<story><title>Against Nostalgia - Mike Daisey on Steve Jobs</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lukifer</author><text>I wish that before Steve had left us, someone would have been able to ask him about the lack of a magical user experience for developers. While Apple has always made &quot;closed&quot; hardware, the Apple II and the early Macs were delightful toyboxes for swaths of young people: BASIC, Hypercard, ResEdit, etc. They (we) learned, tinkered, explored, taking the concept of a &quot;bicycle for the mind&quot; to a whole new level.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a lot to like about modern Mac and iPhone development: the tools and the documentation are arguably better than they&apos;ve ever been, and the APIs have become absurdly powerful. But there&apos;s very little magic or UX to be found for the young and the new: even if you scrape together the $99 and brave the frustrating certificate process, it still takes a lot of overhead to make anything happen on the screen. (Recent improvements like ARC and storyboards help, but they&apos;re a band-aid.)&lt;p&gt;I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable &quot;prosumer&quot; programming, in the spirit of Hypercard. If the FSF types could pull their neckbeards out of their UNIX sphincters for five minutes, they&apos;d see that the real barrier to truly free software is software that&apos;s trivial to learn how to edit or create [1]. And if Steve had seen this as a priority, I have no doubt that he could have made it happen.&lt;p&gt;[1] Obviously, not all software could be written this way; we&apos;d still need engineers. But even web-enabled Hypercard-style apps would allow people to create a great deal of value for themselves and others, and give them the courage to venture deeper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bonaldi</author><text>Steve &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; see it as a priority: Project Builder/Interface Builder &lt;i&gt;were&lt;/i&gt; &quot;prosumer&quot;, when launched. NeXT put a lot of effort into the developer tools, and not just for developers: the &quot;Why the World Needs A New Computer&quot; brochure had a whole spread devoted to Interface Builder, explaining how an end user could get most of the way towards creating their app, (with a mention of handing off to an engineer for the tricky parts, admittedly).&lt;p&gt;They definitely saw creating a magical user experience for developers as a priority. Good thing, too, as at one point WebObjects -- which had a GUI editor to create bindings for HTML in 1996! -- was all that was keeping them afloat.&lt;p&gt;(The NeXT dev environment is one of the things TBL credits for making him able to start the WWW, incidentally)&lt;p&gt;Apple, too, had its fair share of UX-work-for-Devs. MPW Worksheets were one of the first attempts in many years to think of a shell as more than just a line printer in a window. Dylan had a clever and elegant UI (when it wasn&apos;t crashing). Of course there was Hypercard, as you mentioned.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, it&apos;s really hard for such things to get traction with developers, I suspect more than a little because of a &quot;I just need vi&quot; mentality, which reminds me of the hoary &quot;why would I want a toy mouse and pretty pictures when I have MS-DOS like a real man?&quot; nonsense from the WiMP Wars. Some devs do seem convinced that there&apos;s no better way of programming a computer than for them to churn out text (apart from maybe getting your IDE to churn out text for you) and so traction is hard to get for &quot;magical&quot; experiences.&lt;p&gt;As for developing for non-developers, that remains a really difficult problem, because the challenge is not really in expressing your _solution_ to a problem so much as it is in being able to state the problem clearly. Tools can only help so much with that, mostly in giving expressive power to people who didn&apos;t realise they were suited to programming.&lt;p&gt;Even given all that, Apple continues to pour work into Automator, an under-appreciated app which is really bringing the power of basic scripting to people.</text></comment>
<story><title>Against Nostalgia - Mike Daisey on Steve Jobs</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/jobs-looked-to-the-future.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lukifer</author><text>I wish that before Steve had left us, someone would have been able to ask him about the lack of a magical user experience for developers. While Apple has always made &quot;closed&quot; hardware, the Apple II and the early Macs were delightful toyboxes for swaths of young people: BASIC, Hypercard, ResEdit, etc. They (we) learned, tinkered, explored, taking the concept of a &quot;bicycle for the mind&quot; to a whole new level.&lt;p&gt;There&apos;s a lot to like about modern Mac and iPhone development: the tools and the documentation are arguably better than they&apos;ve ever been, and the APIs have become absurdly powerful. But there&apos;s very little magic or UX to be found for the young and the new: even if you scrape together the $99 and brave the frustrating certificate process, it still takes a lot of overhead to make anything happen on the screen. (Recent improvements like ARC and storyboards help, but they&apos;re a band-aid.)&lt;p&gt;I think there remains a tremendous unfilled space in the computing world for usable &quot;prosumer&quot; programming, in the spirit of Hypercard. If the FSF types could pull their neckbeards out of their UNIX sphincters for five minutes, they&apos;d see that the real barrier to truly free software is software that&apos;s trivial to learn how to edit or create [1]. And if Steve had seen this as a priority, I have no doubt that he could have made it happen.&lt;p&gt;[1] Obviously, not all software could be written this way; we&apos;d still need engineers. But even web-enabled Hypercard-style apps would allow people to create a great deal of value for themselves and others, and give them the courage to venture deeper.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>xsmasher</author><text>In my lifetime, home computers have moved from being tinker-boxes that blink a few lights to consumer-ready products that non-hackers can use. Jobs helped that transition, much like Henry Ford helped the car make the same kind of transition.&lt;p&gt;That wasn&apos;t a mistake either - read the chapters in folklore.org where he fought tooth and nail against having any expansion or ports in the original mac. The openness of the Apple II was mostly Woz.</text></comment>