I was a HUGE Apple fan for the early Macs. I totally get what you are saying. But we LOST in the workplace. It was just too slow for the other folks in the office to use (of course, the real death blow was having only a graphics mode to the display so the typing was dreadfully slow-- and the secretaries wouldn't use them- but that's another story).

But I get your point. That's why I phrased my response as I did. I have never done UI/UX testing- maybe the parent has and was sharing his insight.

But if we are all just speculating, I've got to throw out a shout for the other point of view. Yes, too many (how many is too many? I don't know) and it gets to be like using VIM. But two buttons? Seems like it should be ok.

Trust me, I agree that this new ribbon is very cluttered and contains too much visual noise, but in turn I don't mind exposing things visually to the end user. I hate MS Office with the ribbon, but I deal with people all the time who love it. Just let me turn it off :)

Well she no more typical a computer user than you are I would think. I like to see a curve of typical computer users age distribution (but I understand it would be a little skewed if it's hard for the older generations to use computers).

I feel that ribbon is designed for a select group of new users who need that kind of help. And I hope it's easy to disable it. It's fine for Microsoft to use something like this as a default mode as long as power users are able to turn that stuff off.

This is what turns me off on OS X, there is often no way to do certain more advanced things. Or it's hidden so well it requires hours of searching on the web for what plist to modify.

The shortcut for move is Cmd-Option-V, if anyone wants to know.

1. Why?

2. `rm huge-file`

That reminds me of the first few times I tried to learn vim.

Now though, any other editor that's not Vim or Emacs feels like that...

Just double click on one of the tabs.

In a desktop OS, you have a seemingly infinite set of modifiers (Ctrl, Alt, Double click, click, right click, Ctrl + Shift), which are not 'logical' operations like tapping and swiping - they must be learned and remembered.

I'm sure there's a few more buried in there that I haven't discovered. (Like swipe backwards to delete an item from a list)

And now even those are getting out of control:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/gestures.html

Pretty soon I'm going to run out of fingers, and these certainly aren't easily discoverable.

This same pattern continues on iOS devices. They don't ever use complicated gestures, certainly not as the only way to accomplish something. The most complicated gesture you need is pinching.

The new iOS 5 has gestures to switch apps and get home, but those are really like keyboard shortcuts since the home button is still there and offers a simpler alternative.

Easy? Maybe for some. I bet the same people who have to be told to right-click also have to be told how to work their bluetooth/wifi connection (and never bother to turn it off to save battery).

But I'll grant you this point if s/easy/possible/

I think that you overstate the importance of turning off wifi and bluetooth. Those are power user options, for sure. When you're trying to conserve battery power, you're trying to streamline how you use the device, which to me, smacks of 'power user'.

The flipside to that argument is that it is ridiculously easy to browse a web site, check your email and play Words with Friends and Angry Birds. These are the things that the majority of people care about... not whether or not a given physical interface is active or not.

And you are right, of course, in that ios allows most people to do the things they most care about very easily-- that's probably the takeaway. If you do that, then, apparently even if the other stuff is hard, people will probably figure out how to do it when they need it. Somehow.

Android devices on the other hand, need constant fiddling. My Droid would barely last a day with everything turned off, and with wifi, etc. turned on, it would die after only about 6 hours.

Disclaimer: I don't own an iOS device, so don't know how intuitive it might or might not be.

The only reason to turn off the cell radio but not the wifi radio is to conserve battery, which again puts you well outside the use case of the typical apple user.

In my experience, this is rarely enforced.

(In fact, I just got off a plane, and the announcement is "electronic devices must be off, not in airplane mode. that's for after we're in the air.")

The actual removal of abstraction (mouse) have made it much easier to use it. This is why my son at 2 can use the ipad and he can't use the mouse and keyboard for the desktop and laptops.

I have no doubt that this UI, though cluttered, will help users out but I question whether this is ultimately the best solution.

ie there's an inductive leap between "I want to delete all files except this one" and "I can select that one file and then invert selection before deleting". At minimum it requires you to know what "invert selection" means. Ordinary users may take a different, more fiddly, path.

I don't know if that's the case here. My intuition says it is. However, in my optimistic heart I hope Microsoft did a bunch of usability testing and determined that ordinary users do grasp an "invert selection" concept more often than not.

That's how design for mass-use user interfaces works, right? By evidence-driven testing, not by what the programmer/designer thinks makes sense? Clings to idealistic belief.

The dangerous button is much easier to find than the fix-it button. One is right there, with your files. The other is someplace else, related by metaphor alone. Once you have selected the recycle bin you then have to search through your very long deleted file list, select the file you want, select another button to restore it (which appears in the same place as a different button existed before selecting the file), and then navigate back to the place you were expecting the file to be. We're talking about users who can't figure out a menu, but they can perform this multi-step task. I can easily see a new computer user screwing this up.

Next time you look at the context menu of a removable drive, see that "Format" is right there with the eject menu item. One should be used every time you use the drive, the other very rarely and only when you're sure. The latter should be removed to a sub-menu under "advanced", or similar.

Myself, I'd make it harder to delete things and a lot easier to find them again.

Or maybe two. One to go from selected file to all other files, and another click to get back.

Selection only comes handy when you will be doing something to several items at once. Thus, the selection function could be turned on via a menu item or a button: it's a totally different operating mode where you click on or drag around the items to select them.