5 ms·
Am I the only one who has always thought of the Apple UI to have always been form over function/usability by a long shot? I remember the first time I used an i
by koyote 11y ago
Am I the only one who has always thought of the Apple UI to have always been form over function/usability by a long shot?
I remember the first time I used an iMac: I spent about half an hour trying to figure out how to eject a CD. A context menu might not look very elegant but it's insanely useful and powerful and very easy to get the hang of.
In the end I had to be told/taught that the way to eject the CD on a mac was to move the CD icon on the desktop to the trash (in the days of CD-RW drives, you'd think this would erase the CD).
That, to me, is the sheer definition of an un-discoverable feature.
The iPhone's lack of back button (and the fact that apps are very inconsistent in their back button placements) has brought me similar pains in getting simple things done.
- tatx 11y agoThat Apple was ever good at design was probably the relative side effect of other software and hardware developers being abysmally bad at it (probably due to monopolistic inefficiencies). And now that the competition is heating up and challenging Apple on the design front, the flaws that earlier would have been swept under the carpet by ardent fans, including me, are becoming difficult to disregard.
- Bud 11y agoUh, no. It's because they valued design highly, made it an indispensable part of their company, hired great designers, and gave designers like Jony Ive extraordinary power to shape products. BTW, what flaws, precisely, have now magically become "difficult to disregard", but were entirely invisible before? Just a couple examples will do.
- digi_owl 11y agoNah, Jobs didn't know much about hardware or software but he was a stickler for appearance.
- drumdance 11y agoYeah I remember being confused by the drag-to-trash metaphor too, except in my case we were still using floppy disks and I thought "are you sure this won't erase my term paper?"
- frik 11y agoFloppy drives had a mechanical eject push-button and there was no unix-style "mount" afaik.
- Drdrdrq 11y agoOn unix at least (linux and aix) there was mount / umount of a floppy, which should always be done before removing it from the slot. Linux couldn't force you though, but it was good practice.
- digi_owl 11y agoDepends, you could mount it with the sync option. This would make all writes happen right away. Not recommended on FAT formated flash devices btw, as it will cause massive amounts of writes to the table.
- afandian 11y agoI don't know which floppy drives you used, but the ones I did had no push-button. It was software only. I skimmed through the models in Wikipedia and couldn't see any with manual ejects. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Macintosh_Performa_5200.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/df/Macintos... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Macintosh_Performa_6300.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Macintos... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Macintosh_LC_630.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Macintos... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Macintosh_quadra_605_warm.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8e/Macintos... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Power_Macintosh_8500_150.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Power_Ma...
- digi_owl 11y agoI don't think he was thinking about Mac. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Floppy_Disk_Drive_SDF-321B.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/Floppy_D...
- fyolnish 11y agoFrom the menubar: "Special" → "Eject"
- mhurron 11y agoCommand-E