Use y'r interface

Well today was fine. Up until the point when age-old technology failed me again.

I've got to hand it to those guys at IBM: simple green letters on a black background still produce some of the simplest, most dummy-user-friendly user-interfaces I've seen. All you do is move your cursor to the right spot, enter only valid data (the system manages to prevent just about any mistake a user might make, short of spillng coffee on his keyboard), press 'Enter', and you've just made a computer do what you wanted it to.
Try that on for size, Microsoft, Apple and Linux. AS/400 rocks when it comes to making stupid people work with a computer.

Well... that is of course until they see flashy wysiwyg word processors or dazzling graphics in the next game on a more popular (and desktop-oriented) platform.

What is it with user-interfaces that nobody ever gets them quite right? Just look at the known examples: they're all just demonstrations of a lack of ability to make a consequent choice.

Windows has all the thrills: graphically hot, context sensitivity all over the place, multi-language, all the software you can dream, compatibility assured and developers' tools that make any knowledgeable man get a mental erection. But all that is just it: there is just too much of Windows! Just try to open up Word, and find out different ways to do the same thing, like pasting some text: there is of course the customizable menu, a gazillion of toolbarbuttons, and he ever-present Ctrl-V. But rest assured: there's more! Now they've invented the 'ribbon', there is a multi-dimensional clipboard, you get a smarttag allowing you to alter the formatting after pasting,... Have you ever tried to tell a computer-dummy to always use the same way of doing it, just because they lack the flexibility to guess that they all do the same, but sometimes slightly different? Come on, Redmond: allowing the user to customize his experience is just not the same thing as creating an easy platform for anybody to use. My grandpa is just not capable of customizing. Well not his computer, anyway.

Mac? Beautiful at first: anybody can use a Mac. The one-button mouse was wonderful, really, as was the single-menu idea. But at a certain point, you have to come to more decisions: when you want all sorts of information at your fingertips (I know that used to be more of the competitor's slogan, but isn't that what they all want to do - but fail miserably?) you are going to need some buttons and keys, close to your fingers, that make it all run. Boing!
And closed source? Well, fortunately, noone cares ;-)

Linux, recently presented as an alternative for the dummy user, now with an automatic install, control panel stuff, all the zing and dang of any modern operating system, only with a better designed engine, supported by a world of geeks. Of course, if it were really that magnificent, we wouldn't need the geeks. How many people you know have recompiled their kernel? Written scripts to automate the toaster in beautiful languages like python? Decided which packages to install, and configured their unwilling hardware? Be for real: Linux is a wonderful system, usable by a lot of people, until something goes wrong (and believe me: it will).
Open source is wonderful, but who has ever really profited from it, apart from the initial cost for the OS?

And then there's the fairy godmother of OS-es: OS/400. No kidding: this thing is stable as hell, and in most views, pretty simple. Behind the scenes, there really are only three (3!) levels of directories, everything gets compiled the same way, some brilliant tricks, and very straightforward user-interface.
But what trouble it takes to make that user-interface! Computerlanguages from hell (RPG), indecipherable layouts of files, overkill on options and switches. Copying a file will do just fine on the command line, but there is just no way of debugging withot a fine-tuned development environment. Not with the complexity of today's software. Sometimes you just NEED a comlex UI. And AS/400 has it NOT.

So why the rant? I don't know. In the old days, when the server would have been next to me, I would probably have kicked it. Since it is now literaly miles away from me, I'll just have to spit my poison at it verbally. Take that, you swine!