[OT] "The Condescending UI" (was: Do we need Win95/98/Me support?)

[Walter Bright]

On 1/22/2012 10:30 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Hah! I just found the *perfect* article about this and other similar
> matters:

Hilarious!

It reminds me of back in 1984 or 85 or so, a Mac evangelist came by the company 
I worked for then (Data I/O) to evangelize the Mac. None of us in the group had 
ever used or seen a Mac before, so we were GUI virgins.

One of the first things he did was hand out a sheet of paper with a bunch of 
icons on it. He proudly asked us what each of those icons signified. We got 
about 10% of them right. He was crestfallen. One I remember looked like a box of 
kleenex. We all had rather creative explanations for what that kleenex box did.

Turns out that was the icon for "Print".

So we naively asked him, wazza matter with the word "Print" to mean "Print"? 
And, you know, if we don't know what the word "Print" means, we can look it up 
in a dictionary (or these days, google it). How do you google a box of kleenex?

A phonetic language is a fantastic invention. Icons are a step backwards to 
ideographic written languages, which require memorization of vast amounts of 
trivia (made even worse by companies that copyright their icons, preventing 
standardization).

But what, he says, about foreigners who may not know English? Well, again, you 
can look up "Print" in a dictionary. How do you look up kleenex box?

He finally mumbled something about us just not "getting it" and left.

To this day, the only thing that makes icons usable is hovering the mouse over 
it so you see the tooltip in, ahem, ENGLISH, saying "Print". Heck, as I write 
this in Thunderbird email, the icons on the top row all have English words next 
to them - Send, Spell, Attach, Security, Save. And the print icons still look 
like a box of kleenex to me.