deskthority

So I've been forced to use Mac OS for over a week now and being a life-long Windows and DOS user I of course absolutely didn't understand the point of it at all xD . I was particularly stumped by lots of windows getting lost without appearing in the taskbar, the weird structure of the taskbar to begin with, and the apparent lack of disk navigability xD . Also programs like Office, Outlook (I know, shudder) and several others work differently, and shortcut like like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V don't work.

So I was wondering what, from a Mac user perspective, the big advantages are of the interface of Mac OS, because I obviously just don't get it xD . I'm limiting it to the interface because if we go on about the whole supposed virus resistance thing it'll probably escalate quite badly :p .

Please clarify if you are trolling or not. Thanks.

Windows; what's the point?

You do realise that most all of you concerns are much the same the other way around, i.e. a mac user trying to use windows for the first time.

Chyros wrote: So I've been forced to use Mac OS for over a week now and being a life-long Windows and DOS user I of course absolutely didn't understand the point of it at all xD . I was particularly stumped by lots of windows getting lost without appearing in the taskbar, the weird structure of the taskbar to begin with, and the apparent lack of disk navigability xD . Also programs like Office, Outlook (I know, shudder) and several others work differently, and shortcut like like Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V don't work.

So I was wondering what, from a Mac user perspective, the big advantages are of the interface of Mac OS, because I obviously just don't get it xD . I'm limiting it to the interface because if we go on about the whole supposed virus resistance thing it'll probably escalate quite badly :p .

CMD & Tab allows you to see which apps you have open, pretty much the same as what ALT & Tab on Windows does.
I use the dock to host the apps I use most, if I want to open something else I open spotlight with CMD and Space to search for said app.

And what do you need to browse the contents of the disk for? Most people just need access to their documents which is what Mac OS does.

For copy and paste you use the cmd key - not the ctrl key

OS X works pretty much the same, you just have to get used to a different way of doing things.

Khers wrote: Windows; what's the point?

You do realise that most all of you concerns are much the same the other way around, i.e. a mac user trying to use windows for the first time.

You do realize that's not the question he asked, i.e.

So I was wondering what, from a Mac user perspective, the big advantages are of the interface of Mac OS, because I obviously just don't get it xD .

And I can say as one who started on IBM PCs, then went to Mac OS for work, then back, then trying it pretty recently, I had similar concerns. It wasn't the operation; I was used to a lot of it from older iterations of Mac OS. I also dived into it because I wanted to develop for iOS. But despite my enthusiasm, loving a lot of the software, and giving it over a year, I sold my MacBook Pro because a lot of it still didn't make sense. And I never really 'got' the appeal, personally, and thought I was missing something.

It took me only a couple months to get comfortable with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, but I have not gotten used to OSX in the 2 years I have been using it. Some things make very little sense to me, like how/when you use Ctrl/Command/Option. Also whats with all this extra crap on long press, does anyone actually use it?

It does look like a trolling post...

I was forced to use OSX for 4+ years too, coming from Linux and Windows. I think the OSX has features that were once ahead of Windows (before Windows 8/10), e.g. spotlight, opened windows preview. Now they are getting real close, Windows 10 now even officially provides full Ubuntu bash shell support. And I agree that usability is highly related to habit, i.e. how transferable one's previous interface knowledge is on the current OS.

Some advantages of OSX over Windows in terms of its interface:
- Quartz (the graphics engine / implementation in OSX) provides a much smoother experience for the whole interface.
- Native Unix support allows the entire skill set related to unix to apply, somewhat related to interface...

Macintosh was built to be "fool proof", but I agree that its interface design is not at all fool proof. It takes about the same time to teach a totally new computer user to send an e-mail in both Windows or OSX, I guess.

Shortcuts are fairly logical. The command key issues commands, hence the name. The option key (often sub-captioned "alt") provides an alternative or complementary action, either with the mouse or with shortcuts. Control should never appear in shortcuts but it does get used sometimes.

The impression I got was that shift extends the namespace: cmd+X is really command "x" (lowercase) while cmd+shift+X is command "X" (capital) giving you an extra 26 keys in Latin alphabet layouts.

