I really see no serious UI benefit in Apple's products. It seems roughly equivalent to me, and it uses the same paradigms as other conventional systems, it just does it in a shinier way, and it seems cool just because Apple does it, just like everything MTV does seems cool to a teenager.

OS X may not be your cup of tea, and that's just fine. You just happened to attack what I perceive as one of its strengths, so I'm surprised by your choice of targets.

Although I was a bit skeptical at first, once I got used to the concept it made a lot of sense. On a Mac, Ctrl+key combos are for contextual menus in the GUI and navigation/commands in terminals and text areas. For instance, you can navigate to the beginning and end of nearly any text element in OS X by using Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e, the standard Emacs shortcuts. And the Cmd+key combos are for GUI and application-level shortcuts, such as copy, paste, print, close, etc. There are two different contexts being handled, so it makes sense to use a different key. The combo to copy a line from a terminal window should not interfere with the combo to cancel the running process within that window, as an example, and on OS X it doesn't.

Most importantly, those shortcuts are implemented consistently across applications. No matter what app I'm working on, Cmd+, will always bring up the Preferences window, Cmd+w will close the window, Cmd+q will quit the application, Cmd+h will hide it, Cmd+p will invoke the print dialog, Cmd+s will save, Cmd+S will save as, Cmd+z will undo, etc. I never have to stop and think about it, or get jarred out of my train of thought by an application that uses some non-standard shortcut to save, or quit or similar. I use Ubuntu at the office and while many apps are making good progress on presenting a consistent interface across the OS, I still get frustrated regularly by apps that do things differently.

Finally, Cmd+Tab provides the same functionality as Alt-Tab on Windows and Linux. Cmd+` lets you switch between the windows of a particular application, which I've found to be quite useful on a many occasions.

Point being, don't knock it till you understand why others like it. While I don't agree with all of Apple's UI decisions, there are plenty of excellent usability features in OS X and I now prefer it to both Windows and Linux because those features line up nicely with the way I work.

Aside from a few crappy lowest-common denominator Java desktop apps that haven't been optimised for OS X, but thankfully those are disappearing fast.

Huh? Do you mean things like iPhoto that bundle photos?

And yes, iPhotos seem to be a problem. I watched a friend spend three hours trying to find some photos they'd previous loaded in iPhoto.

I don't know if I understand what finder is doing different than say windows explorer or konqueror in linux. when you click on finder it opens a new file browser that has the typical list and icon view as well as some quicklook view that I don't like much and a nested list view where each column is a different folder. It seems pretty similar to windows in my opinion. (not that it's all peaches, I would really like to have a file cut and paste option instead of only copy but I digress)

edit: Looking at your higher up comment I guess you are talking about the isuite of programs that aggregate all your files and handle them internally? even that is a folder on your hard drive(~/usrname/Pictures/iPhoto Library is still a folder just right click on it to select show package contents and you can get to all your files or just open iPhoto and right click on a picture you want to locate and select reveal in finder) though and it's less of a function of finder and more of a function of the iphoto itunes etc.

- Don't you find "a right click" with a one-button mouse a bit tricky? I did try it but somehow it wasn't happening... maybe that's where things went South.

- Plus, being a geek, I always can do what I need to do. I'm not really looking for solutions here. My main argument is that despite a reputation for usability, OS X seems to me to lack practical usability and to instead mostly coast on good and reputation.

Well the fundamental idea behind iPhoto is: why would you care where it put your files at all?

* If you want to see or edit your pictures, you can do so via iPhoto (or iPhoto-compatible image manipulation)

* If you want to mail or export pictures, iPhoto has "Share" and "Export" options

* If you want to open one of your pictures in a third-party software, OSX's standard file picker has a "media" section which gives you a special iPhoto file picker (which works extremely well, it can even search through all your tags and faces)

All the iLife apps (iMovie and GarageBand, mostly) work this way. So does iTunes.

> Don't you find "right click" with one-button mouse a bit tricky?

Control-click. And every mac that has shipped in the last 3 or 4 years can right click.

As you say, it's not just iPhoto - it's a big part of the iVillage. Certainly some people - not just geeks - like this approach, but I find it patronizing ("Don't worry your pretty little head about where we store the files.") and authoritarian ("You may not delete the Pictures folder from your home folder or give it an alternative name.") all at the same time.

