How Intuitive Are Macs Really?

Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by LocalPCGuy on Monday May 24, 2021 @11:46AM (#27265742)

This is the thing about Macs - people think they are intuitive because they have learned how to use them over X number of years. Including, I believe, those building the OS at Apple. But for a person who isn't familiar with them, they are absolutely not intuitive.

And any time there is a complaint, the community is like "Oh, dummy, just do this thing that is not obvious at all, how could you not figure that out?"

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by ChuckNorris89 on Monday May 24, 2021 @12:22PM (#27266260)

>This is the thing about Macs - people think they are intuitive because they have learned how to use them over X number of years

You can say that again. I never had to interact with a Mac in my life (Macs weren't popular in Eastern Europe so I grew up with Windows and Linux) and later in life at one job interview, the tech lead gave me his Macbook and told me to code a sorting function in JS and stepped out for 10 minutes. Within that time, I accidentally performed some swipe gesture on the trackpad which hid my code editor away with me unable to find it as I had no visible taskbar and all I had visible was a Chrome window so I started googling how to get my code window back. When the tech lead came back I apologized and told him I couldn't finish the task since I hid the code editor by accident and had to google how to use the OS.

I'm biased here of course, but IMHO for someone new to the OS, MacOS UX discoverability is worse than Windows or major Linux DEs.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by spiralx on Tuesday May 25, 2021 @01:38PM (#27279830)

I hate that stuff, it seems like every other minute I've moved my mouse too far and I'm suddenly in one of several completely different screens or views, I then need to figure out how to get back to where I was and perform the appropriate action, and then remember where I was beforehand.

I've annoyed a couple of people by disabling all their hot corners when I've used their Macs lol.

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Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really? by moogleii on Monday May 24, 2021 @01:19PM (#27267082)

It goes both ways. I agree cmd click on the title is definitely less intuitive (hell, I just learned that now). If I were guiding a new user to macOS, I would instead show how to reveal the Path Bar on Finder which requires less memorization from the user. Not sure why that isn't enabled by default.

That or explain the arrow-key centric keyboard navigation, which has fewer exceptions than Explorer.

But there are plenty of shortcuts on Windows that are the way they are for historical reasons, not because of user-centric design.

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