566 words
Today nonsensically titled post, features bullets with links that are mostly sponsored by Michael Tsai.
The mantra of moderately-to-very experienced computer users is “customization customization customization” [...]My first reaction was to think
Wrong!– complete with capital letter and exclamation mark. This may be true for 'moderately-to-very experienced' sixteen-year-old computer users, but not otherwise. Who needs customisation if the interface is good enough to begin with? – Rather than
Customisation, customisation, customisation, the mantra for UI developers should be
Choice is bad. – I guess this warrants a more careful discussion. There is good customisation as well. Perhaps it's customisation that doesn't feel like you're customising things, e.g. windows and icons remembering their positions. And those are easy to undo as well. – I haven't thought this through properly, hm.
I used to read it after I started considering the Mac press rubbish and incompetent in 1997 or so – yep it took me a long time to figure that one out.
Me too - I went through the hoops to subscribe to c’t even though it was rather expensive from the US. Then my subscription lapsed about two years ago, because I wasn’t find it any use (also, it took effort to read German :-)
IMO, the best English-language Mac publications are TidBITS, MDJ/MWJ (www.macjournals.com) and MacUser UK. I just got another request from ASCII’s MacPeople magazine to include ICeCoffEE on their CD, and happily said yes - wish something like it existed in English. It contains essentially a paper equivalent of VersionTracker with useful capsule reviews for hundreds of products - even the screenshots in the complimentary issues I was sent turned me on to a number of programs I’d otherwise have never known about.
Wow, subscribing international magazines is really going a long way. I would’ve thought there should be an equivalent paper everywhere.
I think c’t titled too much towards the standard Windows review junk around the time when issues became uncomfortably heavy and they switched to fortnightly publication. They are probably still the best non-specialist computer magazine in Germany, but the bar has been lowered.
These days I feel computer magazines have little to offer beyond what I can easily access on the internet. And whatever they have to offer they manage to compensate a few pages down by the sheer incompetence of their other writers. Thus I rather stay away – unless they review one of our applications of course, in which case I’ll get myself a vanity issue, as most magazines don’t seem to send you a complimentary issue these days.