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by johnchristopher
2582 days ago
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She's a knowledge worker, highly paid and was in her 20's when computers became ubiquitous. Her education, the job she's supposed to do... it's like a carpenter who don't want to learn about electric screwdrivers. As soon as you try to get a bit more general: “Ctrl-A works in any applications or folders or anything with multiple items... it allows you to select everything at once.” She shuts down and gets back to her task of writing stuff. The thing is: computers aren't magical enough yet for that kind of user. |
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Isn't it the other way around? Ctrl+A does nothing on my machine, because I haven't set it up to do anything.
I think the problem is that most OS's were designed with programmers in mind, then have had a kind of 'user-friendly' face lift pasted over fundamentals that have remained more or less the same. I can see why non-computer people don't want to deal with that - you engage most of the time with the user-friendly mask, but it's fundamentally incoherent and inconsistent, since it's just a mask, implemented half-heartedly, by programmers who don't use it.
Ctrl+A is basically just an incantation. When people are presented by a bunch of incantations with no logical consistency, by a machine they aren't interested in, it's unsurprising they learn the bare minimum.