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We need to document macOS

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Re: We need to document macOS

#121

Post by pwinnski »

stuntkite wrote: post #102
givinguflac wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Years ago Finder left much to be desired, but with all the updates of the last few revisions I'm not left wanting for anything. People complaining about searching likely haven't tried smart searches, it's awesome. Can anyone specifically call out what their issues are with Finder besides "it sucks"? I really feel that I'm missing something here.

I have not used smart searches, and now I'm reading about them and it does look pretty cool. But that search bar should give me something sort of close to what I'm looking for in a couple strokes and it really doesn't. I can specifically call out what my issues are with Finder. - Where is my fucking folder tree. There was no reason to take it away other than "thinking different" just like the backspace key. Super spe…

Unfortunately, your points aren't numbered, but I'm confused by a couple of them.

- Finder has had tabs for a few releases, and I can't recall the last time I had multiple Finder windows open at the same time. I use tabs for everything.

- By "sliding cell" do you mean the columns view? I use the list view roughly 100% of the time, so I'm no help there.

- On my system, quicklook opens a preview to the left of the finder window, so it doesn't cover the finder window. I think I must have moved it over there in the past, and it remembers.

- My system shows me every single dotfile, hidden file, and everything. I don't recall which setting I used for that, but zero things are hidden.

- Do you not have right-click, Services, New Terminal Tab at Folder? If not, then that must be something I installed in ages past.

Finder isn't perfect, by any means. It conflicts with how I like to do things semi-regularly. But I think a few of the issues you've raised might be solvable. At least that would lessen your pain a little.

Some of the differences between the defaults and what I see on my system might be down to this: https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos

Re: We need to document macOS

#122

Post by dethos »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #66

No. It's Apple who needs to do that. This isn't a free software project - lack of documentation is an argument for abandoning the platform, not for starting a community project of doing work for Apple for free.

Indeed, the responsibility belongs to the company that is providing the proprietary software/product. Otherwise it would send the message that good documentation shouldn't be provided because the "community" will handle it for free.

Re: We need to document macOS

#123

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

davemp wrote: post #113
blablabla123 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple >decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the >time. Nice summary of the status of Linux documentation. Not sure if it's really 50% wrong, especially the man pages make an impression of over-corrected but the usefulness depends on the tool and is completely random. But yeah, online documentation, classical tutorials are usually useless. When I see…

> But yeah, online documentation, classical tutorials are usually useless. How long ago was this? Checkout the arch linux wiki. It's a pretty great resource for all things GNU/linux.

The Arch wiki is great for dealing with common problems in popular software. Other stuff tends to be about as outdated and incomplete as the average "how to" blog post. It's a good resource to have, but it's not the same thing as having well-documented software.

Re: We need to document macOS

#124

Post by krallja »

delinka wrote: post #89
anonymfus wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The real kicker is that STILL many errors produce a window where I can't even fucking copy the output. Why that is still a feature, I have no idea. BTW a standard way to do it is to just press Ctrl+C in such window without any text selection or context menu. Because such messages could be shown when system has no resources to create context menu or text selection, and that was very important in 16-bit days.

Let me klingon to the thread with this: It's 2017 and I still can't use the keyboard to copy and paste from and to a Windows command line window...

Alt+Space E P

Re: We need to document macOS

#125

Post by AsyncAwait »

oscii wrote: post #74
stuntkite wrote: post #35

OT a bit but I think still related. 8 years ago when I switch to OSX I was furious with finder. Tiny window, no hierarchical browsing and the search just doesn't do shit that is useful. I normally default to locate or find now so much that I was using it the other day I was reminded about how much it sucked. It's literally identical (aside from tags and labels) to what it was forever ago and is a terrible paradigm. I…

It probably depends on a personal workflow, but for me, Finder works perfectly, and I really miss it on Linux. I have a reasonably organized directory structure, and I navigate and do basic tasks like copying mostly using just a keyboard. I remember directory names and I just start typing their names and the Finder goes to them (actually, most file managers have this feature). Occasionally, I do 'ls | grep' or 'find'…

I find Dolphin to have every possible feature I could ever want under Linux, I feel pretty confident in saying that it can be configured to work exactly how you want it to under Linux.

