Re:How Intuitive Are Macs Really?
by m_mueller on Monday May 24, 2021 @01:41PM
(#27267373)
I actually find MacOS applications far more discoverable than equivalent windows or Unix tools. That's precisely thanks to the consistent menu structure, which always includes a help menu with a search option, including both the help files as well as the menu itself. Having help show you where to find a particular option so you can learn it for next time is precisely what I want.
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It's better than nothing, and yeah, probably better than the competition as well.
But then there are core features like "a file icon on a document window can be dragged exactly like a file icon in the finder" that you can use macOS for years and never find. That's before they started hiding the file icons in Big Sur!
macOS is packed with little things like that.
It still works in Big Sur! Just hover over the window title and the icon (called the "document proxy icon") will appear.
I think it's fine that they hid it, since even before, the things you can do with it (dragging, cmd/ctrl-clicking) were already hidden.
The only old functionality that is lost with Big Sur is that you could glance at the icon to see if there are unsaved changes (if so, the icon would be dimmed). But you can still tell by looking for the dot in the red close button.
I had no idea one could do this!
Or, that you can Cmd+click on the document icon or name in any titlebar to pull up a menu of its containing directories. This one is _super_ handy and has zero discoverability.
Can you give some examples of applications you're comparing?
it doesn't really depend on the application. every MacOS application has a menu in the same style, and with the menu & help file spotlight search that I described. I find almost no Windows app has something equivalent (as in a menu search), plus they have a multitude of differently shaped menus with various guidelines for how to structure them.