What are some excellent examples of user-friendly software?

Question

espex · Answer

In my opinion and depending on how you wish to define "excellent" I would say that examples of user-friendly software is generally something with a gui interface. Anything that takes a complex task and compresses it into a few clicks of a mouse or push of a button, making the experience more enjoyable for the user, I would describe as user-friendly.
That said a few examples would be the Apple OS, the "wizards" for installing applications and devices for Windows, modern FTP clients, webmail, and the standard OS for Xerox machines. By contrast any console app is generally !user-friendly.
By today's standards, Windows 3.1, Linux from 5 years ago, Olympus camera OS, Palm OS, and first generation Windows phone software, are all NOT user-friendly.

anonymous · Answer

It depends on the users, but for people who are inexperienced with software, generally pretty much anything that comes out of Apple itself (Garageband? iMovie? I haven't used any of their programs pretty much since MacOS X came out) has very high standards of usability, independent of platform. Their lead used to be much higher, though.