191–200 of 638 posts
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How so? It can't get much more intuitive in my view, it's a collection of your favorite apps with dots under each running one.
Then why do I have to keep unpinning iTunes? Why does it come back when I remove it? Why does it only have colorful icons instead of icons+text? I use a bunch of IDEs that visually look the same, but their functionality is wildly different. This is a usability nightmare.
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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…
> The inability to easily go to $HOME in Finder is of great annoyance to me You should be able to use cmd+shift+h to always jump to the home directory in finder. I remember having the same real annoyance until I discovered the hotkey.
One other thing the author forgot to mention is, in most cases one has to eject the DMG manually and then delete it if you want to clean up your downloads folder. Else you will just have this mounted until the next reboot. I know many people that just just the app from the mounted DMG itself without ever using the one in applications.
The dmg install process has always been a mess. But note that Little Sister was pretty instinctively going to the App Store. If Chrome was in there she would've probably gotten it with no problems.
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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…
> Where's file X for project A?
> On the floppy disk for project A.
And that more or less continued for most users through the 90s, but then it got confusing to the entry-level user:
> Where's file X for project A?
> In My Documents, under the folder "Project X".
Which, I'd bet, is one of the reasons why cloud-based editors have taken off - the file is "in Google Docs", rather than in a directory hierarchy on the filesystem. GDocs presents me with a more or less flat view of all of my documents. I hate this - I have to go over to Google Drive to organize them - but I can understand how it'd be much more approachable to the average user.
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…
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…
First, not going to claim that macOS is "intuitive", because my in my experience, "intuitive" usually means very different things to different people. As a long-time Mac, Windows, and Linux user... I'll say that there are plenty of random broken things on the Mac, but there are also a few nice things that work very consistently on the Mac, but you'd never think to try them because you're used to them not working on L…
You can do this in Windows. Save the file, open the save dialog again, drag the file icon to the Explorer window with the folder you want open. Hold shift to toggle copy/move.
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Believe it or not, the way the filesystem worked on the original Mac operating system was that things did stay where you put them. Open a disk and the folders on it could be put anywhere in that 2D space, and each folder's contents could similarly be anywhere in their virtual 2D space, and each disk/folder opened in its own window that even re-opened in exactly the same position with exactly the same size as when you…
Gnome did this in 3.0 and called it spatial browsing. It was awful with a hierarchy 5 folders deep you ended up opening 5 windows.
I'm a Windows user and had to help a Mac user. Let's just say Mac definitely is my cup of tea.
And since those that i was helping ( an architect and a large property owner) didn't even remember their password to install an application.
I wouldn't consider them a actual user of the OS either ( just a consumer).
If they have OS X, they are free to search for someone who can actually help them, but it's not me. And it's almost the first thing i say on the phone.
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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…
> Oh, and Linux seems to be by far the least stable. I have apps freezing the whole damn computer way more often there than the other two. How often is that? What hardware do you run it on? What distro do you use?
Two different Ryzen APU based computers I've built running whatever Ubuntu happened to be the latest. Tried both KDE and XFCE and they freeze about 1-2 times a week. The computers haven't crashed and if you ssh in everything seems to be running fine, but mouse/keyboard/screen are completely frozen. One computer dual boots Windows and I can run Windows for a month on it without rebooting and it never misses a beat.