There are so very many things, big and small. The ability to colour-code icons is something I still miss in Windows. In OS 9 and earlier you could assign a custom icon to literally anything writeable (file, folder, volume) just by copying and pasting icons between files¹ — I don't use Mac/mac( )OS( X) enough to know if this still works the way it used to. The menu bar provides a menu devoted the application itself, which makes so much sense, and the menu bar remains open during dialog usage, so you never lose access to the Edit menu commands in dialogs. AppleScript and Apple Events are whole boatload of win — it's for GUIs what PowerShell is to automation).

Another one that you never realise until you go back to Windows, is that the menu bar holds open submenus when you move into one diagonally. Windows has the horrible menu open/close delay as an abhorrent bodge, while Mac OS caters for a human behaviour that is illogical but so natural that it makes more sense to just do what users expect, giving menus that behave flawlessly without any conscious recognition. A lot of what the Mac does right has been so subtle that it never elicits praise — we notice when things are stupid but overlook things that magically work so well that we never even had to apply conscious thought.

Menus also dynamically update as you press and release keyboard modifiers which is a nice touch. Also, the Help menu has a feature to find menu items. The Office 2016 ribbon has a command line (!!!!!) but it still utterly fails to provide something to just locate the icon you want. As a result, you may as well scrap the entire ribbon and just have the Jef Raskinesque command line since it's easier than spending five minutes trying to find every wretched ribbon icon you want.

Macs are very deeply different to other systems and it will take some time to understand them. You can't learn another OS in a week, or anywhere remotely close.

I can't say a whole lot more as my newest system is still Tiger, although I've used various later versions of the OS including El Capitan. With that said, Apple have done a remarkable job of preserving the essence of the system from each revision of /[Mm]ac ?OS( X)?/ to the next (just not the name), which is another of their trademarks: apply intelligence to the design from day one, get things right, and then preserve the essence of that vision while extending and improving it. Microsoft's ideas change with the wind, leading to so much backlash from confused users. Even huge leaps in OS version on the Mac still leave you with a largely familiar system that basically works the way you'd expect.

Apple aren't perfect, or even honourable, but there's a lot to take way from the Mac experience.

vivalarevolución wrote: Please clarify if you are trolling or not. Thanks.

No, of course I'm not trolling xD .

What I basically said was what I dislike coming from Windows to Mac OS, and I was wondering what Mac OS users dislike in Windows coming from the other direction. Above all, I like the overt navigability of Windows compared to Macs, and I'm sure there are things people like in Macs too - but I don't know about them yet, hence why I asked . I'm seeing some good points being raised though.

What I disliked when I moved back to Windows?

Microsoft's pathological meddling makes it very hard to understand how anything works. The file association methods in classic Mac OS and X are both wholly manifest-driven — the former using resources (FREF/BNDL/kind) and the latter using properly list files. URL association was intractable but readily manageable in Mac OS 9 using InternetConfig (a third-party facility integrated into the OS), and in X it was made part of the application manifest.

There are just so many ways in Windows to do things. Starting programs on login takes so many forms (scheduled tasks, the vintage Startup group, Run and RunOnce Registry keys and maybe others) and file association and file type management is complicated almost beyond human comprehension. There's the modern type system (based on part of the legacy system) that since 8 largely has control except if an extension is new, and XP's bodged attempt at centralised types, and system verbs on system types, and vintage type system in general (and confusion on whether users can inherit and modify or not). File > New is attached either to extensions or types, or both, or something, and the various Registry structures are nested to various levels in ways that seem illegal but work anyway … How can managing file types have got so completely out of control? Also, URL launching is buried in there in a way that is hard to manage and readily breaks.

