151–160 of 638 posts
I wish macOS would steal some ideas from Windows instead of iOS. And Windows really needs to stop stealing ideas from macOS, macOS hasn't been on the forefront of UX since at least the late 90's.
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The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users. The reason people put crap all over their desktops is because they "lose" it if they put it anywhere else, while the desktop always stays "where it is". I don't think anyone's come up with a good solution to that problem, yet (Apple's isn't very good, and Windows' similar moves with its defaults aren't any better) and we're far enough into computers being common tha…
A better search functionality would help.
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Also, by default Finder seems to hide directory structure from you. This seems to be Apple thinking it'll confuse people if they can see 'up' directories, but I think just as often it confuses people like me who are trying and failing to go up. I use all three major desktop OSes regularly now, and overall Windows just feels like the most user-friendly and straightforward, though of course it too has issues (e.g. vari…
The inability to easily go to $HOME in Finder is of great annoyance to mevwhen combined with app signing. Hashicorp seems to run into this most often - download a new version of Terraform/Packer/whatever, install to ~/.terraform.d/plugins/darwin_amd64, and MacOS sternly tells me I can't run it, with zero instructions on how to proceed. Manually type the path in Finder/Go, Option+Open the binary, then you're good to g…
It's understandably hard to market a computer with the line that it is "easy to use" -- customers don't want to feel "stupid." And Apple has had a lot more financial success as a computing analog to BMW, Mercedes, Miele, Bosch, etc. than as the "friendly computer."
The transition to OS X came with a focus on "it just works" rather than "easy to use" -- and from my perspective many things, like the Finder and window management, became more difficult than in classic Mac OS.
NeXTstep was a powerful operating system for power users (marketed towards education and science, not your mom and dad.) Its focus was not on ease of use, though it did have a consistent high quality GUI (better than OS X, IMHO). Mac OS X is in many ways just a reskinning of NeXTstep.
(IMHO the Lisa Office System was the height of usable, intuitive, usable Apple GUIs.)
Finally, Apple has an intuitive easy to use operating system to sell, and it makes them a lot more money than Macs do: iOS.
I bought a Mac in 2014 after a lifetime of using Windows. I never understood why people called it easier to use than Windows. Maybe this sentiment is a holdover from an earlier era when people would mindlessly run executables and zip files attached in emails and AIM messages. From a UI perspective, it's 90% identical to windows. From a UX perspective though, something fundamental like Finder is still not up to the jo…
I used Mac OS 7 and 8 extensively back in the day, and despite some UI similarities it was a totally different experience from Windows machines. The computers had totally different ports (parallel and ps/2 vs proprietary mac connectors), and a different set of software (Clarisworks vs Word Perfect). There were even developers who made games just for Macs like Ambrosia Software.
Nowadays, you can basically use the same software (Chrome, Slack, VSCode, Steam) on Windows, Mac, or Linux. And can share a USB-C hub between a Macbook and a Dell.
I just helped a friend who is a lifetime windows user set up her new MBP M1. I was reminded how un-intuitive things are and how useful UI elements are hidden in the name of "simplicity". A lot of it for her is centered around the finder and accessing files in general. The two biggest issues she had was: 1) finder not easily acting as an image viewer. Eg, she had an SD card from her camera, and wanted to quickly scan…
I switched to Linux a while ago because I was annoyed at Apple for a number of reasons so I'm not exactly an Apple fanboy. However regarding your 1) there is one thing I'm sorely missing and that's QuickLook. No matter what finder view you are in, if you are in a folder with pictures (or even Word documents) you can press the space bar to see an almost full screen preview. Arrows for navigation work as they would if…
For the souls that have to suffer through the context switch of using both OS X and Windows or Linux at different workstations. htps://kinto.sh is a great open source app that let's you have the same keyboard commands and such in every OS, really recommend it!
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> well the usual fx keys aren't doing it When you say the 'usual' function keys... do you really mean some other system's function keys? Why would you expect macOS to use the same function keys as a different system? There's no standards body for these things.
> There's no standards body for these things. Yes there is -- it's called CUA (Common User Access) "The subset of CUA implemented in Microsoft Windows or OSF/Motif is generally considered a de facto standard to be followed by any new Unix GUI environment." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
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Also, by default Finder seems to hide directory structure from you. This seems to be Apple thinking it'll confuse people if they can see 'up' directories, but I think just as often it confuses people like me who are trying and failing to go up. I use all three major desktop OSes regularly now, and overall Windows just feels like the most user-friendly and straightforward, though of course it too has issues (e.g. vari…
The filesystem is super confusing to tons of users. The reason people put crap all over their desktops is because they "lose" it if they put it anywhere else, while the desktop always stays "where it is". I don't think anyone's come up with a good solution to that problem, yet (Apple's isn't very good, and Windows' similar moves with its defaults aren't any better) and we're far enough into computers being common tha…