If you don’t believe me, fire up https://macos9.app on a machine with a mouse, and try organizing / browsing some files.
- Where is the ability to easily split/tab for side-by-side directory comparison?
- Every directory is opened in a new window, which makes everything even more jarring
- (Do I just not know how to operate the window manager?)
- Is the not grid-aligned icon position saved? This seems like a long-term usability nightmare.
- How can I create something other than a directory?
- Where is the location bar?
Then again, I'm not familiar with old OR new macOS, so I might have a similar first experience with the new finder.
What I found nice is the UI/UX consistency. Modern systems don't really have that anymore, with all the accumulated partial UI overhauls and different UI libraries.
These days I’m in love with Total Commander (yes I mainly use Win+WSL2), but I know of several TC style File Managers are available for the Macintosh)
And i do know that TC was cloned/inspirere from ’mc’ (to give credit…!)
So is Gnome Files, and in very similar ways.
In general, Apple has lost its UI mojo in the last decade or so, macOS shouldn't be used anymore as an example of a good desktop UI.
Apple also has a thick Human Interface Guidelines document from.. ‘97 or ‘03, I can’t remember. But it’s great.
Funnily enough, if you use it as a yardstick to measure the current macOS by, macOS is full of violations of that HIG.
Pulling back to the article: I wonder what desktop the writer uses, because KDE is absolutely chock full with idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies. Especially because KDE application development is much less top-down than Gnome, so each applications feels completely different which leads to having to “learn” each application separately. Absolutely horrible UX.
Hard disagree. I'd rather have some small inconsitencies (nothing consequential anyway in my KDE experience) than having all applications consisetently unusable due to top down decisions to remove and hide features as is the case with Gnome.
It always makes me laugh when some people believe the marketing of Apple saying that their OS is the most ergonomic when it is totally not the case.
Things like creating a new folder is a nightmare, if you are in the kind of a tree view and try to create a folder or paste a file, it will end up in the top parent folder.
When you sort by recent date it does not make any sense: you have files from the most recent to the oldest, but for a given day, like the last day or week, they are ordered in the opposite way (oldest to newest).
There are hundreds of other stupid decisions like that.
In the same way, who had this brillant (ie stupid) idea that the enter key will edit the file name name instead of opening it? Using a major keyboard key for an operation that you rarely do!
Consider the current macOS Finder:
https://a.qoid.us/20240907-finder.png
Finder's design is extremely similar to GNOME Files! And so the inherent downsides of the design language are present in Finder too, such as it being harder to drag windows around or click to activate windows.
But macOS does avoid most of the UI papercuts the author points out. It's not perfect, but let's go through the list.
- View Options: Finder has a similar-looking icon that does the same thing. But in Finder, the little arrows on the right of an icon are always part of the same button as the icon itself. Finder doesn't use split buttons in the way the author complains about.
- Help: The macOS User Guide explains all the icons and what they do. But you don't actually need to go that far, because macOS has a feature where if you click Help and start typing, it will show menu items (from any menu) that match what you typed. In this case, if you start typing "list", it will show the "as List" menu item, which achieves what the author wants. (I guess I should point out that macOS does have a menu bar at the top of the screen, and all the actions you can take by clicking icons can also be taken through the menu bar.)
- Tooltips: Finder doesn't have tooltips for the locations on the left pane, only for the icons in the toolbar. Even there they take a while to appear.
- Navigation: I'd ding Finder here because there is no location bar at all (only an 'open by path' dialog that's kind of buried). Even going to the parent directory is not exposed in a particularly obvious way. Still, at least Finder doesn't have something that looks editable but isn't.
- Scrolling: macOS has hidden scrollbars by default, but they stay at the right of the window. They don't jump to the left like the author is complaining about.