In a pair of recent essays, Eric Raymond tears into the open source community -- rightly so -- for its failure to deliver software that Aunt Tillie can use. He's spot on. One of his comments got me wondering, though:

If the designers were half-smart about UI issues (like, say, Windows programmers) they'd probe the local network neighborhood and omit the impossible entries. If they were really smart (like, say, Mac programmers) they'd leave the impossible choices in but gray them out, signifying that if your system were configured a bit differently you really could print on a Windows machine, assuming you were unfortunate enough to own one. [Eric Raymond: An Open-Source Horror Story]

As it happens, I'd never tried printing to a Windows XP queue on my home network from my Mac, and I wondered how well those Mac programmers Eric talks about handled that case. So here, for your Flash viewing pleasure, is Aunt Tillie's OS X Adventure. ... [Jon's Radio]

10:56:57 PM

categories: Mac Pile