Software: Good or "what were they thinking"

By Lee Alexander

Let us imagine a person of average education (literate, knows his numbers) has never used a personal computer. Further, we assume he knows of them, has seen others use them, and is not computer phobic. We now place him in front of a PC on which the Windows operating system has just come up. A likely question from him might be, "I see the Start button, where is the Stop button?" Your reply of, "When you want to quit you hit Start," could be confidence draining. Into which of the two categories in the title of this article would you place this feature?

Start | Turn Off Computer presents you with three buttons: Standby, Turn Off, and Restart; so far, so good. Ah, but there is a fourth choice! Where is it? You must hover the cursor over the Standby button (unless the person is a helicopter pilot, you will have to explain what “hover” is). Then you will get a tool tip pop-up telling you to hold down the Shift key and click to enter the Hibernate state. You don't get that? Whoops, you may have to go to the Control Panel and double click Power Options. In the resultant dialog box, click on the Hibernate tab and check Enable hibernation . Why not a fourth button? I have no idea.

Since he has seen a computer in action on TV shows or movies, he may have a fair idea what the keyboard (he has even used a typewriter in the past) and mouse is all about. With a little prompting and a few timorous movements of the mouse, he is on the way to navigating the GUI (Graphics User Interface). Natural curiosity should tempt him to experiment with the mouse buttons and a little prompting about the distinction between left click, double-click, and right-click can begin to rebuild confidence. We consider the combination of the GUI and a mouse to be a "good thing."

Applications

It is time for some home-grown definitions. I would like to group applications into three categories: General Purpose, Niche, and Special. From my point of view, I would put the Operating System into the Special category; however, within such a program I would put the File System in the General Purpose category. Playing a critic can be tricky. Microsoft's paradigm of an office, Home or otherwise, has its pros and cons. I feel the concept of Files and Folders is easier to grasp than the precedent, Directories. Drag and Drop may take time to develop the dexterity of mouse usage but is fast and intuitive.

On the other hand, separating the My Documents folder and placing it higher on the hierarchy of the Folder tree can give the false impression that it is separate from the C: drive. Reinstallation of the operating system could wipe out the contents of this folder. With a single physical hard drive, I used Symantec's Partition Magic to move the My Documents folder to another drive where it will be safe from an OS crash.

Word Processor

This is the first application that comes to my mind in the General Purpose category and from the get go it is truly intuitive. Presented with a blank page, you are encouraged to simply begin typing. Later versions of the higher end products may suffer with bloated features but the advanced technology of today's PCs easily handle this. Many users may never avail themselves of such tools as creating a Table of Contents or use the Outline view. However, when you decide to write the Great American Novel, the tools are at your beck and call.

Close companions to the word processors are the DTP (Desk Top Publishing) programs. By presenting a copious amount of templates, it is easy to get your feet wet with one of the leading publishing programs.

Niche Programs

The first genre that comes to mind is spreadsheet programs. The first of its sort, VisiCalc, was created by Dan Bricklin while a student at Harvard. Mitch Kapor developed the industry standard, Lotus 1-2-3 , in 1982. In spite of its long history ( long being relative for the field of computers), a person seeing such a program for the first time would probably be put off by the grid of small boxes. How could you fit anything substantial into such small spaces? The fact that they are expandable locations on the worksheet is part of a rather long learning curve. Using alpha characters for the columns and numbers for the rows assists in the visualization of the layout. Originally intended for financial number crunching in accounting, does it seem appropriate to use the $ character as a prefix for an absolute (fixed location) cell? On the other hand, it reduces typing compared to bracketing a cell designation with two symbols such as {-}; a choice off the top of my head.

Photo editing

Roll ups and pop-up toolbars, which are movable and can be parked anywhere on the screen, provide more screen real estate for actual photo editing. In a field as young as digital photography, it may be unreasonable to expect standardization among the many photo editing programs. Therefore you may expect to spend a significant amount of time learning the quirks and foibles of individual programs. For example, the Dazzle Photo Editor uses a process called Evolution and storable methods called Genotypes to aid you in a sort of batch processing mode. Applying these features is not very intuitive. Since the program came without a hardcopy manual, you can expect to spend a considerable amount of time reading text on your monitor or a good amount of paper and ink from your printer.

Here is a pet peeve of mine; most programmers call them toolbars, but Adobe insists on the term palette. Admittedly many of a photo editor's functions are primarily color driven, but cropping and resizing has little to do with the color of a pixel. I find it awkward to dissociate palette from a collection of colors. However, it is Adobe's program and if they want to rewrite the dictionaries I guess they have license to do so.

Special

Suite – dictionary definitions – 1. A matching set of furniture; 2. A musical composition of several movements only loosely connected. In computer software, I expect a suite to be along the lines of both definitions; that is to be matched and loosely connected. Groupings such as Microsoft's Office and Corel's WordPerfect Office fit the bill. Corel Draw with included PhotoPaint is a bit of a stretch. You can edit a photo and then add it as a graphic in a Draw project.

Prior to the delivery of programs over broadband Internet connections, it made economic sense for a vendor to package companion programs into a single box. By integrating programs onto optical media, combining manuals into a single publication, and shrink wrapping the whole business in an attractive bundle makes for a good marketing strategy. The savings to consumers could be considerable IF they were interested in the associated applications at a reduced cost.

Software Delivery

As more and more of us adopt later technology (at lower than initial costs), the difference between downloading a program over the Internet and traveling to a brick-and-mortar store or waiting on a delivery service has its appeal. More than a few of us, however, would appreciate the CD and manual of boxed version. The problem is that, of late, printed manuals are few and far to come by; even in shrink-wrapped goods.

My primary gripe, with some vendors, is the small price differential between the electronic and the hardware versions. If I save them the cost of stocking shelves with their product by downloading their program on my dime, I do not feel a 10% discount is sufficient.

Conclusion

By now, you no doubt realize that many of the comments in this article are personal and opinionated. I marvel at this wonderful new world of communication where everybody can be a pamphleteer. It harks back to a time when freedom of speech and publication forged a new nation. Forums to express your opinions abound and we should not hesitate to make use of them.