How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:18AM (#27265352)

Believe it or not, the way the filesystem worked on the original Mac operating system was that things did stay where you put them. Open a disk and the folders on it could be put anywhere in that 2D space, and each folder's contents could similarly be anywhere in their virtual 2D space, and each disk/folder opened in its own window that even re-opened in exactly the same position with exactly the same size as when you last closed it.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by handrous on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:26AM (#27265469)

That's a good point—that's probably the closest a file manager has come to being truly usable by most folks.

Relatedly, IMO iOS took a huge step backwards in UX when iOS7 moved away from a highly spatial interaction metaphor for practically the entire OS—by which I don't mean the skeuomorphism, exactly, but things like folders sliding the screen "open" when tapped, so that they had a sense of physical location within the main screen. Or "slide to unlock" looking like a physical slider so you didn't even need to read it to know what to do. The loss of the security blanket that was the physical (or at least faux-physical) home button has hurt it, too.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by bluGill on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:41AM (#27265656)

It was great until you had a disk shared between the large monitors at school and the tiny one you had at home. So long as all screens are the same sized and layed out the same it worked good. However any form of using two different computers and the whole thing started to fall apart. Throw in multiple monitors and it isn't possible to do this usefully.

It also only worked well when you only had a few files in any folder. If you have 100 files that are related in one folder and you can't find anything without sorting it alphabetically. Depending on how your brain organizes things this might not matter.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:50AM (#27265792)

I think the concept may just need some slight modification to work in more modern cases like this. Namely, by making the interface zoomable.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by michaelmrose on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:24AM (#27265441)

Gnome did this in 3.0 and called it spatial browsing. It was awful with a hierarchy 5 folders deep you ended up opening 5 windows.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:32AM (#27265541)

I don't think the cultural convention of directories in Linux is well suited to spatial filesystem navigation. Still, it'd be nice to still have the option, especially with AppImage doing a reasonably job of approximating the one-file-application paradigm of Macs.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by michaelmrose on Monday May 24, 2021 @05:14PM (#27269799)

The normal procedure of clicking on a folder result in redirecting the existing file management window to the new directory is the only functional way to operate. The behavior of creating a new window per directory inevitably creates too many window management tasks in terms of constantly closing extra windows.

Also what size your file manager should be is a function of what else you have on the screen which is inevitably variable so you end up resizing and moving windows to fit in with an arrangement that is different than last time you opened that directory. It's vastly easier if you want 2 directories shown side by side is to just use the traditional split view.

The fact that size and position are arbitrarily chosen even if they are per directory means that there is no mental map between position and position in the filesystem hierarchy.

Spatial browsing is a poor metaphor based on nothing that never made any sense whatsoever.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by prewett on Monday May 24, 2021 @04:43PM (#27269476)

I think if you leave Finder with the defaults (icon view) it still does this. I think if you change the view, say, to list view, Finder may apply that view to all folders you haven't specifically chosen a view type for. I think if you specifically choose a type (like icons for your a folder of images) it stays that way, but it's not clear to me exactly what happens.

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