too complicated

An iMac vs. My 4-year-old

posted: Oct 29 2004

Granted, this is the default paint program for AppleWorks (OSX), and he was trying to use a textured fill, and the image is a hodge-podge chaotic mix of… you know what? There’s no excuse for this—my old windows 3.1 paint program could have applied that fill on this image.

Ever tried explaining an error message dialog to a 4-year-old? “You can’t do that because the computer doesn’t know how to…”

And a few minutes later he’s grunting under his breath “I hate this.”

I tried to help, “It won’t work kiddo, you have to start over, or erase it all and try something else.” And a few minutes later he’s zoomed all the way in (3200%) and erasing the image one pixel at a time. That’s nice, I think to myself, he’ll be busy with that for a while. But like a good boy, he soon asks how to erase more at once, faster.

I tried to make the eraser bigger, but you can’t. so I explain to him that he just has to do it like he was, one pixel at a time. However, within about 10 minutes, he’s proclaiming a clean canvas. I looked over at the screen and yeah, it was all blank, but I noticed he was still zoomed way in and I’m thinking he needs to slide over to another area and erase that space too.

Then he starts zooming out and there’s no image. Anywhere. “How did you do that so fast?” I ask.

“Like this.” He zooms out as far as he can. and drags the eraser around. Funny thing…the eraser stays the same physical size on the screen regardless of zoom in/out. So with the image at 3.13%, he erases the whole thing with a few strokes. “I’m using my brain!” he tells me.

-- jase