“A couple of years ago, I read Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen’s
The Anti-Mac Interface, thinking “It’ll be a while before any of
this becomes reality”. Recently, someone here on Advogato mentioned
it, and I thought I’d sit down and read it again. Much as I
remembered, it was an excellent paper, but unlike the last time, I
thought I could see the seeds of the Anti-Mac in systems developed
as free software today.”
“The paper goes something like this:”
“The original Unix text mode interface was perfectly suited
to the user community it was made for, a group consisting mainly of
hackers, who had the time and interest to understand the system and
figure out how to use things like the system’s utilities and pipes,
and who also manipulated relatively few data objects, mainly the
files in their own code, text files, and so on. Later, the
Macintosh interface was also very well suited to its target
audience, knowledge workers with little or no computer science
background, who wanted to work with moderate amounts of graphic
documents.”
“The Anti-Mac interface as outlined by Gentner and Nielsen is
aimed at a third group of users, which they believe will be
dominant in the future (the future as seen from 1996, there are
signs that this group is emerging at the moment): People with
extensive computer experience (although not necessarily a CompSci
background) who want to manipulate huge numbers of complex
information objects while being connected to a network shared by
immense numbers of other users and computers. Using this as a
starting point, the paper postulates five design principles for the
Anti-Mac interface…”