Long story short, I shouldn't have to open an application to grab one file. I should be able to use the file explorer. Apple seems to go out of its way to make that harder for me.

I would argue that non-geeks are, in fact, far more likely to enjoy this approach than geeks.

> I find it patronizing ("Don't worry your pretty little head about where we store the files.")

Well except it's easy to know where they're stored.

> and authoritarian ("You may not delete the Pictures folder from your home folder or give it an alternative name.") all at the same time.

And this one is utterly bonkers: it's an open not-secret-at-all that iTunes and iPhoto let you move, create switch library by pressing Option as you start them.

> Long story short, I shouldn't have to open an application to grab one file. I should be able to use the file explorer.

You are. It's not like the file is stored in a secret binary database.

> Apple seems to go out of its way to make that harder for me.

Whatever.

Sure, I can control-click the folder, select "Show Package Contents" (?!? an obvious way to say "open this folder"), open the directory named "Originals" and then drill down into the year-stamped folders until I find my albums. But clearly Apple doesn't want me doing that. Otherwise, the photo library would work like all the normal folders. I could simply double click to open it and view its contents.

This is all I meant by "Apple goes out of its way to make this harder."

Apple has always provided an alternative way of importing photos in Mac OS X (it is, in fact, the way of importing photos that predates iPhoto), the application is called “Image Capture”, it’s in your applications folder and you can make it you default for whenever you are connecting a camera. It puts photos in folders.

The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.

FFS, Apple is far from perfect, but the things you're complaining about have pretty simple answers.

By contrast, if this were a Pages document, I could simply click on "Attach a file" and then browse to the folder where the document lives. In the case of iPhoto and iTunes, this feature - file browsing - is simply not as straightfoward. I don't think that's up for debate. You are free to suggest ways that I can get at the photo (through iPhoto, through another OSX app), but I can't browse to the item the way that I can browse to other files on my filesystem.

> The only person going out of their way to make this difficult is you.

I really don't see how. I want something perfectly normal: I want "Attach a file" to work. In many cases, with many Apple programs, it does. But in a number of other cases (iPhoto, iTunes), it does not. This is not my fault. I am not doing anything special or nerdy or geeky here.

Ah, but you can access anything in iPhoto in the "open file" dialog that opens up when you go to attach a file in gmail. It's in the left sidebar under "media", from there you can get to anything in iPhoto organized in the same way they are in iPhoto (here is a screenshot: http://civicit.com/~tvon/files/osx-open-file.png).

Obviously though, you didn't find this, and I can see how that could be a bit obtuse if you expect to browse "Pictures" and find a bunch of image files.

I hope you are not serious, because it's not only trivial, I explained how it works in the comment you first replied to:

> * If you want to open one of your pictures in a third-party software, OSX's standard file picker has a "media" section which gives you a special iPhoto file picker (which works extremely well, it can even search through all your tags and faces)

OSX's standard image picker has a direct access to iPhoto libraries, and gives you direct access to iPhoto's search engine as well. Likewise for iTunes.

> I really don't see how. I want something perfectly normal: I want "Attach a file" to work. In many cases, with many Apple programs, it does. But in a number of other cases (iPhoto, iTunes), it does not. This is not my fault. I am not doing anything special or nerdy or geeky here.

Out of 6 phrases in this comment, only 2 are correct. And one of them only barely.

In any case, thanks for clearing this up for me.

It's just a different type/style of abstraction that may not be suited to you!

All file systems essentially hide the nasty details of where and how files are stored (which inode does it start at, is it fragmented across multiple sectors, which physical device?).

From a UX point of view there is a lot to be said for not treating every single file in exactly the same way.

I'm sure it's an approach that will get more and more prevalent in future (context relevant functionality for the types of files you're currently interacting with/managing).

Needing two hands to get a context menu is the kind of thing that makes me question the 'minimalism' of OSX. Same as needing two keys(/hands) to do 'delete to the right'

Mice that support right clicking have been shipping with every Mac since 2005, trackpads that support right clicking with every Mac since 2006 or so.

If it's off by default it doesn't exist for most users.

I guess it's part of the file menu now... http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2639319...

Right click on a photo in iPhoto, then click on "Show File".

edit: ah crap I forgot a new iPhoto had been released and you're probably talking about '11, not '09. Ignore this comment.

Sure does, it overlays a standard Unix filesystem with some OSX-specific features (hides "system" folders such as /bin or /tmp, displays "bundles" as files).