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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 fold

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.
tritium 9y ago
Power users not being impeded is precisely my point, and you've made it for me. That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument. These kinds of features are not surfaced readily (existing many interactions deep, and not single gesture or action operations) or they are completely absent from the bundled operating system distribution, despite comprising essential utilities.
- mschaef 9y ago
  > That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument. You're making the assumption that people, general users, even care about these features. What evidence do you have that this is the case? Everything I've seen indicates most people have other things that are much more important to them than open text-based file formats or hierarchical directory structures for locally storing files.
  - tritium 9y ago
    Okay a very simple way to add context to my claims, to prove that these are intrisic features of any operating environment that must function without network access, as a standalone system, is to look at how internet-based entities replicate similar bahaviors to enable web based collaboration. Proving my point is the existence of URL shorteners (as analagous to file names and paths on a local machine) and plain text snippet sharing sites such as pastebin (as analogous to users passing plain text snippets on a shared standalone system). So too with pixel editing. This is a fundamental aspect of an operating environment, and one that Preview.app performs inadequately at, and the likes of which OS X does not otherwise support natively. Does my flimsy opinion hold water yet?
    - sjwright 9y ago
      Asserting that pixel editing is "fundamental aspect of an operating environment" is not just flimsy, it's highly subjective at best and entirely without substance. Windows doesn't have a bash shell, an NFS client, a PDF annotation tool, or instant file previews; I'd consider these far more serious omissions.

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.

tritium 9y ago

Power users not being impeded is precisely my point, and you've made it for me. That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument. These kinds of features are not surfaced readily (existing many interactions deep, and not single gesture or action operations) or they are completely absent from the bundled operating system distribution, despite comprising essential utilities.

mschaef 9y ago
> That these features are considered "advanced" and thus buried is my argument. You're making the assumption that people, general users, even care about these features. What evidence do you have that this is the case? Everything I've seen indicates most people have other things that are much more important to them than open text-based file formats or hierarchical directory structures for locally storing files.
- tritium 9y ago
  Okay a very simple way to add context to my claims, to prove that these are intrisic features of any operating environment that must function without network access, as a standalone system, is to look at how internet-based entities replicate similar bahaviors to enable web based collaboration. Proving my point is the existence of URL shorteners (as analagous to file names and paths on a local machine) and plain text snippet sharing sites such as pastebin (as analogous to users passing plain text snippets on a shared standalone system). So too with pixel editing. This is a fundamental aspect of an operating environment, and one that Preview.app performs inadequately at, and the likes of which OS X does not otherwise support natively. Does my flimsy opinion hold water yet?
  - sjwright 9y ago
    Asserting that pixel editing is "fundamental aspect of an operating environment" is not just flimsy, it's highly subjective at best and entirely without substance. Windows doesn't have a bash shell, an NFS client, a PDF annotation tool, or instant file previews; I'd consider these far more serious omissions.