4 ms·

I completely agree with some of what you're saying but it's criticisms like "There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Doc

by Osmium 14y ago

I completely agree with some of what you're saying but it's criticisms like "There's NO way to get to the hard drive: they just hide everything and give you Documents, Pictures, etc...." that seem misguided: of course you should hide the inner workings of the OS from the average user, but it's absolutely trivial for anybody to see their hard drive if they want to (including hidden files). The easiest of which doesn't require any advanced knowledge, but is just a matter of going into Finder preferences and checking "Show these items on the desktop: [] Hard disks" Criticising Apple for hiding things that the average user shouldn't know about seems to be getting in the way of completely valid criticisms like what you say about OS X needing a more modern FS.

VonGuard 14y ago
I agree, Apple can hide things to make the OS less complex. But what irritates me is that, as a user, I upgrade to the new OS, and the most basic of functionalities is hidden from me. They've literally taken something away. You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore. Is it not unreasonable to think that your users might want to be able to do this as you've had this hard-drive-on-desktop paradigm for well over 30 years now? I'm glad there's a check box to show the computer on the desktop now. I would never have found that. I mean, 30 years of interface paradigms teaching me to make an alias or simlink there was obviously just some mental retardation on my part...
- taligent 14y ago
  > obviously just some mental retardation on my part. Well I am not going to disagree with you on that point. There has ALWAYS been a way to have your hard disk on your desktop.
- craigyk 14y ago
  What? My mounted volumes show up just fine on my desktop?
- epochwolf 14y ago
  > You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore. Open finder. Hit Cmd + , to bring up the preferences. Click the Hard Disks checkbox.
tolmasky 14y ago
Its somewhat strange to on the one hand argue that the OS should be super simple (so simple as to hide the hard drive from the user), and in the next breath describe changing a preference as trivial: its not, stuff like that is really confusing to precisely those non-computer people -- especially Finder preferences which is often confused with System Preferences or Finder's other preferences (known as "View Options"). The argument is not that Apple should not make things easy. It is that Apple is increasingly doing this in the laziest way possible as opposed to actually thinking about the problem. The hard drive is confusing? Oh just hide it by default and add a preference. Ugh. They used to hate preferences, now there's one for strange trivial stuff.
- CognitiveLens 14y ago
  I realize this is flogging a dead horse, but the point is that the OS is super simple for novices/casual users, but is trivially adjustable for power users. It doesn't matter if those adjustments are confusing to non-computer people - that can be a good thing - but it's nice that with a bit of computer knowledge, you can essentially be running a solid Unix machine with a pretty, though not universally perfect, interface.
  - tolmasky 14y ago
    My point is that I don't think (from my own experience), that these things have necessarily been made any more understandable in OS X land by half-porting some of these iOS metaphors. My concern is precisely that the experience really has not gotten much easier for novices, but more convoluted by competing ideas of the way computers should work shoved together. Let's look at the hard drive example in more detail. What did we lose by hiding the hard drive? Arguably the most important thing was access to Apps. This has been a critique of OS X for a while, that the main way to access Apps is this strange folder that lives in the hard drive. Perfectly fair thing to want to fix. Spotlight made it simpler to launch for pros, but you can't expect the primary way to launch an app to go from recognizing an icon to remembering the name and typing it into a textfield that appears when you click on the top right, especially if the goal is to move to a world where people buy LOTS of apps. So to remove the hard drive, you need another easy "visual" way of moving through your apps. What they chose to do was introduce the "application picker mode" to replicate the home screen of iOS. But the problem is that this is NOT the home screen of OS X, and so the experience is jarring and scary vs. a safe place to return to. Perhaps had they done something bold and said, look, by default now this is what you look at, then maybe it would have been interesting. Instead it is literally a bolted on feature. In iOS, there is no question how to launch an app, you see them all in front of you. In OS X, you start with a strangely empty desktop and a few "blessed" apps in the dock, and you are supposed to divine that a chrome spaceship means "show me the rest of my apps" Or perhaps you are supposed to figure out that a five finger gesture does that. I have not done extensive user studies of course (but then again, neither has Apple), but I have witnessed this feeling scary to people like my mother. They don't know how to get out of it and are afraid to touch anything. It is not the safe "home" of iOS, it is the exact opposite: bizarro desktop-is-blurred-out mode. Touching most things on the screen now leads to launching some application, and since OS X comes standard with a ton of apps you'll never use, the app they launch is probably a random app they've never heard of which results in me getting a phone call asking whether they should be scared because they launched Time Machine or Game Center or some other thing. Again, my point is not that Apple is not worrying about novice users, its that these features feel exactly like a pro user lazily saying "fine they want iOS, here's iOS". Apple understood that desktop metaphors wouldn't necessarily work on a phone, that's why they took the time to think up new ones. It would be nice if they'd also realize that phone metaphors don't always work on the desktop. Or at least think these things through a little more before just dumping them in. I 100% think there is a system that is 1000 times easier to comprehend for people and hides the hard drive in a way where the common user will never need or care for it. OS X is NOT that system.
lutorm 14y ago
The file system hierarchy exists for a reason: to organize information. Having the UI hide that organization in the name of "simplicity" and display it as a flattened list defies explanation. The users that can't handle a hierarchical structure probably just puts all files on the Desktop anyway, so what's the advantage here?
- taligent 14y ago
  Please. By all means explain how seeing /etc, /usr, /private, /var benefits the ordinary user.
  - VonGuard 14y ago
    Well, seeing their own logs in some sort of anti theft scenario?