What I miss most about NeXTSTEP and Mac OS is the engineering culture. You've got native fractional character widths and fractional character positioning, which has been there since 2001 (although we had it in the UK long before that in RISC OS) — the jump from Mac OS 9 to X sorted out typopgraphy once and for all. From day one, Mac OS X had a fully off-screen buffered GUI, well before video cards could handle this in hardware (that came along later as Quartz Extreme). Mac OS did the entire buffered, alpha blended, shadowed UI in pure software, meaning that it never, ever flickered. Mac OS 9 applications never flickered either — Mac culture never permitted it, but in one swoop, that burdened was shouldered by the OS. Windows never cured flicker.

Mac OS has generally introduced an engineered solution from the outset and stuck with it. For all of its pros and cons, you're given one single system to work with. You can use third-party tools to enhance it, but you always know where you stand. While some argue that "you don't need to know" (which is often true) if you want to know, it's not hard to find out, and you're usually met with something logical. Even the old API was wonderfully straightforward and clean, even if Macs were a complete nightmare to program.

That's what I've missed so much from the Mac: everything in its right place, doing its one job correctly, knowing how it works and where you stand with it, and knowing that it will always be there.


It's not all roses. Every OS has its strengths and weaknesses, and for all of it, I've settled back in Windows. You win some and you lose some. Personally I never cared for Mac OS X: it broke so many of the fundamental rules of the window management, and it's a lot more complex than it ought to be — the folder-based approach got ruined by just too much to work with. I stuck with Mac OS 9 until I moved back to Windows, but I've had some computer or other running Tiger for the last nine years.

On macOS you can change or add a keyboard shortcut for any menu item in any application in one place in system settings.

The column view in Finder has no equivalent on Windows.

A proper Unix Terminal with Ruby, Python, etc by default.

Drag and Drop everywhere. E.g. Select some text in a browser and drag it to the desktop to create a file there. Drag a file from the Finder to a choose file button in a browser.

Renaming an open file will change the file name in the open application window too.

Drag and drop files from the icon in a document's window.

Full automation with Automator, Apple Script, and other built in tools.

More consistency between applications.

System wide text macro expansion, auto completion and spell check.

Zero driver problems. No shitty carp ware comes preinstalled with a Mac.

Emacs keybindings in every text field.

Pressing cmd with the thumb is nicer than pressing ctrl with the pinky for shortcuts.

System settings are in the system settings application and not sprinkled in five different places like on Windows.

Applications on Macs are often nicer than Windows or Linux Applications: Ulysses, TextMate, OmniGraffle, Omnifocus, Tramsmit, Kaleidoscope, Pages, Keynote, Final Cut, Pixelmator, MarsEdit, Dash, BookEnds, and many more.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: The ability to colour-code icons is something I still miss in Windows.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/be-creativ ... s-folders/

I formerly used Folder marker Pro but fell out of the habit. Not sure if it works in Windows 10, but it was pretty dead simple to use.

chuckdee wrote:

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: The ability to colour-code icons is something I still miss in Windows.

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/be-creativ ... s-folders/

I formerly used Folder marker Pro but fell out of the habit. Not sure if it works in Windows 10, but it was pretty dead simple to use.

Not folders, icons. I know that Windows has a horrible hack for applying custom icons to folders, but I said icons. Icon colour is part of the file's metadata. Which reminds me: stationery pads.

Think of the Microsoft Office template system, but extend that out via file system metadata to all file types from all programs. Simply set a file's Stationery flag, and it becomes a template file ("stationery pad"). Clear that flag and it's back to being an editable file. No need to screw with filename extensions to make the change, and it's not restricted to a single program (Microsoft Office hoards so many good ideas).

Historically, if a program advertised that it was stationery aware, it was handed the file as normal by the Finder; if not, the Finder would prompt for a name and duplicate the file first. Manifest-driven behaviour has only started to take hold in Windows in recent years. Most Mac software has no installer as there's simply no need — the program's manifest tells the OS all it needs to know, and the OS remains in control. Application directories of course also go back to RISC OS!

