As someone who has used Linux for over a decade, I find macs rather counterintuitive. Especially if I need to do anything off the beaten path. Maybe it's because I'm not a visual thinker.
How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
481–490 of 638 posts
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#482I 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…
> Why is it that when I click Finder, nothing actually opens? This would be an example of the 10% of the UI which isn't identical. One of the fundamental differences between macOS and Windows is the menu bar. There's only one at a time, and it belongs to the program which has the focus. A corollary of this is that you don't need a window to have a program. It's not just Finder, most macOS programs are perfectly happy…
The single menu bar design breaks down very quickly once you start using a large display. Evolve to multiple large displays and it is an absolute mess. The only option you have is to enable the toolbar on every screen, which starts to be laughable.
I have used Windows setups with as many as 50 screens (command and control center). Having each application exist within its own window with all relevant menus in that window is, by far, a superior approach in these settings.
Even with three large monitors, using a mouse to fly across that screen space to reach a menu is just a pain. Imagine a system consisting of 25 x 4 screens. It would be a nightmare.
Shortcuts? Someone else said MacOS lacks discoverability. It’s true. Tooltips are almost nowhere to be found and lots of applications have no shortcuts. I have watched non-expert users in fear of clicking a button because they have no clue what it does.
The single menu and single mouse button idea worked well on an old Mac with a single 9 in screen. It works fine on laptops. The minute the display grows in size and multiple displays are used the approach breaks down very quickly.
If you own a multi-monitor Mac setup (we have several) and have enabled the menu bar on all screens, you already understand how broken that concept has become. If it was not you would only have one menu bar with your three large screens.
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you fucking kidding? How do you explain the M1?
M1 can be explained by consolidating iOS and macOS so that less effort is spent on the desktop. M1 machines are very close to iPhones when it comes to the boot process and security model, and iOS features are now infiltrating the desktop like widgets and even the ability to run iOS apps on desktop (used to be Marzipan/Catalyst but it still meant the apps had to be compiled for it, but now macOS on M1 is technically c…
M1 is about capturing growth in the laptop/desktop/workstation market, it isn't about cost savings a dying market. Consolidation isn't the right word. It's about taking their mobile "opinions" and saying if we bring these to the desktop we can grow the market. The ROI does not make sense otherwise. Might as well pay Intel and keep milking it then.
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#484I transitioned from Ubuntu to Mac for work. As others here stated, there are often keystroke and click combinations that do perform many tasks a user might want, and it's clear this isn't the main problem. In almost every case, my first ten guesses for a particular action would be wrong: deleting URL suggestions, split screen, forward delete, open terminal, switching windows within an application, search and replace, and so on.
My opinion goes deeper. There's a fundamental problem of aesthetics over functionality in Apple's designs. As I sat in front of my fresh workplace iMac, I had no idea how to turn the machine on. I looked in the back and didn't notice anything other than ports. I looked on the edge... the front... the back again... the front again... the screen...
Finally, I took my phone three levels higher in the building where I knew I got 2G signal. The power button on an dark grey iMac---I discovered after 15 minutes---is in a bottom corner of the back, essentially flush with the rest of the monitor body in the place a person is least likely to look.
The fact that multiple prominent websites exist with this information tells me all I need to know about whether Don Norman would state Apple makes intuitive products or not.
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Linux rarely crashes. What it does do is handle low memory situations really badly. Simultaneously browsers have got way more memory hungry. I have left firefox overnight and had a tab decide it would like to eat all my memory. Linux does have an oom killer to deal with out of memory situations but it will kick in halfway to the heat death of the universe and you will reboot first. Oom looks just like a crash the UI…
> handle low memory situations really badly
Yeah, I wonder why this happens. I've seen LKML emails trying to address this problem, they even cited Firefox as an example:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/4/15
This also seems to be the norm in user space software. I've read a lot of source code where people simply assume malloc never fails. Tried to discuss this on freenode once, apparently nobody knows what to do in case the system is out of memory. Why can't it gracefully degrade?
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work) CMD+C then CMD+ALT+V I think of it not as copy-paste vs cut-paste but mark-copy vs mark-move. It makes it consistent with drag and drop where alt is the modifier for copy vs move (the default depending on whether it's same disk vs another one)
There's no Alt key on a Mac.
Option/Alt
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Finder is atrocious. It's the worst default macOS app and probably the worst program period I've ever used. It's been so dumbed down that it's basically unusable for anyone slightly experienced. - There's no way to create an empty file - There's no easy way to cut a file/folder (Cmd-x doesn't work) - There's no (?) way to keep everything consistently sorted and aligned - ~~Tags are useless and just take up space…
Also difficult/impossible to smart merge 2 folders, they always replace each other.
There is a console command on Mac OS called 'ditto' that accomplishes this.
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#488Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with command-up to go to the enclosing folder? As the poster stated, you don't even need to use the keyboard shortcut, there's a menu item.
If I'm in a GUI app, I'm navigating with the mouse. Having to take my hand off the mouse to type Cmd+Up is not good UX for such a common command as "cd ..".
For GUI you right click on the folder name and go to parent or you double click on the parent folder name in the path at the bottom of the window.
Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true at all! The moment you cut a file on windows it is marked as hidden, which makes it disappear with default settings. It's treu that unless you paste it it will remain there in practice, but the UX gets it right. Furthermore, you can cut once and paste to several places, with predictable semantics identical to every other implementation of cut+paste (though performance of the first paste will be differ…
You were wrong about the 1st part too. Cut files don't change attributes and don't disappear.
At least Explorer marks them as hidden when you cut them, I didn't check the file attributes.