samanosuke wrote:
I think that the reason that Apple has stuck to one button mice for so long is because of simplicity. A single button mouse can be used by both left and right handed people, eliminating bias. [...]
Okay, there are multiple schools of thought on this -- from the designers themselves. To oversimplify, on the one hand (whee, puns), more buttons are 'good,' in line with that misattributed Einstein quote about not oversimplifying.
On the other hand, the Mac's original target market
was the absolutely clueless, and a design goal was for the interface to be rapidly adopted by those exact types -- people with no prior experience with computers. For those, another button would've added a whole new level of complexity in the critical learning phase. We've all sat down with newbies who couldn't keep track of their right from their left -- those guys did too, in testing, and decided the tradeoff made sense; for the Mac's audience, with the Mac's metaphors, stuff should either have a visibly documented representation on the screen. If you couldn't pull it off that way, you probably weren't doing the right thing for the sort of people who'd buy a Mac.
The Amiga got a pretty decent split on the issue; you didn't gain a whole lot from the second button, since it was dedicated to one task, but it dodged the Apple lawsuits, improved ergonomy (one less click motion, potentially, although we all know there's that slightly greater risk of release error), and wasn't very 'modal,' so it didn't really introduce any more complexity. What the Mac guys were actually fearing, and recoiling against after they timed it in practice, were, in fact, some pretty context-menu-like things, and PARC systems that decided you needed three buttons for the likes of "Select," "Menu," and "Meta" -- while being fairly strict about the sequence required (first "select" the icon, then "menu" what to do with it, then use one specific button to select the menu option -- and to copy a file, repeat the sequence again for an early version of the cut/paste technique that re-emerged in Windows).
Today, we're doing a whole heck of a lot of "semantic" stuff with computers, and the idea of pulling up "context" is itself a powerful idea... While nobody can figure out how to use the OS X Dock, which, if it weren't so weird and confusing to everyone, might actually be a way to preserve the click-and-drag gesture that Apple just might've been inventors of (you'd drag your selection to a 'verb' present on the dock, but those 'verbs' would have to be there, and the most common actions for web users -- save this as a link, save this as a file -- would end up being implied by the drag operation to the holding area, probably guaranteeing the 'wrong' behavior 50% of the time).
I'm not sure what the moral of this is, but it logically signals a further 'death' of the system as one guaranteed to be straightforward for people who can't figure out a two-button mouse (though, as anyone who's had to support Mac users knows, that straightforwardness was pretty much dead a year or three after launch). That's fine for Apple's business, people who can't figure that out are now a minority, and will probably suck it up and learn like Windows users did, but it feels like Jobs is playing games with Raskin's observation on familiarity -- instead of actually
doing research and testing and interaction science, Apple will cough up whatever's cool, and people will eventually develop familiarity with whatever it is once they've bought in on the reputation of the original Mac.* Nothing has to meet Jobs' own standards of 'insane greatness' anymore, it just has to avoid too many of the basic interaction pitfalls that would make it an unmitigated disaster (and even then, if the box is nice, and it conveys slightly more status than everyone else's pink flamingo, people will ignore those).
(Doing the Newton/Mac split was smart in retrospect, but we know how that went... Had they been able to make one brand 'the absurdly simple one' and one brand 'the slightly more complex one' instead of splitting across device categories, there might've been a hope left for usability and consistency... But that would've required admitting that anything could possibly be complex. One upshot of the current situation is that they're now acknowledging -- at least through design philosophy -- the way their ideas steer the commodity market, and the commodity market can be pretty good at retaining simplicity once a product category gets entrenched... The stupid-but-useful iPod Shuffle idea stands a good chance of lasting long past the point Apple drops it, now that they've blown the marketing dollars to drum the idea into every otherwise-unaware consumer's head.)
*And of course, this now drives the 'cult,' because if you'd only been following Apple (or even moreso, NeXT) for the past decade or two, things might make sense... and the more people who can have relatively specialized, marketable knowledge (vs. skills that can be acquired by anyone with five minutes of noodling), the more money they can rake in and feed back to Apple through purchases.
I have no idea why I wrote all this, now. Blame coffee, but the main point is that there really was a continuum of thought on "How hard are computers going to have to be to use?" -- well, that's vague, so specifically, how much time must be spent with the manual before a particular degree of proficiency is gained -- and I'm still amazed and amused at how this one goofy machine from Commodore hit on most of the accepted compromises first, just by doing what was obvious to the designers. (Hmm, should that be a surprise? People tend to do what seems obvious. :-))
