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"From a visual standpoint, there might be very little difference between a feature that is not visible and a feature that is out of the way. Conceptually, this

"From a visual standpoint, there might be very little difference between a feature that is not visible and a feature that is out of the way. Conceptually, this is a big deal instead. A feature that is not visible and your only way to find it is by reading about it somewhere, or seeing a video tutorial, is something undiscoverable and poorly executed." Apple has been doing this since the first Mac. Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done. For example: They knew all about the Star and Smalltalk and friends, which had a consistent use of three mouse buttons for actions, cut and paste, whatever. Apple instead insisted on the false simplicity of a one button mouse, which doomed future users to a maze of difficult to remember modifier-click finger Twister instead.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done. I don't feel like this is true. One thing I'm consistently impressed by in the original MacOS is how well the chosen abstractions map to the actual way things are. There are some exceptions, like the trash can and its famous relationship with removable media, but on the whole it works a lot better than what we have today.
- dhimes 7y ago
  I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse. There's a similar "swipe a surface that doesn't look like an active surface" trip on the apple TV remote as well. I may be old-fashioned, but those are very unintuitive in my estimation and I consider them poor design. The look good in pictures, though. I love, however, my iphone 11. There's somehow more of a conceptual root to all of it- to the point that after I had it for two weeks and someone asked me if I missed the home button I really couldn't remember what all the home button did. I do have to fool around with it to get a screen shot, but it was the same with the home button. Could never remember the order of operations. It does feel sometimes like it's "design first- hack the UI" though with Apple and it leads to a few annoyances.
  - majormajor 7y ago
    > I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse. This feels like some user-specific customization. The ctrl-click context-menu right-click-substitute has been around since 1997 (Mac OS 8), and various Apple input devices have had different sort of "right click shortcuts" since then (at least after 2007 or so? it took a while) but I don't know of a tap-to-right-click default. "Click the right side of the apparently-buttonless-mouse" and "two finger click" are the most well-known. None of these are intuitive - the context menu stuff was a power user thing in the Mac world in the late 90s), but fairly unchanging.
    - dhimes 7y ago
      Maybe I was tapping and not brushing.
greggman3 7y ago
There was an explicit advice in the famous Apple Interface Guidelines that a good user interface should have all features be discoverable. The quintessential example was most things should appear in the menus but the menus will tell you about hotkeys. That was on contrast to DOS programs of the day where there were no menus and you were required to read the manual to even get started.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

> Make things simple and pretty on the surface for the happy path, but overly simple, so that there's a bunch of secrets to get actual tasks done. I don't feel like this is true. One thing I'm consistently impressed by in the original MacOS is how well the chosen abstractions map to the actual way things are. There are some exceptions, like the trash can and its famous relationship with removable media, but on the whole it works a lot better than what we have today.

dhimes 7y ago
I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse. There's a similar "swipe a surface that doesn't look like an active surface" trip on the apple TV remote as well. I may be old-fashioned, but those are very unintuitive in my estimation and I consider them poor design. The look good in pictures, though. I love, however, my iphone 11. There's somehow more of a conceptual root to all of it- to the point that after I had it for two weeks and someone asked me if I missed the home button I really couldn't remember what all the home button did. I do have to fool around with it to get a screen shot, but it was the same with the home button. Could never remember the order of operations. It does feel sometimes like it's "design first- hack the UI" though with Apple and it leads to a few annoyances.
- majormajor 7y ago
  > I found this true of the mouse on a Mac. Which one? I don't know- it was my cousin's. I don't remember the details but I was looking for a context menu to do some normal context-menu-y stuff like adjust the size of a picture or something- or maybe save a picture in a browser. I couldn't for the life of me figure it out (and I cut my teeth on a Mac+, had all the Inside Macintosh books, fooled around with assembly language programming, and so on). Then my hand accidentally brushed the mouse. Turned out, to get the context menu, you had to brush the mouse. This feels like some user-specific customization. The ctrl-click context-menu right-click-substitute has been around since 1997 (Mac OS 8), and various Apple input devices have had different sort of "right click shortcuts" since then (at least after 2007 or so? it took a while) but I don't know of a tap-to-right-click default. "Click the right side of the apparently-buttonless-mouse" and "two finger click" are the most well-known. None of these are intuitive - the context menu stuff was a power user thing in the Mac world in the late 90s), but fairly unchanging.
  - dhimes 7y ago
    Maybe I was tapping and not brushing.

greggman3 7y ago

There was an explicit advice in the famous Apple Interface Guidelines that a good user interface should have all features be discoverable. The quintessential example was most things should appear in the menus but the menus will tell you about hotkeys. That was on contrast to DOS programs of the day where there were no menus and you were required to read the manual to even get started.