When I say Afferbeck Lauder [1] I mean "alphabetical order" [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afferbeck_Lauder
Those are beautiful, thank you for posting them
When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
121–130 of 385 posts
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#122I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…
I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…
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Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIL they are called "hives". Windows Registry is an interesting thing. Even casual users have to interactive with it once or twice w/o fully understand it. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/sysinfo/regi...
Raymond Chen explained why a registry file is called a “hive”: Because one of the original developers of Windows NT hated bees. So the developer who was responsible for the registry snuck in as many bee references as he could. A registry file is called a “hive”, and registry data are stored in “cells”, which is what honeycombs are made of. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030808-00/?p=42...
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#124Why is the author so perplexed by it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_sort_order It's simply natural sorting. I don't see what is so controversial about it.
I find the term "natural" to be inadequate here, there is nothing natural about sorting strings in this particular fashion compared to another. It should be given a more descriptive name, like "Number-aware alphabetic" or something like that as to actually give a hint about what it does.
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#125I have the same problem on Nemo. More specifically, I had made a small app that displayed files of a directory in alphabetical order, and then when I look at it in Nemo it isn't the same order because I didn't implement their smart algorithm.
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#126>Well, apparently all these operating systems have decided that no, users are too dumb and they cannot possibly understand what alphabetical order means.
i really really hate this framing, and i see it far too often. no, the operating system developers did not make a value judgement about their users. they observed their users to find out what behaviour was expected, and they designed the behaviour of the system to match the behaviour that the majority of users expect.
and then you made an incorrect assumption about how the system works, and decided that your incorrect assumption means everybody else is dumb and you're the only smart person in this situation?
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#127This is reminding me of the whole "Worse is better" essay and debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916370 The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want. For their purposes, they've assumed something about the implementation, to the point that a convenience feature is actually a misfeature for them. But the author her…
>Understanding the target audience for your product results in very different design decisions
This is an excuse. Just add an option to sort both ways. It isn't hard.
There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features. Even if you had the features under an "advanced mode" UI that's still a better software than not having the feature in first place.
Have people forgotten the 80/20 rule? Most features will be used by only a small slice of users, that doesn't mean they're out of scope.
Sorry, I'm just kind of exhausted of software not being able to do the most obvious things because it didn't align to some perfect vision of how the user should be.
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#128Maybe it's just me but I don't miss this at all: Image-1.jpg Image-11.jpg Image-2.jpg The only time natural sort bit me was with nonsensical names like .jpg
I think it depends on the person. That order is exactly what I expect and want.
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#129This got me riled up to the point where I blew a gasket and just can't.. I agree with the article. I liked computers better when everyone hated them, and for the reasons they hated them..
I agree that the base functionality of just sorting character by character can be occasionally useful. However I would really be interested in seeing why you believe this to be the correct choice for user-facing graphical file managers, as its evident problems with typical usage seem more salient compared to the edge cases as illustrated in the article.
Re: When I say “alphabetical order”, I mean “alphabetical order”
#130I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…
Agreed.What's more, the idea that people learn to put leading zeros is wrong and impractical, unless you know in advance how many digits you need. When you go from version 5.9.17 to 5.10.0 you don't go back and relabel every existing folder as 5.09.17. The today standard way of sorting is well defined, unambiguous, and natural. Lexographic has its place, but user facing interfaces ain't it.
No
Just no
User interfaces that try to be cleaver are a pita.
Keep it simple, and avoid the confusion with corner cases that otherwise will baffle users. Like this