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Preview.app fucking sucks. There are a handful of truly obnoxious sins that OS X commits, and not providing a graphics editing application with full access to t

Preview.app fucking sucks. There are a handful of truly obnoxious sins that OS X commits, and not providing a graphics editing application with full access to the pixel raster is one of them. Other sins include no trivial click path to instantiating an empty file on the desktop. One must open an application and either issue a command (touch or similar) or save an empty file with the application used (TextEdit.app for example). This is inconsistent with the fact that you can create folders in the context menu, but not files. OS X discourages thinking in terms of the file system in general, by dumbing down the interface with "shortcuts" like All My Files, and buries the root hard disk partition many layers deep, in the default interface, forcing users to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. This creates a natural bias against proper command of one's data, among novice users, and promotes sloppy, confused organizational skills and inefficient usage patterns that eat the fuck out of hard drive space, leading inexperienced users to purchase unnecessary upgrades, in order to solve behavioral problems in hardware. OS X also pushes users away from non-binary file formats, defaulting most formats to favor non-plain-text and targets closed formats that leave the user unable to look at file contents in a common universal manner. This leaves non-technical and less-technical users in a world where only "apps" can inform you of mere parts of your data. Again, users are not thinking in terms of files on disk, or discrete packets of information. Data lives in indescribale places at locations they often can only describe by "way finding" through pointing and clicking or tapping. There is no path, or tree, or name, or directory, or disk to these people, and thus no file or disk space to think of. Text resides is fields, images in albums or galleries, on and on. Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things. This is in many ways due to Android and iOS (which in turn influences OS X). Linux is hardly a presence in the desktop world. And now Windows is going the same way. Dark days ahead.

sneak 9y ago
What do you need empty files for?
- sjwright 9y ago
  I think he said they save you from having to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. Or something.
  - mschaef 9y ago
    Windows has had a mechanism for creating empty documents via the shell since Windows 95. I don't think I've ever found it useful. (Much like the ability to drag and drop text from WordPad to the desktop to make a clipping file.)
    - Clane 9y ago
      Coming from Windows all my life to OS X was a bit bumpy. I will say not being able to create a quick text document is so very mildly annoying. But I've learned to use Notes.app in place of my usual purposes for *.txt files unless I'm wanting to move some chunk of text data somewhere quickly outside of the walled garden of my Apple ecosystem.
  - Karunamon 9y ago
    I don't quite understand why you'd ever want to create a new file in this way, and I remember being baffled by it as a child when Win95 came out. Isn't it always going to be faster to open whatever application you want to create your file in (bonus: win+r on Windows, cmd-space on Mac) and just save the new file there? Creating the file first and then invoking the program by opening it with the GUI seems like a pathological workflow.
    - ozmodiar 9y ago
      I think it's to not have to relocate a folder in a Save As dialog. Sometimes I already have a folder open, and just want to create a new file then drag it into my editor because I know the Save As dialog is pointed elsewhere.
      - 9y ago
mschaef 9y ago
> Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things. They just have different ideas about what's important. Back in the early 1990's, I volunteered in the medical education office of a Houston area hospital. This is the office that ran the residency program responsible for training doctors. Important and life saving stuff. Anyway, one of the admins there was a DOS Wordperfect user with something like 10,000 files in a single directory on her hard disk. It wasn't the most efficient way of organizing files, but it worked for her and let her focus on the business of getting doctors trained.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Research on the 'ecology' of end user computing would be quite interesting and might inform future products. Personal anecdote: I put the date in yyyymmdd format in many of my file names for teaching documents so I can order by time easily. Gnome Shell when it first came out had an 'activity journal' feature (like Win XP I recollect) based on the zeitgeist functionality[1] which I found really handy. You could view your history, click a bar (like on wayback machine) and get the docs. A versioning system based on that would be wicked. Alas, this initiative seems to have died. [1] https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/tutorial-on-gnome-activity-journal-zeitgeist-and-sezen/ https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/...
sjwright 9y ago
What you describe as the "dumbing down" of the file system is the inherent consequence of multi-user operating systems, i.e. a bias towards the user's home folders; clearly done to help users better organise their documents. Meanwhile, power users are not even momentarily impeded, with key locations (such as the file system root) readily accessible from the Go menu. Or keyboard shortcuts. Or the terminal. Or from the dock, the sidebar, the desktop, the toolbar or anywhere else you wish, just by dragging it there. You only have to set this shit up once and it's there forever. Pixel editing graphic applications are free and plentiful on all major desktop operating systems. MacOS doesn't ship with one that suits your needs, but consider that Windows doesn't ship with one that suits my needs. Q.E.D. Your complaint that many end-users don't use computers the way you use computers is pure get off my lawn. Those young whippersnappers don't understand the motion of electrons or the byte endianness of various processor architectures? Back in my day, we had to punch holes into cards...
- wang_li 9y ago
  Also abstracting away the local storage device makes a cloud transition a lot easier.
  - tritium 9y ago
    a cloud transition I disagree that this is a "good" thing. Cloud being parlance for someone else's computer. This is not pure "get off my lawn" garbage. Try communicating how to save and transfer a protected zip file with sensitive data to pretty much any non-developer. These are essential tasks, and if you only socialize with technical folks, sure, everybody will be on the same page, but that leaves 90% (or more) of the rest of the world nearly clueless and left out in the cold. Whoops! EDIT: To elaborate, consider the palpable difference in technical confidence between Ed Snowden and Laura Poitras. Technical people often gasp at the things Snowden had to carefully explain. Realities that are painfully obvious to power users. This sort of skill differential is extremely common, and the amount of babying and hand-holding ordinary users often require is painful to behold. My claim is that the obscurity of essential activities is the root of this sort of thing. Editing raw pixels with precision, taken as a simple example.

