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I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. At least from

I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal. Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. Or looking up words in the built-in dictionary. The amount of effort the mac team invested to re-use ux interaction modes is really crazy coming from other platforms, and it extends to abstractions such as disk images. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you could clone mac volumes to usb or firewire disks, boot from them, clone volumes to compressed images and restore them - all seamlessly, without messing with disk sizes, sectors, boot records or bioses - and it would just magically work. Granted, the story is no longer that easy with APFS and M1/M2 macs, but I still think this is a bar that no other operating system has reached.

doix 4y ago
> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive. > Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works". > Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt? > Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. This is pretty universal. > Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.
- sirn 4y ago
  >I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk. For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc. This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
    And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.
    - andrekandre 4y ago
      and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...
    - sirn 4y ago
      It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).
scaredginger 4y ago
I think the key is that macs are optimised for this workflow. As someone who uses the terminal a lot, I often find it difficult to get the information I want from any GUI, compared to piping terminal output through different utilities. After all, if you're talking about consistency, you cannot beat the UNIX philosophy. However, most people would balk at this workflow. Workflows are just very personal and a reflection of how one thinks. How one thinks is also influenced from what they've used in the past, especially in formative years. Trying to justify why any user interface as unequivocally better than another is an exercise in futility.
jeswin 4y ago
I have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even Gnome due to the accompanying legacy baggage. Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.
- tpush 4y ago
  Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.
- ubercow13 4y ago
  >Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document. Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going. Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document. The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.
lynndotpy 4y ago
> At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal. I'm having a hard time understanding this, even with your examples. It might be possible that I simply haven't figured out the primitives, or an underlying logic to the OS? In my experience, MacOS is the worst offender (excluding Windows) of inconsistencies. MacOS is filled with UI elements that, as far as I can tell, only appear once. (For example, the green 'status light' when activating SSH, compared to the slider buttons used everywhere else in the OS.) My experience is roughly ~5 years MacOS (mostly as a child), ~10 years Windows, ~10 years Linux. In all, it feels like Apple demands a "larger" language one needs to learn, compared to various Linux distros.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
I do agree with a lot of this. What should not be forgotten, however, is how much of the basic UX primitives are being thrown away with the new Catalyst iOS style apps.

doix 4y ago

> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives. Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive. > Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work. Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works". > Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries. Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt? > Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides. This is pretty universal. > Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets. I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.

ethanbond 4y ago
IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.
sirn 4y ago
>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens. On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk. For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc. This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.
- jemmyw 4y ago
  And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...
  - sirn 4y ago
    It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).

scaredginger 4y ago

I think the key is that macs are optimised for this workflow. As someone who uses the terminal a lot, I often find it difficult to get the information I want from any GUI, compared to piping terminal output through different utilities. After all, if you're talking about consistency, you cannot beat the UNIX philosophy. However, most people would balk at this workflow. Workflows are just very personal and a reflection of how one thinks. How one thinks is also influenced from what they've used in the past, especially in formative years. Trying to justify why any user interface as unequivocally better than another is an exercise in futility.

jeswin 4y ago

I have used/owned the macs at various points in my life. The user interface has remained consistent over the years, but it has poor usability compared to even Gnome due to the accompanying legacy baggage. Here's an example. Closing all document windows doesn't close the app. This is a design decision from 1984 (at which point we knew far less about the usability of Desktop UIs than we do now) which imho hasn't quite aged well. What's the point of keeping an app open without documents? Most people open docs from the File Manager or Desktop (which might load the app as well if there isn't one already running). And not by going to an inactive app (with a hanging toolbar) and then doing File -> Open.

tpush 4y ago
Not closing the app once all windows are closed is not 'legacy baggage', but intentional design. An app can do more things than just display stuff in windows, e.g. playing music, or downloading stuff.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  It may be less intuitive that apps can run with few or no visual indicators.
ubercow13 4y ago
>Closing all document windows doesn't close the app I love this about macos. Its consistent: eg, you close documents with cmd+w one by one, until they're all gone. Then you press cmd+n to create a new document. This is consistent and logical. On other OS, cmd/ctrl+w does something different if you're closing the last document. Another example of the inconsistency it causes is in browsers when you close the last tab and it asks you "closing the browser will cancel the in-progress download, are you sure?" and so you have to keep an arbitrary tab/document open to keep background downloads going. Also in a practical sense it is useful for slow-starting applications to be running and ready to load a document without needing to keep open a blank document. The equivalent behaviour on other systems is achieved by MDI applications which are much less elegant IMO. Or for apps that have to keep running but don't have a specific window to show, they implement something similar to mac anyway where the application appears in the system tray.

lynndotpy 4y ago

> At least from my experience with ~15 years of mac, ~15 years of on-and-off linux and windows, macOS has remained more consistent, because the primitives are much more universal. I'm having a hard time understanding this, even with your examples. It might be possible that I simply haven't figured out the primitives, or an underlying logic to the OS? In my experience, MacOS is the worst offender (excluding Windows) of inconsistencies. MacOS is filled with UI elements that, as far as I can tell, only appear once. (For example, the green 'status light' when activating SSH, compared to the slider buttons used everywhere else in the OS.) My experience is roughly ~5 years MacOS (mostly as a child), ~10 years Windows, ~10 years Linux. In all, it feels like Apple demands a "larger" language one needs to learn, compared to various Linux distros.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

I do agree with a lot of this. What should not be forgotten, however, is how much of the basic UX primitives are being thrown away with the new Catalyst iOS style apps.