A young artist has some photos to line up in photoshop, so gets a ruler out of their bag against the screen and manually moves all the photos into position.
A writer has a list of words for his index so opens up notepad and manually arranges all the words in alphabetical order then manually finds each page the word is on in his novel and types it next to his index.
A scientist has a list of numbers to add up in a text document so opens up Windows calculator and types each number in one by one.
I think today, particularly artists don’t realise that a computer is not replacement for a pen and paper but can actually COMPUTE things!
Why are all these things that a computer can do very easily still done manually by many people. (Particularly artists!!! But even developers :O) Is it just that we haven’t solved the human-computer interface problem yet? Is it bad education? Is it just capitalism deliberately causing software to not be interoperable? Is it just Microsoft Windows is so bad? Maybe the right software hasn’t been invented that makes all these things intuitive. Or perhaps we haven’t got the right coding language yet. What do you reckon?
How old are these people you are talking about? I don’t think I know a single artist that pulls out a ruler and puts it on the screen honestly, but I know there some some basic pieces of software that don’t have special ruler tools. And when it comes to adding up numbers on a calculator, based on the amount of information needed it can be easier then setting the information up on a spreadsheet, especially if it’s just a calculation they need to do once.
A lot is just about effort/efficiency for each task at hand, if someone did put a ruler up to their compute then they probably just aren’t tech saavy or had a computer on their desk, making it faster to measure than it would be to look through the interface to find the ruler tool (which in software can be pretty well hidden.)
But generally it can just be a matter of set up, if a task is easy enough with analog tools, setting things up or loading up software can take more time than it would be to just do it yourself another way.
And I have never seen a writer reorganize words in wordpad one by one and the writers were asked if they did that they would probably think you are insane for even asking.
Pretty much every artist I know is pretty software saavy too so they all pretty much know how to handle using rulers, keyboard shortcuts and batch editing. So I’m assuming this may just be more of a more localized occurrence your seeing with people more than anything, unless people are just generally more tech saavy where I am in the world.
Those are funny but it is true a few utilities on the command line in UNIX easily do those but you can’t blame the users for those examples.
For one, Photoshop with it’s team and adaptation should be handling UI with ease by now. It’s be worth their while to hire someone with no computer experience and then start building a UI from that experience. That’s what was done to me: they hired a secretary with no computer experience and it was one of my jobs to get her through the entire configuration management process with the instructions I wrote. No fun. Of course that would be much easier than revamping a UI.
For the others, MS Word can handle the author, a one off calculation isn’t likely to inspire the scientist to learn Excel or UNIX cl tools or bother setting them up. Word is pretty easy to figure out even without extensive training.
So of those only the real world artist trying to become a digital artist is left high and dry by specialist software like Photoshop.
I was arranging some sprites parented to a camera as elements of a HUD and I actually did bust out a ruler to check if it was centered at the top of the camera view. Probably a better way to do it, but it was quick, easy, and it worked.
Sometimes it’s easier to just do it manually rather than write a program or find a feature that does it. It mostly depends on how much number crunching you’re going to be doing.
People just haven’t come across the ease of using other methods yet. I’m sure everyone has something new to learn on computer to help compute or do whatever but just on a different level. So…are you trying to ask why these people don’t learn these things or what? That can almost be said about anything. You may be tech savvy, others may be mathematically savvy, they may be able to calculate things faster in some method better than yours. Doesn’t that same question arise there too and on every type of skill?
You can’t really expect everyone to be equally skilled in each skill.