sneak 9y ago

What do you need empty files for?

sjwright 9y ago
I think he said they save you from having to surface the usual affordances through several settings in multiple preferences menus. Or something.
- mschaef 9y ago
  Windows has had a mechanism for creating empty documents via the shell since Windows 95. I don't think I've ever found it useful. (Much like the ability to drag and drop text from WordPad to the desktop to make a clipping file.)
  - Clane 9y ago
    Coming from Windows all my life to OS X was a bit bumpy. I will say not being able to create a quick text document is so very mildly annoying. But I've learned to use Notes.app in place of my usual purposes for *.txt files unless I'm wanting to move some chunk of text data somewhere quickly outside of the walled garden of my Apple ecosystem.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  I don't quite understand why you'd ever want to create a new file in this way, and I remember being baffled by it as a child when Win95 came out. Isn't it always going to be faster to open whatever application you want to create your file in (bonus: win+r on Windows, cmd-space on Mac) and just save the new file there? Creating the file first and then invoking the program by opening it with the GUI seems like a pathological workflow.
  - ozmodiar 9y ago
    I think it's to not have to relocate a folder in a Save As dialog. Sometimes I already have a folder open, and just want to create a new file then drag it into my editor because I know the Save As dialog is pointed elsewhere.
    - 9y ago

mschaef 9y ago

> Have you met or spoken with younger non-technical people lately. They are lost and beyond clueless about a lot of important things. They just have different ideas about what's important. Back in the early 1990's, I volunteered in the medical education office of a Houston area hospital. This is the office that ran the residency program responsible for training doctors. Important and life saving stuff. Anyway, one of the admins there was a DOS Wordperfect user with something like 10,000 files in a single directory on her hard disk. It wasn't the most efficient way of organizing files, but it worked for her and let her focus on the business of getting doctors trained.

keithpeter 9y ago
Research on the 'ecology' of end user computing would be quite interesting and might inform future products. Personal anecdote: I put the date in yyyymmdd format in many of my file names for teaching documents so I can order by time easily. Gnome Shell when it first came out had an 'activity journal' feature (like Win XP I recollect) based on the zeitgeist functionality[1] which I found really handy. You could view your history, click a bar (like on wayback machine) and get the docs. A versioning system based on that would be wicked. Alas, this initiative seems to have died. [1] https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/tutorial-on-gnome-activity-journal-zeitgeist-and-sezen/ https://saravananthirumuruganathan.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/...

sjwright 9y ago

What you describe as the "dumbing down" of the file system is the inherent consequence of multi-user operating systems, i.e. a bias towards the user's home folders; clearly done to help users better organise their documents. Meanwhile, power users are not even momentarily impeded, with key locations (such as the file system root) readily accessible from the Go menu. Or keyboard shortcuts. Or the terminal. Or from the dock, the sidebar, the desktop, the toolbar or anywhere else you wish, just by dragging it there. You only have to set this shit up once and it's there forever. Pixel editing graphic applications are free and plentiful on all major desktop operating systems. MacOS doesn't ship with one that suits your needs, but consider that Windows doesn't ship with one that suits my needs. Q.E.D. Your complaint that many end-users don't use computers the way you use computers is pure get off my lawn. Those young whippersnappers don't understand the motion of electrons or the byte endianness of various processor architectures? Back in my day, we had to punch holes into cards...

wang_li 9y ago
Also abstracting away the local storage device makes a cloud transition a lot easier.
- tritium 9y ago
  a cloud transition I disagree that this is a "good" thing. Cloud being parlance for someone else's computer. This is not pure "get off my lawn" garbage. Try communicating how to save and transfer a protected zip file with sensitive data to pretty much any non-developer. These are essential tasks, and if you only socialize with technical folks, sure, everybody will be on the same page, but that leaves 90% (or more) of the rest of the world nearly clueless and left out in the cold. Whoops! EDIT: To elaborate, consider the palpable difference in technical confidence between Ed Snowden and Laura Poitras. Technical people often gasp at the things Snowden had to carefully explain. Realities that are painfully obvious to power users. This sort of skill differential is extremely common, and the amount of babying and hand-holding ordinary users often require is painful to behold. My claim is that the obscurity of essential activities is the root of this sort of thing. Editing raw pixels with precision, taken as a simple example.