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intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad) And yet my dad is constantly confused and frustrated by all these gestures he keeps invoking by accide

intuitive and easy for inexperienced users (like a iPad) And yet my dad is constantly confused and frustrated by all these gestures he keeps invoking by accident. In truth, iOS is loaded with power user features that constantly surprise beginners. The same is true for macOS with all of its trackpad gestures and complicated windowing features. The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS. It had a consistent user interface backed by extensive research into human-computer interaction. It used powerful spatial metaphors that worked with the brain’s spatial memory [1], not against it like today’s “smart” systems that try to guess what the user wants. [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

ineedasername 7y ago
>The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS This is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing, inserting their own preference in place of Classic Mac OS. For your typical user, I'd wager it will often be the OS to which they were first exposed. (though certainly not always) Personally, I rather liked Windows 3.11. It did everything I needed at the time, and it was simple enough that I could hold pretty much the entire abstraction of it's configurations, settings, features, etc in my own mental space. Windows 95 was... okay. I managed to skip ME and Vista. In contrast, Classic Mac OS seemed like a "pretty" OS that crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues that often required disabling "extensions" and re-enabling them in groups to find the offending one. Until then, you'd experience the supremely unhelpful "type 10 bomb" hard crash. Windows BSOD was annoying, but I hated those bombs.
- chongli 7y ago
  crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues Oh there’s no question that Classic Mac OS crashed a lot. The underlying technology left a lot to be desired. That’s really beside the point though. None of crashes were caused by the UI design. They were due to a lack of protected memory and corruption of preference files, along with the ad hoc extensions system you mentioned. These problems could all have been solved without abandoning the truly easy-to-use UI. Modern macOS continues to have a lot of very difficult-to-troubleshoot problems. They don’t usually cause the system to crash, but they’re very annoying to deal with nonetheless. A common one I keep having is random processes using 100% CPU for no readily apparent reason. Take one look at Activity Monitor (or Task Manager on Windows) and you’ll see dozens or even hundreds of processes running in the background. How the heck is my dad supposed to troubleshoot that? He won’t! He’ll notice his computer running hot and battery draining rapidly and ask me to figure it out for him.
  - rileymat2 7y ago
    With modern macOs the battery meter shows applications using a lot of power, and it has its own tab in Activity monitor.
    - chongli 7y ago
      I use that feature every day. It doesn't solve the problem of random services like cloudphotod occasionally deciding to use 100% CPU for a few hours in a row. Killing the process in Activity Monitor just causes it to restart immediately.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  > his is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing Maybe, but they'd be wrong. I didn't grow up using classic Mac OS much, but in hindsight I'd definitely agree that it put more thought into user interaction than anything else I've ever used.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    You cut off an important bit there, cherry picking a part of my comment, which makes it seem like I had made a sweeping generalization. I specifically stipulated that it didn't apply in all cases.

ineedasername 7y ago

>The last truly user friendly operating system was Classic Mac OS This is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing, inserting their own preference in place of Classic Mac OS. For your typical user, I'd wager it will often be the OS to which they were first exposed. (though certainly not always) Personally, I rather liked Windows 3.11. It did everything I needed at the time, and it was simple enough that I could hold pretty much the entire abstraction of it's configurations, settings, features, etc in my own mental space. Windows 95 was... okay. I managed to skip ME and Vista. In contrast, Classic Mac OS seemed like a "pretty" OS that crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues that often required disabling "extensions" and re-enabling them in groups to find the offending one. Until then, you'd experience the supremely unhelpful "type 10 bomb" hard crash. Windows BSOD was annoying, but I hated those bombs.

chongli 7y ago
crashed for difficult to troubleshoot issues Oh there’s no question that Classic Mac OS crashed a lot. The underlying technology left a lot to be desired. That’s really beside the point though. None of crashes were caused by the UI design. They were due to a lack of protected memory and corruption of preference files, along with the ad hoc extensions system you mentioned. These problems could all have been solved without abandoning the truly easy-to-use UI. Modern macOS continues to have a lot of very difficult-to-troubleshoot problems. They don’t usually cause the system to crash, but they’re very annoying to deal with nonetheless. A common one I keep having is random processes using 100% CPU for no readily apparent reason. Take one look at Activity Monitor (or Task Manager on Windows) and you’ll see dozens or even hundreds of processes running in the background. How the heck is my dad supposed to troubleshoot that? He won’t! He’ll notice his computer running hot and battery draining rapidly and ask me to figure it out for him.
- rileymat2 7y ago
  With modern macOs the battery meter shows applications using a lot of power, and it has its own tab in Activity monitor.
  - chongli 7y ago
    I use that feature every day. It doesn't solve the problem of random services like cloudphotod occasionally deciding to use 100% CPU for a few hours in a row. Killing the process in Activity Monitor just causes it to restart immediately.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
> his is a statement for which you're like to find people for most every operating system saying the same thing Maybe, but they'd be wrong. I didn't grow up using classic Mac OS much, but in hindsight I'd definitely agree that it put more thought into user interaction than anything else I've ever used.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  You cut off an important bit there, cherry picking a part of my comment, which makes it seem like I had made a sweeping generalization. I specifically stipulated that it didn't apply in all cases.