Ray writes:

>No, Wirt, I was complaining that the "RUN" command is no longer 
>in the START menu.

Yes, that's true. They moved it to the "Accessories" folder, so that it's now 
grouped with other similar programs, such as the MS-DOS prompt, and that 
seems reasonable to me. The MS-DOS prompt itself was moved and renamed 
the "c:\command" when XP appeared, which took me a little while to find at 
that transition, and I too grumbled a bit when I first looked around for it.

The "RUN" command is no longer at the bottom of the screen as it was, nor is 
the "Start" button labeled "Start" any longer -- but does everyone remember 
all of the jokes about "how do you turn your PC off? Press START." It's kind of 
a no-win situation for Microsoft. I suspect that all of the jokes actually did 
have an impact with the designers of Vista

The tendency nowadays, lead by Apple and emulated by Microsoft, is to make 
things look much less computerish than they used to, and the 
dimunition/elimination of typed commands are part of that trend. 

Heck, with Apple, to be exceedingly stylish and cool, they packaged up the 
5th Generation iPods (the ones with video screens) in a very attractive, 
elegantly designed box in which only the iPod and the earbuds appear. It is so 
yesterday, so uncool to include instructions on how to use a really hip product 
that they don't.

I presume the thought is that using an iPod makes you so hip and cool that 
your friends will show you how to use it. Me, not having any hip or cool friends 
(I hang around with people like you all), I had to find the instructions using 
Google.

But as for things looking less computerish than they used to, the Apple iPhone 
and Touch iPod are triumphs of design. I constantly have to remind myself 
that this is a UNIX-based computer when I'm using it, because it is the least 
computer-like device that you could ever imagine. I am wildly impressed with 
what Apple has done with the iPhone. It truly is a transformative bit of 
technology and design.

But it too is not perfect. It is after all a computer. The primary difference is 
that when it fails, it doesn't print out an HP3000-like failure tombstone that 
only an engineer would love, or any sort of error message at all. It merely quits 
and reboots itself. It's fast enough doing that so that it isn't really wildly 
irritating, but it does happen often enough that it will occasionally try your 
patience.

Nonetheless, as I say, I am very impressed with the iPhone. But then again 
they provided instructions booklets with the device and have very nice on-line 
training videos up on the Apple website. With the video iPods however, I think 
that they took "coolness" one or two steps too far.

Wirt Atmar

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