Supercard 4.8 public beta

Richmond richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Mon Oct 17 05:43:50 EDT 2016


Here's something for the 80 year olds:

My Mum and Dad, who are 86 and 84 respectively, run Xubuntu on their 12 
year old
Toshiba laptop: several of their friends (also in their 80s) run Linux 
distros.

Frankly none of them know nothing more that "bung in the install disk" . . .

They have all converted over the last 10-12 years from Windows as the 
fag of trotting
round to the "Fixit" shop, and forking out moolah for that, every month 
has just got
too much.

They don't seem to have any problems at all: between them they employ 
XFCE, Cinnamon and
MATE as desktops.

I am their "support calls" bloke: and in the last 10 years I have had 7 
support calls, which from
23 computers running Linux with 80 year old end-users seems pretty 
damn-good.

The first thing to tell Octagenarians is: "Now's the time to sit up and 
take notice instead
of going senile." works a charm!

Richmond.

On 17.10.2016 00:58, Kay C Lan wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 16, 2016 at 8:45 PM, Roger Eller
> <roger.e.eller at sealedair.com> wrote:
>> In regards to "recording" actions to script, my first experience was in Mac
>> OS 6.  The finder had a menu item called "macro" that could record, save,
>> and playback every click, drag, move, cut, copy, paste, and typed text that
>> was performed in the GUI.  This was in 1991, btw.  But it wasn't revealed
>> to the end user as a script, and could only be changed by re-recording the
>> actions.  Still very powerful for its time!
>>
> Yes, and it also included the ability to hi-light something by using
> the screen version of a hi-lighter to underline something important or
> circle something important. The Help system used it and most software
> that came out at the time also used it. If you did a Help search for
> 'turn off extensions' the Help system would come up with the text
> explanation of how to do it, but at the bottom would be a hyperlink
> 'show me'. Clicking on it would result in a hi-lighter circle being
> drawn around the Apple menu item, the mouse would then move up there
> and click on it, the Control Panels menu option would then be
> underlined to hi-light it and the mouse would move down to select
> it... etc, etc. As you say, very powerful and the precursor to
> AppleScript.
>
> And for Richmond,
>
> here's a not so entertaining or fun exercise to try: give a Linux box
> and cheap android phone to a bunch of Octogenarians and see how long
> they last before the 'support calls' start piling up. In my opinion
> Linux is only suitable for those who are geeks; and any comments about
> how 'easy and great Linux is' by anyone who's done any sort of
> Computer studies at any sort of educational institution is completely
> irrelevant - because they have little clue on how daunting and foreign
> this stuff is to the elderly.
>
> We (my wife and I) live 9hr flight time away from our parents. My in
> laws use to have MS desktops and android mobile devices because my
> brothers-in-law all follow the same 'too expensive' logic. They were
> constantly over at their parents place fix things and showing them how
> to do things. Mobile devices were a particular bane because my in-laws
> travel a lot and they just never seemed to work when they needed too.
> The went through multiple different 'set-ups' including several in the
> popular EeePCs range. Every time we visit it's the same, can you have
> look at this, can you fix that, how do you do this. We eventually got
> sick and tired of it so we bought them some iPhones and iPads. No more
> support calls - for the mobiles, they still have their Windows
> desktops. It's chalk and cheese, we are now inundated with emails,
> blogs, facebook posts, photos and movies of all the minutiae of their
> travels, including the most irritating of all, food photos. The iPhone
> 4 and iPad 2 are still working for them nicely and have outlasted
> anything they've owned before - not that the previous purchases broke,
> they just never really functioned as required.
>
> My parents are older, my Dad just cracked 90 and it's the same story
> with my brothers following the same 'too expensive' philosophy. Both
> my younger brothers are in the computer tech industry and are far more
> computer savvy than my brothers-in-law, and they field all the support
> calls for my parent's MS desktops and Android mobile devices.
> Interestingly even my brother's acknowledge that Linux is 'too
> difficult' to support for the parents. And yet EVERY time I come home
> I have to deal with a support call that my brothers have already
> addressed but the solution still isn't quite right.
>
> As I type this I'm sitting in my mother's spare room, and only
> yesterday was sorting out a problem of the simple need to install an
> app on my mum's Aspera phone. When she tries to install apps it comes
> up with a message that there isn't enough room. Seems simple enough, a
> little house keeping to make space, except for the fact that my mother
> has all of ONE (1) additional app installed on her phone over and
> above the basic install. Further investigation reveals that this phone
> comes with 128MB of internal storage. Yes you read that right MB not
> GB, and there is only 24MB of spare space remaining on it. But, it
> does have a mini SD card slot and in there is a 32GB card with 30GB of
> spare space. So you'd think the system would be smart enough to
> install new apps into the spare space. No, you have to do this
> procedure:
>
> http://www.howtogeek.com/114667/how-to-install-android-apps-to-the-sd-card-by-default-move-almost-any-app-to-the-sd-card/
>
> which I can tell my youngest brother has already done; including the
> bit about 'The Root Method'. Everything seems to be set up correctly
> but as far as I can tell, the install process must cache part of the
> app onto internal storage before it goes to the SD card because slim
> apps can be installed no worries, but if it's an obese app of all of
> 20MB or larger, the 'not enough space' message comes up. If I and my
> brothers can't figure out how to simply install an app my mum wants
> the phone is not fit for purpose.
>
> And this is not the first time, they've had a couple of Huawei phones,
> one I know that could not have it's android system updated even though
> it was only months old, because my folks got a new car and the phone
> couldn't be connected via bluetooth. The Honda dealer spent a day
> trying, my brothers spent days trying, I could only be bothered
> wasting an hour.
> The solution was apparently an upgrade to android but it was clear
> from internet searches this particular really really really cheap
> bargain of an android phone could not be OS updated.
>
> My mum has had at least 3 phones since 2010 and although all up they
> probably cost less than my iPhone 4, my iPhone 4 happily connects to
> their bluetooth car and installs all the apps my mum wants using two
> clicks. IMO her current phone, and some before, have been a complete
> waste of money; what's expensive?
>
> Time is money, and at the rate I get paid per hour I'm glad it's my
> brothers (+ in-laws) who are wasting their time on all the support
> calls. Life is way too short to waste time, and in the case of parents
> (+ in-laws) it's extremely short - I've already lost one. What's
> expensive, I'll tell you what's expensive, it appears to me my parents
> (+ in-laws) are wasting their money on spending their life saving
> dimes and nickels when they should be living their life spending their
> money on 'things' that don't waste their time. They can't take $$ with
> them.
>
> Which of course lets me bring this all the way back to LiveCode and
> why for me it's head an shoulders above anything else I've tried; it
> allows me to create what I want, and get the results that I need much
> much faster, without wasting time and with little or no support calls
> :-)
>
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