3 ms·

I remember studying and the difference was not only about interaction but a general impact on the user. I always found MacOS Finder's spatial file placement a

• eru 2y ago
  'Interface' used to encompass all these things. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43396140 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43396140
• rat87 2y ago
  Spatial file placement is probably not even good on the desktop. In a file manager its definitely an antipattern
  • dsego 2y ago
    I think on earlier windows (95 maybe?) opening a folder would also always open in a new explorer window so you had the impression that the window is actually the folder you are opening. Whereas today we're more used to the browsing metaphor where the window "chrome" is separate from the content. I also don't think today it's useful to have the spatial metaphor, but it probably made more sense back then.
    • rat87 2y ago
      People get way into this desktop metaphor. A window is a program window not an actual window. A folder is not the same as a folder in a filing cabinet and a save icon is a save icon not a floppy disk.they dont have to stand for or emulate physical things
      • 6510 2y ago
        I had my folders themed on win 95. It is kinda hard to explain but the color schemes and images trigger a lot of mental background processes related to the stuff in the folder. Just seeing a green grid on a black background would load a cached version of the folder in my head and alt-tab into a linked mental process that would continue where I left it.
        • dsego 2y ago
          I think we need more visual cues for common operations to give more assurance and reinforce the action. For example, recently I was trying to back up some photos from an android phone by plugging it into a windows machine and copying files over. I already had an older version copied from before, and I was surprised that the copy action resulted in the same number of files after I selected "skip" in the dialogue. What happened was that I probably tried to copy from windows to android by mistake. With everything looking the same it's easy to miss things and have the wrong mental model of what is about to happen. It would be great to have more feedback for actions like this, maybe show the full paths, show the disk/device icons with a big fat arrow for the copying direction or something. Basically the copy/move dialog is the same for 10 files and 10,000 files, same for copying between devices and within the folder... and it will happily overwrite any files if you click the wrong option by mistake. And unlike trashing files I am not sure it's possible to undo the action.
      • shadowgovt 2y ago
        Historically, it's both, which is how we got here. The Xerox demo was definitely trying to make near-as-possible 1-to-1 correspondences because their entire approach was "discovery is easier if the UI abstractions are couched in known physical abstractions." UIs that hewed very closely to the original Xerox demo did things like pop open one window per folder (because when you open a folder and there's a folder inside, you still have the original folder). As time went on and users became more comfortable with computerized abstractions in general, much of that fluff fell by the wayside. MacOSX system 7, for instance, would open one window per double-click by default; modern desktop MacOS opens a folder into the current window, with the option to command-double-click it to open it into its own... tab? (Thanks browsers; you made users comfortable enough with tabbed windows that this is a metaphor the file system browser can adopt!).
• anilakar 2y ago
  OSX has had the striped progress bar for hard-to-estimate processes as long as I remember. Did they do away with it? There are situations where I don't exactly care how far something has progressed but I want to see that it at least has not hung. Fedora's dnf doing SELinux autorelabeling for two hours without any indication of progress is one of those things I hate with passion.
  • account42 2y ago
    The only real indication of progress being made is a log output of steps completed. All a spinner or similar indicator tells you is that the UI thread is not hung but that isn't really useful information.
    • anilakar 2y ago
      Obviously in the ideal case indicator animation would be tied to something else, like background process sending output, and there would be a textual description next to it.
    • lupusreal 2y ago
      Scrolling logs scare common people. I don't know why.
    • 6510 2y ago
      In the 90's I had this idea that in the future steps completed would be confirmed to the server so that the progress can be calculated for other users. Like, on system A downloading step 1 takes 1 minute and step 2 takes 3 minutes. If on system B step 1 takes 1.5 minutes step 2 should take 4.5. Do the same for stuff that requires processing. But we apparently chose to make things complicated in other ways.
  • xlii 2y ago
    There's still progress bar on update and there's timer (but not always). The timer also jumps. Once I had ~40 minutes update that was hope-feeding me with "2 minutes left" for most of the time. My guess is that it's not worth optimizing, but nowadays I shy from updates if I don't have 2h of time buffer (not because I am afraid something will break, but because I know I'll be locked out).
• tambourine_man 2y ago
  You can turn off auto update. I update my Mac when I can, not when it decides.
  • bookofjoe 2y ago
    Bonus: if you do that you don't have to deal with disabling new Apple Intelligence "features" every time.