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That’s it, we’re quitting

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101–110 of 137 posts

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your overall point is solid, that the application (or os) should be making sure it always has a saved state of my document. But...there would still be a need for a way to specify where the document should be stored on the filesystem. For instance when writing software, files have to go in specific places. The file can't just be saved anywhere, or in some application specific bucket, I need to be able to speci…

File -> New Doc (generate name, save in $HOME) New Doc Named... Rename

Yes! And this is basically how Google Docs does it.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to…

As a casual user, it's made Word usable when I need to use it.

This is the engineering equivalent of offering discounts to new users, while ignoring loyal customers; it leads to churn, but not much progress for day to day users (i.e. the biggest users of the software). Applications that I like the most have "levels" of the user interface; you can switch to a more complete, complex, user interface once you get more used to the program.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#103
post #83

Can anyone recommend a good novice-friendly Linux distro with a clean, consistent UI that isn't being progressively replaced with presumptuous avant-garde nonsense?

Grab a (recent) version of Ubuntu and don't upgrade.

This only sounds like a joke, but it's not. Ubuntu is perfectly fine with the idea of not upgrading for years. Hence LTS releases.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#104
This brings to mind the X session management protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_session_manager) that never seemed to be used be in modern Linux applications. Issues that others brought up regarding memory consumption could be addressed with more consistent use of this or a similar protocol. While intended for saving state on logout, there's no reason the window manager/session manager/something else couldn't just direct an application in the background to save state and then kill it when memory gets low. That said, it's probably a bit too late in the game to establish such a policy. Users would be more likely to blame the desktop environment for killing the program and losing all of their work instead of blaming the application for not saving the state to begin with.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- In the case of iPhoto, I remember the program automatically copying the files from a camera to some folder deep within the hard drive and then giving not a clue later as to which folder that was and certainly not allowing any exploration between folders... - Don't you find "a right click" with a one-button mouse a bit tricky? I did try it but somehow it wasn't happening... maybe that's where things went South. - Pl…

> I remember the program automatically copying the files from a camera to some folder deep within the hard drive and then giving not a clue later as to which folder that was and certainly not allowing any exploration between folders... Well the fundamental idea behind iPhoto is: why would you care where it put your files at all? * If you want to see or edit your pictures, you can do so via iPhoto (or iPhoto-compatibl…

Control-click.

Needing two hands to get a context menu is the kind of thing that makes me question the 'minimalism' of OSX. Same as needing two keys(/hands) to do 'delete to the right'

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Certainly some people - not just geeks - like this approach I would argue that non-geeks are, in fact, far more likely to enjoy this approach than geeks. > I find it patronizing ("Don't worry your pretty little head about where we store the files.") Well except it's easy to know where they're stored. > and authoritarian ("You may not delete the Pictures folder from your home folder or give it an alternative name.")…

> Well except it's easy to know where they're stored. Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders . I could simply double…

So, "drag and drop" out of iPhoto isn't what you want, and you don't want to just use the "open file" dialog from another OSX app (since that lets you access all parts of the iPhoto library), and then you don't like how you have to click down a few folders once you do use "show package contents"?

The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.

FFS, Apple is far from perfect, but the things you're complaining about have pretty simple answers.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#107
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well except it's easy to know where they're stored. Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders . I could simply double…

So, "drag and drop" out of iPhoto isn't what you want, and you don't want to just use the "open file" dialog from another OSX app (since that lets you access all parts of the iPhoto library), and then you don't like how you have to click down a few folders once you do use "show package contents"? The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you. FFS, Apple is far from perfect, but the things you'r…

Let's imagine I use a Mac. I open Gmail and I want to send my father a cute picture of his niece. There's no direct way to do this without leaving the application I'm in (Safari) and going somewhere else to get at the picture.

By contrast, if this were a Pages document, I could simply click on "Attach a file" and then browse to the folder where the document lives. In the case of iPhoto and iTunes, this feature - file browsing - is simply not as straightfoward. I don't think that's up for debate. You are free to suggest ways that I can get at the photo (through iPhoto, through another OSX app), but I can't browse to the item the way that I can browse to other files on my filesystem.

> The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.

I really don't see how. I want something perfectly normal: I want "Attach a file" to work. In many cases, with many Apple programs, it does. But in a number of other cases (iPhoto, iTunes), it does not. This is not my fault. I am not doing anything special or nerdy or geeky here.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#108
For me, as a power user, "quit" means "stop doing anything!!", for an IM app, it means: stop showing me as available, stop using my yahoo login because I want this other program to use it! Just stop everything! Don't assume "oh you just want to be offline!", NO! I want to stop you in your tracks and prevent you from doing anything what-so-ever.

I quit an application when I feel it's not doing what I want. I quit an application when I feel the application is being presumptuous and making false assumptions about what I want to do.

I hardly ever quit an application because I need the memory .. it's not about process/memory management. I often close application to reduce clutter on my desktop, and clutter can be reduced without actually quitting applications, so they have a point there, but I'd still hate it if applications assume that I don't really want to quit.

It really annoys me that closing Banshee doesn't stop it from playing music.

It's about setting rules and drawing lines; it's about having control over one's out computer.

I quit a movie/music player to stop from emitting sounds. No, the sound menu is not enough replacement. It might be a good alternative, but not good enough to warrant "never quitting the media application".

I open a browser in private mode then quit it, because .. well it's private mode; if you can't quit it it kinda defeats the point.

I quit a download application (e.g. a torrent client) to stop it from downloading/uploading (to free up bandwidth).

You could try to rethink every use case, and you can provide other ways to achieve the same goals. But, in the end, this is not a good reason to make applications non-quit-able.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#109
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, "drag and drop" out of iPhoto isn't what you want, and you don't want to just use the "open file" dialog from another OSX app (since that lets you access all parts of the iPhoto library), and then you don't like how you have to click down a few folders once you do use "show package contents"? The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you. FFS, Apple is far from perfect, but the things you'r…

Let's imagine I use a Mac. I open Gmail and I want to send my father a cute picture of his niece. There's no direct way to do this without leaving the application I'm in (Safari) and going somewhere else to get at the picture. By contrast, if this were a Pages document, I could simply click on "Attach a file" and then browse to the folder where the document lives. In the case of iPhoto and iTunes, this feature - file…

> There's no direct way to do this (...)

Ah, but you can access anything in iPhoto in the "open file" dialog that opens up when you go to attach a file in gmail. It's in the left sidebar under "media", from there you can get to anything in iPhoto organized in the same way they are in iPhoto (here is a screenshot: http://civicit.com/~tvon/files/osx-open-file.png).

Obviously though, you didn't find this, and I can see how that could be a bit obtuse if you expect to browse "Pictures" and find a bunch of image files.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#110
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I remember the program automatically copying the files from a camera to some folder deep within the hard drive and then giving not a clue later as to which folder that was and certainly not allowing any exploration between folders... Well the fundamental idea behind iPhoto is: why would you care where it put your files at all? * If you want to see or edit your pictures, you can do so via iPhoto (or iPhoto-compatibl…

Control-click. Needing two hands to get a context menu is the kind of thing that makes me question the 'minimalism' of OSX. Same as needing two keys(/hands) to do 'delete to the right'

I can't verify this at the moment, but I'm pretty sure that you can assign the right and middle click actions on a three button mouse to do Cmd- and ctrl- clicks, so this is a nonissue for those of us with a standard mouse.
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