by Osmium 14y ago

VonGuard 14y ago

I agree, Apple can hide things to make the OS less complex. But what irritates me is that, as a user, I upgrade to the new OS, and the most basic of functionalities is hidden from me. They've literally taken something away. You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore. Is it not unreasonable to think that your users might want to be able to do this as you've had this hard-drive-on-desktop paradigm for well over 30 years now? I'm glad there's a check box to show the computer on the desktop now. I would never have found that. I mean, 30 years of interface paradigms teaching me to make an alias or simlink there was obviously just some mental retardation on my part...

taligent 14y ago
> obviously just some mental retardation on my part. Well I am not going to disagree with you on that point. There has ALWAYS been a way to have your hard disk on your desktop.
craigyk 14y ago
What? My mounted volumes show up just fine on my desktop?
epochwolf 14y ago
> You cannot put a link to your compputer or hard drive on the desktop anymore. Open finder. Hit Cmd + , to bring up the preferences. Click the Hard Disks checkbox.

tolmasky 14y ago

Its somewhat strange to on the one hand argue that the OS should be super simple (so simple as to hide the hard drive from the user), and in the next breath describe changing a preference as trivial: its not, stuff like that is really confusing to precisely those non-computer people -- especially Finder preferences which is often confused with System Preferences or Finder's other preferences (known as "View Options"). The argument is not that Apple should not make things easy. It is that Apple is increasingly doing this in the laziest way possible as opposed to actually thinking about the problem. The hard drive is confusing? Oh just hide it by default and add a preference. Ugh. They used to hate preferences, now there's one for strange trivial stuff.

CognitiveLens 14y ago
I realize this is flogging a dead horse, but the point is that the OS is super simple for novices/casual users, but is trivially adjustable for power users. It doesn't matter if those adjustments are confusing to non-computer people - that can be a good thing - but it's nice that with a bit of computer knowledge, you can essentially be running a solid Unix machine with a pretty, though not universally perfect, interface.
- tolmasky 14y ago
  My point is that I don't think (from my own experience), that these things have necessarily been made any more understandable in OS X land by half-porting some of these iOS metaphors. My concern is precisely that the experience really has not gotten much easier for novices, but more convoluted by competing ideas of the way computers should work shoved together. Let's look at the hard drive example in more detail. What did we lose by hiding the hard drive? Arguably the most important thing was access to Apps. This has been a critique of OS X for a while, that the main way to access Apps is this strange folder that lives in the hard drive. Perfectly fair thing to want to fix. Spotlight made it simpler to launch for pros, but you can't expect the primary way to launch an app to go from recognizing an icon to remembering the name and typing it into a textfield that appears when you click on the top right, especially if the goal is to move to a world where people buy LOTS of apps. So to remove the hard drive, you need another easy "visual" way of moving through your apps. What they chose to do was introduce the "application picker mode" to replicate the home screen of iOS. But the problem is that this is NOT the home screen of OS X, and so the experience is jarring and scary vs. a safe place to return to. Perhaps had they done something bold and said, look, by default now this is what you look at, then maybe it would have been interesting. Instead it is literally a bolted on feature. In iOS, there is no question how to launch an app, you see them all in front of you. In OS X, you start with a strangely empty desktop and a few "blessed" apps in the dock, and you are supposed to divine that a chrome spaceship means "show me the rest of my apps" Or perhaps you are supposed to figure out that a five finger gesture does that. I have not done extensive user studies of course (but then again, neither has Apple), but I have witnessed this feeling scary to people like my mother. They don't know how to get out of it and are afraid to touch anything. It is not the safe "home" of iOS, it is the exact opposite: bizarro desktop-is-blurred-out mode. Touching most things on the screen now leads to launching some application, and since OS X comes standard with a ton of apps you'll never use, the app they launch is probably a random app they've never heard of which results in me getting a phone call asking whether they should be scared because they launched Time Machine or Game Center or some other thing. Again, my point is not that Apple is not worrying about novice users, its that these features feel exactly like a pro user lazily saying "fine they want iOS, here's iOS". Apple understood that desktop metaphors wouldn't necessarily work on a phone, that's why they took the time to think up new ones. It would be nice if they'd also realize that phone metaphors don't always work on the desktop. Or at least think these things through a little more before just dumping them in. I 100% think there is a system that is 1000 times easier to comprehend for people and hides the hard drive in a way where the common user will never need or care for it. OS X is NOT that system.

lutorm 14y ago

The file system hierarchy exists for a reason: to organize information. Having the UI hide that organization in the name of "simplicity" and display it as a flattened list defies explanation. The users that can't handle a hierarchical structure probably just puts all files on the Desktop anyway, so what's the advantage here?

taligent 14y ago
Please. By all means explain how seeing /etc, /usr, /private, /var benefits the ordinary user.
- VonGuard 14y ago
  Well, seeing their own logs in some sort of anti theft scenario?