Appleiphany (noun): The feeling experienced when using or viewing an Apple device, questioning why the heck things haven’t worked like this all along. Example: When viewing the recent iPhone Guided Tour, I kept asking myself why mobile phones don’t already do all this stuff… seriously, it’s so dang obvious. See also hindsight.
Ghosted Notes
The writings of a technology ronin
Apple seems like they always had it "right" the first time, even in their not-so-successful products. I’m thinking of the Newton, which, if you look at what it was trying to do, precursed just about every mobile device on the market (even the UI looks remarkably familiar to Palm users). Of course the Mac GUI was the right way back in the 80′s, and hasn’t substantially changed in over 20 years. And for all the latecomers to the MP3 player party with claims of easy to use controls, it looks like the iPod got it right right off the bat.
Temptation to get a MacBook rising…
My parents have a Mac desktop now. I visited them two weekends ago and used it quite a bit while I was there. They have a two-button mouse, so that wasn’t an issue. I’m definitely thinking that my next computer will be a Mac. This machine I have now is a home-built job with plenty under the hood, so it should keep me happy for a while.
@TomWest: I still think it’s bizarre that people focus on the 2 button mouse thing. Since the first iMac in 1998 they’ve had USB as standard. USB == plug and play for pointer controls, whether that’s a mouse, tablet or trackball.
I actually don’t hear the "but it only has a one button mouse" argument very much anymore, but I think it may have been a backhanded result of Apple’s marketing. They’ve been so vocal for so long about having a complete system in one box that having to go buy a mouse to get the second button that many feel is essential is somewhat of a contradiction.
Having taught computer classes to beginning MS Office users, I can certainly understand Apple’s viewpoint. People get confused by "left click" vs. "right click". They just want to <em>click</em>.
Mac’s don’t have two physical buttons but they’ve had "right-click" click functionality for quite awhile. I’m not a Mac fanboy … my job involves testing on lot of different hardware … I have 3 PCs and 2 Macs at work, a mix of desktops and laptops plus 2 PCs at home. The horrendous ctrl-click combo on old Macs is a pain. But the Mighty Mouse with left and right click zones plus four-way scrolling via mini-trackball and squeeze button is way better than most PC pointing devices I’ve ever used. As far as touchpads on laptops, the MacBooks have the best implementation … two finger scrolling, two finger click = right click, programmable swipe zones, etc. Whenever I use a PC … like my home laptop, I find myself trying to two-finger scroll or two-finger click and realizing that I can’t because it’s just so intuitive.