Re: Apple hiring $MS programmers?

On 2008-02-29, Michelle Steiner <michelle@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <slrnfsf1ni.hla.foo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Ian Gregory <foo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You open the drop down menu expecting plain text to be an option
and you see these Microsoft formats and HTML and wonder why the
hell you can't see the plain text option. Yes you figure it out,
but it it is a definite "wtf?" moment.

Gee, I never had a WTF moment with it.

Well gee, you never tried to do that until you had played with
TextEdit enough to know it was not built that way.

Anyone who opens TextEdit for the first time and types some
text and then wants to save it as .txt is bound to try opening
the Save dialog right? That is the logical thing to do. They
will see it is set to save as "Rich Text Format", which is not
what they want, so they will open the "File Formats:" drop
down menu and will see a variety of formats listed. They will
be looking for "Plain Text" and they have every reason to expect
it to be there. Why wouldn't it be? They don't see it because
it is not there. They look again, and most likely have a "wtf"
moment. The app is designed in such a way that that is practically
assured.

The only reason I didn't have a wtf moment myself is that the
OP had already claimed that there was no way to save as .txt
and although I didn't believe him I assumed that doing so
would at least require a non-obvious action. It took me about
10 seconds to find the Format > "Make Plain Text" action and
go back to the Save dialog and see that plain text was now the
only option for saving.

Once you know how it works it makes some sense although from
what I have seen and heard I certainly don't rate TextEdit as
a text editor and I can quite understand why people pay good
money for apps like BBEdit.

Ian

--
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/
.

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