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How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

jeremyaboyd.com

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Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#521

Post by rubyist5eva »

turkeywelder wrote: post #448
rubyist5eva wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window snapping exists in macOS, hold the option key while hovering over the zoom button and the snapping options pop up in a tooltip. Personally, I like that macOS is more or less unchanged. It’s familiar, and I don’t have to worry about big sweeping changes like Windows 8 or Gnome 3 and Gnome 40. For everything else there’s usually a tiny utility app you can install the gives you the functionality and runs in the b…

ohh that option thing is well hidden, thanks for that. Is there a keyboard shortcut for it?

I haven’t found one but I never really dug into the keyboard shortcut settings because I use Rectangle anyway.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#522

Post by dmitriid »

bayindirh wrote: post #516
dmitriid wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you think I pressed Cmd+J?

Sorry, I misread your comment and didn't see the link. I thought you've said that the options just don't exist. When I checked on my El Capitan Mac (an Early 2008, non unibody MacBook Pro), opening my home folder in icon view and opening view options shows almost the exact screenshot I've shared on my previous comment, including "use as default button". Moreover, any view except tri-column view produces a view option…

OMG :facepalm: I can't even begin to imagine who coded this, and why?!

Basically:

If you open a folder from a "shortcut" from the sidebar, and press Cmd+J, you get the barren options from the screenshot: https://imgur.com/3meteoB. And it doesn't matter if you keep clicking on other folders

Since I always use just a few folders linked from the sidebar, that's what I would always get.

To get to the "actual finder window", you have to select a folder, and press Cmd + Down to "open it". Visually, nothing changes. But the View Options do: https://imgur.com/EJuqWDC

It still doesn't have the "set as default", but, at the very least, it now looks more like your screenshot.

I'm literally at a loss for words.

Edit: more over, if you Cmd+Tab back, and your current folder is a subfolder of an item in the sidebar, the Cmd-J panel resets back to its barren view. Why?!!

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#523

Post by phendrenad2 »

Apple is always coming up with new "trust us this is better" ways to do things, seemingly without thought for how they interact with older "trust us this is better" things. TFA has a great example. MacOS made the "Applications" directory because Steve Jobs thought installing an application should be something you do via a "drag". Everything should be a drag! Eject a CD? Drag it? Where? Uh, hell, the trash can! Want to copy files? Don't copy-paste like a rube, instead drag it! And the App Store is an abstraction where the user doesn't need to know that the Applications directory exists, oops.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#524

Post by http-teapot »

timbit42 wrote: post #461
philliphaydon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Single button mouse --> no instructions, can't find out how to right click I can’t stand OSX, but I’m pretty proficient. I think the right click is a symptom of you being so used to Windows or linux. The average user probably never needs to right click. I bought my mum a MacBook Air and she’s never needed to right click in the 4-5 years of owning it. I think it’s hidden for good reason. She also never asks if she s…

Having a second button is better than having to double-click.

I think you mean two-finger tap? I only use the trackpad and find the two-finger tap far more efficient. I'd never buy the Apple mouse, though.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#525

Post by voussoir »

cytzol wrote: post #113

This post illuminates two ways in which users' expectations of computers have changed since the '80s, which is when this UX was designed: 1) Users don't deal with external storage nearly as much anymore, so the "disk image" paradigm feels out of place. Before the Internet, it was more common to insert a floppy disk, drag the application from the disk to the hard drive, and then eject it again. Users were accustomed t…

I avoid installers and prefer portable releases 100% of the time. Sometimes, you can extract an installer like a zip and it still works. Other times, I suffer through the install process once and then zip up the resulting folder to get my own portable for next time. I think it's crazy how even the simplest of programs today want to run installers.

I wrote more about it here: https://voussoir.net/writing/master_of_my_domain

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#526

Post by prewett »

wraptile wrote: post #70
rchaud wrote: post #14

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…

As someone who recently switched to MacOs (not by their own choice) there are hundreds of little annoying, broken or inconsistent OS things I find. One of my favorites just happened yesterday with finder - I was trying to figure out how to rename a file, well the usual fx keys aren't doing it so the common process was to go to the toolbar context menu where hotkey is indicated next to the action's text. Rename for so…

I'm curious, why didn't you click on the filename after it has been selected? That initiates rename on both Finder and Explorer, as well as other applications that edit that sort of text. (Except not OpenOffice's spreadsheet tabs, grrr)

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#527

Post by michaelmrose »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #485
michaelmrose wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Arguably they could degrade more gracefully by just starting slightly sooner when they have some resources to manage but they successfully ignored the problem until it became someone else's problem. At this point I don't know that any solution would be much better than simply running a daemon like earlyoom in practice. I'm just surprised that desktop distros ship with Firefox which absolutely can in edge cases leak gigabytes of memory but no good way to deal with misbehaving applications after memory is exhausted.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#528

Post by taylodl »

throwaddzuzxd wrote: post #205
rchaud wrote: post #14

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…

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…

> There's no way to create an empty file"

Depends on what you mean by easy. There's 2 (two) things you need to do to make this easier:

1. Enable New Terminal Tab at Folder service in Finder (goto Finder/Services/Services Preferences.../Files and Folders).

2. Make sure the Path Bar is visible in Finder (it's on the View Menu)

Now right-click the path in the Path Bar where you want to create the folder, select and click the New Terminal Tab at Folder and then touch whatever empty file you want created. Close the terminal window/tab.

Done!

I rarely need to create a new, empty file - but when I do this is how I do it!

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#529

Post by m463 »

crazygringo wrote: post #512
m463 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The .dmg drag thing has benefits - many times you can run an app from within the .dmg You can also drag into locations that are not /Applications

Sure, and that can be reserved for power users. You can right-click on applications to open them as folders, and the same could be done with DMG's. 99% of people just want to install or uninstall with a click, which is why I wish Finder made that the default workflow.

The dmg is just one drag.

Meanwhile an installer flow seems to be more of a gauntlet you have to get through. For macos it is several mostly standardized pages, for windows it is more annoying, complete with dark patterns.

Re: How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

#530

Post by michaelmrose »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #198
michaelmrose wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 don't think the cultural convention of directories in Linux is well suited to spatial filesystem navigation. Still, it'd be nice to still have the option, especially with AppImage doing a reasonably job of approximating the one-file-application paradigm of Macs.

The normal procedure of clicking on a folder result in redirecting the existing file management window to the new directory is the only functional way to operate. The behavior of creating a new window per directory inevitably creates too many window management tasks in terms of constantly closing extra windows.

Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.

The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.

Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.

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