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Originally posted by Janaka Cooray: I do not see how the current download options of dmg, pkg etc and manual dragging of an application icon to the dock is 'easier' than a wizard-driven interface. |
First you don't *need* to drag an application to the dock; you would do that for applications that you use frequently and you do want a quick access to.
And second, drag-an-drop installation is much easier and clean. You just see and know exactly what has been placed and where. When you need to "uninstall", you just drag-and-drop the thing to the Trash (and empty it). Some preference files that will remain on your home directory (in ~/Library/Preferences or ~/Library/Application Support), are just... files eating up some KB of disk space, and you can throw them as well. They are completely harmless if they remain there.
I don't see how would you prefer an installer or wizard, that will put files in the system, god knows where, that the unistall procedure may fail to remove. And I am not talking about benign preference files, which are created in known places after having run the application.
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I agree with your statement that, in reality, any computer is challenging to use for the beginner - but since my sister is expereincing problems using the Mac, I feel it is right to challenge the Mac's reputation as being so much easier to use. My sister does have 512 MB RAM - I reckon the 'unusable icons' on her desktop may be Windows executables - the freezing sounds like a real issue though. |
I cannot know of course what happens on your sister's eMac. However, there are some simple general guides you can follow to keep a machine in good shape. In your case, I would suggest the next time you see her, to backup any documents she has and reinstall the system from the beginning. Then, you can create a normal account (the first one that sets up the system has administrative privileges) and let her use this account. In this way she cannot screw up the system by misuse of the administrative power she has (I assume) right now.
The general consensus about Mac's ease of use is that it is generally easy and intuitive to new users, and often quite hard to old Mac users, from the MacOS 7-8-9 days, which have already a well developed and different sense of ease-of-use.