Also, on a Mac, you can highlight several files and double-click any one of them to open the whole lot. The Finder knows to retain the selection until it knows whether a double-click is being requested — another example of the Mac catering for erroneous but natural human behaviour (I forget whether a single-click actually clears the selection). The whole set of files is passed in a single inter-process communication packet (AppleEvent) to the target program, while Windows struggles horribly with opening batches of files at once as every file is passed to a separate process.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: You've got native fractional character widths and fractional character positioning, which has been there since 2001 (although we had it in the UK long before that in RISC OS)

That is something that I dislike about MacOS - that text isn't properly hinted! Unless you use a "Retina" display, all text is a little bit fuzzy.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: From day one, Mac OS X had a fully off-screen buffered GUI, well before video cards could handle this in hardware (that came along later as Quartz Extreme).

I would call that a "brute force" approach. Every window got its own backing store. Back then you balked at how "wastefully" it used memory ... but these days it is a drop in the sea.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: Another one that you never realise until you go back to Windows, is that the menu bar holds open submenus when you move into one diagonally.

Oh, I so hate how menus behave on Windows. On Windows you can't select a menu item by pressing a button, moving to the menu item while holding the button and then selecting by releasing. You have to press and release, and then press and release again to select.

BTW, The GTK+ toolkit (Gimp, Gnome etc.) for Unix systems has the diagonal.
Edit: GTK+ had the diagonal from version 1.2-something to the 2.0 series. It disappeared from GTK+ 3 !!
At the same time, the click-behaviour in scrollbars also changed - no longer scrolling a page at a time but jumping directly. At least there is an option for reverting that behaviour but I have not seen anything for the menus.

A little bit of background about myself before I answer the question. LIke most people, I was raised a Windows user. Then my computer was stolen out of my apartment and I decided to use the insurance payment to make the switch to Apple with a Macbook Pro. These days, I just buy Windows computers and put LInux on them and barely use the Windows part.

I was skeptical at first, but within a couple weeks I found Mac OS much easier and better to use than Windows. Here are some of reasons for favoring Mac OS from the perspective of a slightly more than casual user:

• -has a more intuitive, idiot-proof user interface with a quicker learning curve for the new user
  -the overall design is smoother, less cluttered, and more attractive
  -keeping open windows in the dock is cleaner than a big taskbar, although harder to find, but just do the three finger swipe and there are all your open windows
  -Finder is easier to navigate and more logical than Explorer
  -the default macros make more sense (none of this CtrlAltDelete crap) and Command is easier to access than Control
  -replacing the F-row with shortcuts is super convenient
  -Apple machines still have the finest touchpad experience
  -Easier to navigate the Settings menu, among other menus
  -You can run Mac OS, Windows, and Linux on the same machiner (for now)
  -The App Store was a stroke of genius and makes for easier updates than random notifications that pop up on Windows
  -Most of the time for the average user, Mac OS just works better. Windows 8 was probably one of the best things that ever happened to Apple.

And one of the most amazing things is that the user interface has stayed somewhat consistent since the first Macintosh desktop. A friend had one of the earliest Macs, and navigating the menus and folders felt about the same as it does now. Sure, Mac OS these days looks a lot better and has more features, but the overall desktop design has not changed as much as Windows over the years. Apple got it right the first time.

All that said, I stopped using Apple because I did not like the direction they were going with their hardware design. More parts soldered down that were not user replaceable, repairability sacrificed for design and looks, abandoning legacy ports left and right, straight up robbery on factory spec upgrades ($200 for a frickin 8GB RAM upgrade), neglect of the desktop lines, probably. I decided that paying the Apple tax for a better OS was not worth it anymore. I decided to build my own desktop, learn LInux, and get a mid-range laptop for the same price as a quad core Macbook Pro.

In addition, the trend towards a consistent platform across all devices favors the mobile devices over the desktop user experience, because users favor the mobile devices and that's where the money is. As Mac OS started to feel more and more like iOS, that was my final straw.

Yes, the font renderer in Mac OS X is abominable. There's a detailed article on sub-pixel rendering here — well worth a read:

http://www.antigrain.com/research/font_ ... index.html

Which reminds me, Windows "alpha" includes the title bar. Why can't the blending apply only to the content area?