Re: We need to document macOS

#126

Post by [deleted] »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #71
SwellJoe wrote: post #58

When I did some work on porting out product to macOS (so developers could run their server environment locally, though a few loons wanted to actually run macOS on servers), I was immediately struck by how awful and incomplete the documentation was. And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the time. In particular, the service launcher (launchd, ment…

> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Somewhat related, it has become Apple user/developer etiquette not to mention bugs without filing a bug report on Apple's closed issue tracker beforehand: https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html I can't believe how many hours I've wasted on detailed bug reports…

[deleted]

Re: We need to document macOS

#127

Post by userbinator »

Apple has always been vague and stingy with the documentation; despite the author mentioning this,

In the days of classic Mac OS, when print publishing was growing as a result of Macs, Apple published an exemplary series of books under the banner Inside Macintosh

I have read the Inside Macintosh books but they still felt somewhat incomplete and superficial (although they're definitely a little prettier) compared to what I'd consider close to a "gold standard" for documentation, the IBM PC/AT Technical Reference and the same one for MS/PC-DOS.

I suppose it had a lot to do with the general attitude of Apple's culture, summarised in the famous phrase "it just works". The notion that systems should be designed to be so easy to use and obvious as to require no documentation, has resulted in a lack of documentation even for those cases which are not easy to use nor obvious.

Re: We need to document macOS

#128

Post by zoul »

ethbro wrote: post #104
zoul wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is that while bugs can only be fixed from the inside, the documentation can be greatly improved even without Apple’s buy-in.

Not efficiently. And others volunteering their time to reverse engineer documentation on an ever moving target sounds like an exercise in folly. Especially when the first party could hire technical writers for a fraction of the cost of developers and make this problem disappear.

They could solve the problem, but they are not doing it. Trying to force their hand by public shaming may work, but I don’t think it will. Volunteering the effort seems like a pragmatic approach. I would love to have a place where I could send a PR to fix a documentation shortcoming. Adding requests to Radar is futile.

Re: We need to document macOS

#129

Post by fnord123 »

notalaser wrote: post #109
SwellJoe wrote: post #58

When I did some work on porting out product to macOS (so developers could run their server environment locally, though a few loons wanted to actually run macOS on servers), I was immediately struck by how awful and incomplete the documentation was. And, I've been working in the Linux world for a couple decades...where docs are copious but wrong about 50% of the time. In particular, the service launcher (launchd, ment…

> But, I'm kinda baffled why anyone would volunteer to provide free labor to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. YES! MacOS users don't need to document macOS as a volunteer project, they need to demand Apple to give them their money's worth.

And yet Apple does not contribute to homebrew at all. The one project that makes osx usable for developers.

Re: We need to document macOS

#130

Post by ZenoArrow »

Nullabillity wrote: post #47
taurath wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I shouldn't have to go to terminal to edit a conf file to make audio or video work. I have every single time I have tried Linux on the desktop. It does not work out of the box. You must know how to use terminal and edit Byzantine configurations, and read Linux forum posts from 2005 to make basic functionality work. It's my "subjective" opinion, but after 5+ hours troubleshooting and configuring as a power user who do…

Audio has "just worked" for years now, thanks to PulseAudio. Video was a mess for a while, but now it will generally work great out of the box if you've got Intel or AMD graphics. Nvidia is still a mess, but Nouveau will work fine for non-gaming stuff.

> "Audio has "just worked" for years now, thanks to PulseAudio."

For your use cases perhaps, but it's not suitable for all use cases in the same way CoreAudio on OSX is. Music production is a key weak point, which is why JACK and PulseAudio are both required to have what CoreAudio offers out of the box.

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