August 2, 2000
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A new article by Tog over at Macworld talks about the evolution of the Mac interface and underneath all the gewgaws and widgets, what really makes a Mac a Mac. I am particularly enchanted by this observation:
“With the Mac, you have always had the power to move around and organize applications and documents in your own virtual space, maintaining a neat or cluttered workspace, as is your habit. Other desktop systems, from Windows to Unix, have depended more on abstraction, forcing users to remember the location of objects in complex hierarchies. In theory, all of this reduced clutter, but it really only moved the clutter from the visible desktop to the back of your mind. Since most of us work better with visible clutter than with rote memorization, our efficiency drops.”
I think this is one of most frustrating things I have discovered while using graphically-based operating systems aside from the Mac OS. The more restricted or limited you are in customizing or adapting the environment, no matter how good the intentions of the designer were, the more disgusted you become as you use it. The Mac has always had a flexible layer between the obvious changable elements like icons, sounds, or desktop patterns, and the underlying architecture of the file system and software functions. The fact that you can pretty much scatter stuff anywhere you see fit on your hard drive and not have anything break is fundamental to why the Mac works so well for a lot of people.
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