Pop-up menus in Mac OS are also done properly. Windows pop-up menus aren't even menus, they're just floating list boxes. Apple always show the current selection in the middle, making selecting both previous and subsequent items easy. (Curiously, MSIE and Windows "metro" now have this behaviour.) Being real menus, they support separators, something you can't have in Windows. Do they support scroll bars yet? Psion EIKON gets that right:

Scroll bars in popup menus:


Scroll bars in menu bar menus:


Apple didn't even truly invent sheets. Dialog boxes in Windows already are modal only to the parent window, but some programs, notably every version of Office, force dialog boxes to be program modal instead of window modal, by blocking any attempt to focus any other windows. Firefox for example has always had true window-modal dialogs, as has Explorer.

vivalarevolución wrote: ... Then my computer was stolen out of my apartment ...

Such crime is totally unforgivable!!!
For people who do not make backups frequently, the data in a computer can be as important as their life.

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: Being real menus, they support separators, something you can't have in Windows.

Did you mean separator bars in menus? MS Windows' menus can have that. You must mean something else?

vivalarevolución wrote: Apple got it right the first time.

Not everything. One thing I did not like about older MacOS was the scroll bars. They snapped back if you moved the pointer too far away from the bar and prior to MacOS 9 ("System 9") the knobs were not proportional.
Both aspects were by design, however, not by negligence.

The snap-back was because of the principle that every user action could be cancelled. For instance, If you move a cursor away from a button while pressed, the button press is cancelled. Moving the cursor away from the bar was to cancel the scroll. (never mind that scrolling can not be destructive ...)
The fixed size is because the knob represents the viewport over the document and so the dimensions of the knob were supposed to resemble the dimensions of a typical viewport ...

Menuhin wrote: Such crime is totally unforgivable!!!

Indeed. Same with ransomware.

i like spotlight search , i like the consistency of the menu bar, i like a propper terminal.

Thats about it.

Oh and target disk mod is an awesome lifesaver.

Findecanor wrote: Did you mean separator bars in menus? MS Windows' menus can have that. You must mean something else?

Pop-up menus in dialog boxes. They're not menus, they're floating list boxes. This does mean that they support scroll bars while real menus do not. Pop-up menus in Mac OS are actual menus with the same appearance and behaviour, and none of them have scrollbars (unless that's been added recently).

vivalarevolución wrote: Not everything. One thing I did not like about older MacOS was the scroll bars. They snapped back if you moved the pointer too far away from the bar and prior to MacOS 9 ("System 9") the knobs were not proportional.
Both aspects were by design, however, not by negligence.

I find snap-back really handy: it means that I can scroll down a document and then revert back to where I was before. The idea is valid, but arguably the implementation should be changed in Windows to use Escape to cancel, just as with dragging and resizing windows.

The decision to use non-proportional scroll bars was a mistake. I understand where they're coming from, but old Mac and Windows scroll bars were horrible. I remember upgrading from Photoshop 5 to 6 and getting proper scroll bars at long last!

Mac OS had all sorts of little features you'd never notice. For example, cmd+drag to move a window without bringing it to the top (this should be opt+drag, I know), which in RISC OS was simply Adjust-drag (right-drag, but the mouse buttons are named: Select, Menu, Adjust) — something I've always wanted to see in Windows. RISC OS wipes the floor with every other WIMP GUI for mouse operation.

Mac OS since 8 or 9 also has a unified mechanism for indicating document saved status; in 8/9 this is done with the proxy icon in the title bar, that stands in for the document (this shows as dimmed if the document is unsaved), and in X it's done by putting a dot into the close box. The API call for this is naturally clean and simple, and this feature means that the OS itself has status metadata for the window.


By the way, it's worth noting that I could equally make a case for Windows against Mac OS. Right-click → New for example, painfully absent from the Mac. Or Uninstall — even Psion EPOC had a proper uninstall system! Or Apple's lunatic settings dialogs that have no Apply or OK and force all changes live. Or all the different windows that are blocked from keyboard access and from Exposé, such as Spotlight results and any minimised windows — it's truly absurd to have a window selector where certain windows don't show up!