Stratocaster

Monday September 17, 2007

Joining the Church of Macintosh

Mark Wielaard just IM'ed me and said "What??? No Stratocaster update yet?" He and several others have been on my case to resurrect this blog and start commenting on... stuff. So here I am... peer pressure works! Eventually. I promised Mark I would post, and I gotta start sometime. And sometime is right now. So here I am again!

My wife and I bought our first Apple Macintosh this past weekend. The huge (almost too big) 24-inch new iMac. In for a penny, in for a pound. Why am I switching from one proprietary (Windows) OS to another even more proprietary (Mac OS X) OS after having been immersed in the open source world now for over 3 years? When guys like Tom Marble have been begging me to switch to Ubuntu Linux? Well... Windows Vista finally pushed me over the edge. After what I've read about it, and the years of aggravation I've had running XP, I just am having no part of it. So where to now?

I have Ubuntu on my Toshiba laptop. It installed fine, found all the hardware. Even the WiFi worked out of the box. But after messing with it for awhile I realized it was going to take me several hours of goofing with dialog boxes and watching installation scripts run to get it into productive shape. Its not like I'm a dummy when it comes to computers - I'm a power user, and I've got a lot of friends who know everything there is to know about them and can give me help and advice at the drop of a hat. But the thought of making Ubuntu into a productive tool that fits my work style was... well, just not appetizing.

Some other colleagues and friends have long been members of the Church. They've been inviting me to join... and find meaning in my computing life. Ray Gans in particular has been telling me how great the Mac is. And if Simon Phipps is a confirmed Mac-o-phile, then I guess I can use one too.

I am now wondering what took me so long. It is so well-designed, the software so smooth and effortless to use, it is almost like it reads my mind what I want to do. Usually, anything I want to do is one or two obvious clicks or drags without all that "hmmm how do I do that?" annoyance. The applications are just as easy to use as the OS itself. I get it. User experience really IS important.

So why is the user experience on the Mac so great, and on Ubuntu it is, well, not so great (though in fairness, not unusably bad either). Its not because open source software is inherently not easy to use. While Firefox doesn't have the buttery smooth intuitiveness of a Mac application, it is certainly easy to use. But the hallmark of Firefox is its extensibility and the community that has developed around it, not its ease of use. I know that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are working hard to make Ubuntu desktop easy to use as well and has made great progress. But any Linux distro is going to be made up of mostly applications and components that come from many sources, many developers, with different ideas of what is easy and what is not. Some are easy for power users but not for newbies. A few are only easy for their authors. Some are genuinely easy, but still different from other software written by other developers. What makes the Mac so easy is very careful, tested design, and absolute consistency. You can intuit how to do almost anything, and no matter where you are or what you're using, it works the same way.

It seems to me that great user experience is inherently not something that emerges naturally from the hurly-burly world of open source development. Different developers think they know the best way to do something and don't want to be constrained by others' ideas on usability. Or they want to experiment with different approaches. Or whatever - it doesn't matter why all those Linux applications are different. They are. So how to reconcile the need for great user experience - which requires discipline and consistency - with the open source development model? I don't know the answer - but I suspect that a combination of a community-invented (by open development usability nerds) UI specification and guidelines for Linux applications, coupled with intense peer pressure for projects to conform to these guidelines might be a start.