371–380 of 402 posts
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Why not just use it with a case-sensitive file system? Did it break some application you were relying on?
I wondered the same thing, but then acknowledged that adds a first step of formatting the disk / re-installing.
I can think of a lot of reasons to abandon Mac OS X, but this seems like a really odd one to me.
The fact that the basic elements of Windows 95's GUI have survived for so long shows, I think, how well designed it was. For its time it was a great design that was intuitive to understand, relatively lightweight and did not get in my way. About the only changes I think improved things notably were the search field in the Start menu and Aero Snap.
The replacement of actual Search with this Cortana-based attempt at a "smart" search or Q&A interaction is absolutely agonizing to experience as a user and just a completely boggling decision to me in general. Why on earth did a search feature that will return something different from what you typed in, with the exact thing you typed in the secondary results, ever make it out of testing for public release? I have fai…
Cortana won hands down by actually telling a joke (it was about dirty laundry, but it was ambiguous enough that I think Cortana actually "got it".
OTOH, I feel really weird literally talking to a computer, and I don't think I will ever overcome that.
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The replacement of actual Search with this Cortana-based attempt at a "smart" search or Q&A interaction is absolutely agonizing to experience as a user and just a completely boggling decision to me in general. Why on earth did a search feature that will return something different from what you typed in, with the exact thing you typed in the secondary results, ever make it out of testing for public release? I have fai…
Addendum: I was just browsing the Dell website and the URL bar of Edge displayed a Cortana logo and blue text "Can I interest you in a coupon?" So, it's also an ad delivery machine.
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As a long-time Gnome user, I've only realized how bad it is after reading this comment ;) (No irony here, I agree it's truly horrible now.) But, I only realized it now because almost none of the apps I regularly use make use of Gnome's default file open/save dialog. Linux's extreme inconsistency has some benefits ;) Oh, and talking about Gnome, the only reason anyone uses it is that after configuring a few basic stuf…
And watch them take that as cudos...
I think it's beautiful. And, compared to Windows 10, Windows 95 was at least somewhat consistent design wise. After 12 years of macOS I recently got a Windows 10 machine. There's plenty of Windows 10 bling on top of the OS, but you don't have to dig deep before you encounter the embarrassing remnants from very early versions of Windows. Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Micr…
That problem increases when you throw a 4k monitor into the mix.
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The one thing I don't understand that Mac has never adopted is being able to use open and save dialogues as mini file explorers (move stuff around and rename, specifically). Having to switch to Finder to move or rename a file that has the same name as the file I'm trying to save is ridiculous. Of course I never need to do this anymore since I only work on text files under revision control, but it still seems odd to m…
Another good approach might be to do it the other way around: Get rid of the pseudo-file-manager dialogs entirely and let applications integrate with the regular file manager. I think RISC OS (?) did this. Open documents in applications had icons representing them which you could drag to the file manager to save. (And perhaps to other applications to open?) Mac OS also has (or had?) this to some extent – many documen…
Be OS did this, too; I got the impression that Windows was inspired by that, both for BeFS (NTFS) and the desktop filesystem UX.
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For minimize I can't say. But the maximize works the way it works because (and this is according to the platform ideology, not some general truth) you are not supposed to maximize windows in the Windows sense of the word. The macOS interface is based around floating and overlapping windows. If you put a window over the whole screen then it could be as well maximized. This gets a bit hairy on smaller screens but reall…
What was the big screen they optimized for in 1984?
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Absolutely true. I use a MATE desktop too, I can't even rename files in the save dialog. And I don't want to look it up either because it is so inconsistent all the time... I would extend your argument to Windows Explorer in general.
Gnome's save dialog allows you to rename or delete files. Maybe MATE should take some inspiration from the newer version of their desktop environment...
Sometimes I feel like the developers don't want stuff to work similar to Windows. Because that would be admitting that Microsoft actually did something right.
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@blattimwind: "Windows' file open/save dialogues are so far ahead of everything else that the competition seems like unusable garbage to me. I'm glad KDE/Qt chose to emulate these very closely on Linux" I hadn't realized that KDE was copied from Windows 95. I'm surprised no one here has mentioned NeXTSTEP. Here's a demo by Steve Jobs from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
Looking at this NeXTSTEP seems ridiculously ahead of its time.
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What Apple have done with both first and second generations of the Macintosh -- System 1 and OSX -- is pick a basic GUI metaphor and stick with it for at least fifteen years . The original Mac released in 1984 and was produced through 2000, sixteen years. OSX released in 2000 and is now in its eighteenth year. Whilst each system has seen some evolution over time, the general metaphores and interfaces have remained co…
Microsoft hasn't been too different in that regard. In terms of interfaces with any real userbase to speak of, the only real Microsoft UI systems I can come up with could be characterized as * MS-DOS/Windows 3.1-like * Windows 95-like * Windows 8-like Windows 8 basically was born and died in a couple of years, to be replaced with Windows 10, which is very much the same basic set of metaphors as Windows 95. There's a…
Windows 3, 95, NT, and 2K each saw significant changes in where and how major system functionality was presented.
During the same period I was using numerous Unix and Linux platforms (and still do). Those have largely seen far less substantive change at the shell and system level, with a few notable exceptions.
I'm not discussing Linux GUIs, which have been all over the goddamned map. I've used twm, fvwm, fvwm2, VUE, CDE, WindowMaker (my preferred option), GNOME and KDE through multiple generations, Enlightenment, various of the 'boxes (black, open, flux, ...), ion, xfce4, ... And those are the ones I've trialed to some significant extent. I've at least fired up and looked at virtually all the options mentioned on the XWinMan page: http://www.xwinman.org/
There are several fairly central components which have changed fairly markedly. The shift from telnet to ssh, multiple iterations of firewalling, various scripting languages of preference (bash, perl, python, an oddment of others), mailers (sendmail, qmail, anything reasonably sane, mostly exim and/or postfix now), and of course, the whole init replacement clusterfuck.
But the notional concepts of files, filesystem, shell, utilities, pipes, etc., has remained consistent, and even across several utility / server replacements (particularly ssh and mailers), command-level compatibility has been preserved to a remarkable extent with previous options (e.g., rsh and sendmail syntax).
If Microsoft can only be relied on for five-year stints of "having learnt this lesson" then they have not learnt this lesson.