(9:45 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Ease of Use

My first full-length post on The Weblog was devoted to the quest to rid my web browser of the "provided by Comcast High-Speed Internet" in the title bar -- my reasoning was that Internet Explorer had come with my computer and that if I wanted to forget which particular ISP I was using, that was my business. Thus it only seemed appropriate, after reading the Menand article cited in the "quick links" area, to write another post about why computers suck. It will take the form of a bulletted list:

• First of all, it is not "easier" if selecting text with the mouse only allows you to select whole words. This is because the algorithms used to control such text-selecting schemes are not written with HTML tag in mind, so that you inevitably end up selecting a greater-than or less-than along with your text. Why not just assume that people know that highlighted text is selected and allow them to select as much, or as little, text as they want, on a character by character basis?
  
• Why doesn't Microsoft Word know anything about outlines? Their outline feature is very useful once you get it going, but I cannot imagine any teacher anywhere instructing his or her students to use the outline format that is Microsoft's default setting. Everywhere I've ever read an outline, the format has been the same: I. A. 1. a. i. -- and then if you need to go down to another level, make something up. Have Microsoft's programmers never read a book? Have they never attended school?
  
• Also, when I try to use footnotes in Word, why is it that no matter what I do, they never end up on the right page? Even if, by some fluke, they end up on the right page at first, within seconds Word will "recalculate" and move them to the next page. Footnotes go on the same page ass the footnote reference, dumbass. Don't make me use endnotes every time. I am actually afraid of the first time I have to submit a paper to a journal that requires bottom-of-the-page footnotes, because I absolutely cannot figure out how to get Word to do it right -- and I'm the kind of guy who has lovingly caressed every possible setting in order to create the best possible work environment.
  
• Another thing: Who's the fucker who decided that every time you type in an apparent URL, it's necessary to make it blue and underlined? Most of the time, people print off Word documents, which means that hyperlinks are of very little use to the end-users of such documents. I assume that they made this the default setting because they were so impressed with themselves for having come up with such a clever idea, and they knew that if they made it an opt-in thing, no one would ever, ever turn it on.
  
• If someone wanted to do something really useful, it would be to allow the user to make a database of all works cited, with appropriate stats, then format it according to a certain style manual. I wouldn't trust Microsoft to do this right of course, but maybe some plucky group of open source devotees could manage it. A word processor designed around writing academic papers in general would be a good idea -- one could abstract a couple levels away from the text on the page, so that all quoted text could have a citation tied to it and the citations could be given a uniform format. (When I finish my PhD and am assistant adjunct lecturer at Podunk Junior College, this is how I'm going to make my fortune.) This would be a major step ahead of most "educational technology," such as Blackboard, in that it would actually respond to students' and instructors' needs as opposed to creating a new subset of problems to deal with.

Someday, I'm sure that I'll finally lose all patience with Windows and with graphical user interfaces in general. From that point on, I'll write everything in Postscript, using vi -- and none of this vim crap, I don't need the hand-holding of an on-screen indicator for whether I'm in editing or general mode. (If I can be honest for a second, during my Linux Total Immersion Period, I gave up on using vi for anything other than quick web page corrections because the cut-and-paste function was just way too difficult to figure out. Do any computer nerds out there know whether it's possible to "copy" in emacs other than by cutting and immediately pasting the selection back in? Oh, sorry--killing, then immediately yanking?)

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