save you, Scully. I think it'll save both of us."

Switching between Windows and Linux isn't any better....

Ow, I bet not.

The first time I used Linux, I came up short at a pair of radio buttons. Not three, where I could have usefully poked things, but two, where one was out and the other one was in, and this state is indicated by means of a curve with no dot. And I had no idea whether the motherfucking UI designers meant "in" to be selected or "out" to be selected.

I was not happy.

I think Linux UI may have evolved some from "please read the mind of some early 90s hackers" state it was in during the early 2000s but GOOD GOD.

A great deal. I found Kubuntu much easier to use casually than Win7, even.

Definitely not. Especially for the post-DOS generation, who have no idea that a command line exists, much less how to use it, so that you can get them up to the point where they get frustrated because the commands aren't the same. And that you can't actually make sweeping changes to the system by yourself...

My curse stream usually runs in the opposite direction when I want to tell a Mac to do something and it politely insists that there's no reason why you would want to do that advanced sort of thing.

That is also a scenario ripe for all sorts of terrible swearing.

That's a bit of a 90s cliché. Macs these days are *nix boxen, and all that. Behind the candy-coated exterior lies BASH and all the *nix goodness you could need. Just install Homebrew http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ for some CLI package management.

*wince* My sympathies. I hate the mental gear-changing process (and since I use Windows anyway, I'm glad I rarely have to do it!), but bothering some random stranger to unload my philosophical and aesthetic objections upon them is not cool.

I JUST WANT THE PLATFORM WARS TO ENNNND. FOR EVERYTHING.

In this case, the task was logging on to the computer from a different domain from the default. It ... did not help things any that the different domain was distinguishable from a keysmash only because it was carefully handwritten on a post-it in all caps.

This was to be entered in the "username" box. Which instruction was also present on the post-it.

Logging on to a different domain is a task out of the regular task flow enough that I could see why Windows designers maybe made that choice? But oh god would I like to see the results of the usability study on that. (Or see if there was one.)

Knowng Microsoft, probably not, or of there was one, it was for technical people who understood it, but end-users who might have to actually do it.

Technical people, or technically non-technical power users familiar with Microsoft design principles.

The user here seemed to be a Mac power user.

Ah, so even worse, they knew what they wanted to do and how to do it on a Mac and could not obtain sufficient beginner's mind to let go of what they knew. If only the UI designers had taken into account that people familiar with other products might be using their product and built in some helpful crosswalks or signposts...

That would involve not only knowing WHAT those other versions of operating system will do, HOW they do it, but caring that they exist at all.

Fair point.

We're doomed.

Oh, the DOMAIN\USERNAME thing?

That actually makes sense if you think of it this way: your username is not globally unique, it's only unique within the specific domain. When Windows is attached to a domain, your username is always namespaced, with the domain being the namespace. It lets you default to the last used domain as a shortcut, but if there's a risk of ambiguity you need to specify the namespace.

It's like being able to call you Azz, until you're in a big meeting with potentially lots of Azzes in which case we'd need to call out AZURE JANE LUNATIC, PLEASE COME TO THE WHITE COURTESY PHONE.

Maybe the name analogy will be useful next time you have to explain this particular horror to someone. :o)

It makes sense to me.

It did not make sense to those poor dear Mac users.

Heh. Oh, dear!

I come at this from the exact opposite direction, since I am a Windows user (granted, I am sort of married to XP and eyeing the propositions from 7 & 8 with great doubt) and regularly get drafted as tech support for my mother, who uses a MacBook.

We have a lot of conversations along the lines of, "Okay, on Windows I would go to 'My Computer' and right click on 'Properties'. What's the Mac equivalent of 'My Computer'? Okay. How do you right click on this ~~stupid~~ thing? Okay. Now go down to the part where it says..."

Edited 2012-12-01 01:34 (UTC)

The bulk of my experience is in Windows, and the last time my primary machine was a Mac was Majel, the Quadra 660 AV Mac from 1994.

An appeal to Mac-only users who have found themselves faced with a Windows machine

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