[whitedog]

anasazi4st said:

I would also like to welcome you to the world of Mac (and Apple).

You might find it interesting, amusing and informative to check out this link ( http://www.mactracker.com ) and poke around some there. He's done a great job of collecting and organizing this huge amount of data. As someone else who's built his own Windows boxes, I'd ask you to take a look at some of the older desktop Macs (G3 and G4 models) and marvel and the beauty and simplicity of their engineering and design. When I opened up my first desktop Mac (a PowerPC 6700) I just sat there and studied it...and thought "why aren't the PC people building machines like these?"

This same thinking permeates all of Apple's product line.

I think you mean MacInTouch; there's nothing much at Mactracker.com but an offer to sell or lease the domain name.

As for computer design, the sweetest Mac design I've ever seen is the MacPro. Compared to the average PC it's a whole other ball game.

[anasazi4st]

I think you mean MacInTouch; there's nothing much at Mactracker.com but an offer to sell or lease the domain name.



My apologies...as someone who abhors dead or incorrect links, I usually always check them before I post. And, this time I got it wrong.

It's actually http://mactracker.dreamhosters.com/ .

A great source for all things Mac...and other Apple things like iPods, iPhones, iTouch, printers, etc. I've been using it since 2002.

[whitedog]

anasazi4st said:

I think you mean MacInTouch; there's nothing much at Mactracker.com but an offer to sell or lease the domain name.



My apologies...as someone who abhors dead or incorrect links, I usually always check them before I post. And, this time I got it wrong.

It's actually http://mactracker.dreamhosters.com/ .

A great source for all things Mac...and other Apple things like iPods, iPhones, iTouch, printers, etc. I've been using it since 2002.

Yes, the freeware app Macktracker is invaluable for keeping track of Mac hardware and system software. It's unfortunate that someone is sitting on the domain name with no connection to the real Mactracker.app. But since the author of the application offers it for free, we cannot expect him to pay some pirate for the domain.

Because the actual host of an application is often hard to find, I usually refer people to Version Tracker from where it's easy to find almost anything for Mac or Windows.

[jarilehtinen]

Why you really need to drag anything anywhere? Why you just couldn't click a "Install" button and instantly get notification about successful installation?
Mac OS X has few other design clitches like this, just like the almost legendary "drag disk image to trash to eject" but that's another case...

[tallscot]

>Mac OS X has few other design clitches like this, just like the almost legendary "drag disk image to trash to eject" but that's another case...

Or click on the eject button icon right next to the disc image.

[jarilehtinen]

This is true if ejecting from Finder but there's no such thing when looking at the icon on the desktop.

[tallscot]

jarilehtinen said:

This is true if ejecting from Finder but there's no such thing when looking at the icon on the desktop.

I wouldn't expect one either.

Right-click and select Eject, click on it and select Eject from File menu, or click and hold and the Trash turns into an Eject icon and you drag it to that.

I think it's a lot more discoverable now.

The Help system in OS X really does rock too. Type in Eject and the first thing is Eject "X", where X is the disc image and it shows you the Eject command in the File menu with a blue arrow.

The Mac has always been very easy to use, but not necessarily discoverable. OS X has made improvements in this, though.

[dougoftheabaci]

jarilehtinen said:

This is true if ejecting from Finder but there's no such thing when looking at the icon on the desktop.

That is because it is unnecessary. Also, and most importantly, it follows current OS X usability conventions. Also, Macs are all about minimalism and gestalt principles. Having an icon next to the icon allowing you to eject the first iconed-item would be both redundant and highly confusing to the uninitiated user, which would defeat the purpose of adding said eject-icon.

[jarilehtinen]

tallscot said:

Right-click and select Eject, click on it and select Eject from File menu, or click and hold and the Trash turns into an Eject icon and you drag it to that.

This is also true, except for if you went totally Apple and bought the mighty mouse which doesn't have the right mouse button. But this has been discussed over and over again in thousands of forums, so let's not get to this too deeply. I just mentioned that this was one design oddity and there's others - but so there are in Windows (and any other OSs) too.

It's hard to design a perfect OS and Apple does remarkably good job in it, but if some problem is known for several years, it could be wise to change it completely even if old users had to learn it from the scratch.

Message was edited by: jarilehtinen (typos, hmm, quoting acts weird when editing...)

[tallscot]

>This is also true, except for if you went totally Apple and bought the mighty mouse which doesn't have the right mouse button

Yes it does.

>but if some problem is known for several years, it could be wise to change it completely

Well, as I said already, they have changed it.

What do you propose they do to it?

[jarilehtinen]

dougoftheabaci said:

That is because it is unnecessary. Also, and most importantly, it follows current OS X usability conventions. Also, Macs are all about minimalism and gestalt principles. Having an icon next to the icon allowing you to eject the first iconed-item would be both redundant and highly confusing to the uninitiated user, which would defeat the purpose of adding said eject-icon.

So true. Actually the original case was "ejecting CD from CD drive" where things get confusing, disk images are whole another thing - they don't really matter if you eject them or not. Physical eject button on the computer would be nice but that's just the way it has been so I think it's not gonna change. :)

[dougoftheabaci]

jarilehtinen said:

(...) except for if you to totally Apple and buy the mighty mouse which doesn't have the right mouse button.

The last Mac mouse not to have a button was the Apple Pro mouse which was discontinued at the introduction of the Mighty Mouse which can be configured through system preferences to have a right-click function.

Quote

But this has been discussed over and over again in thousands of forums, so let's not get to this too deeply. I just mentioned that this was one design oddity and there's others - but so there are in Windows (and any other OSs) too.

...You mean beyond 10 pages?

And it's not an design oddity. It's simply choosing one convention over another. In this case there are benefits to both where one implies more initial usability the other encourages users to become more engrossed in the OS and apply a learned action in one place to a different one.

Quote

It's hard to design a perfect OS and Apple does remarkably good job in it, but if some problem is known for several years, it could be wise to change it completely even if old users had to learn it from the scratch.

I think you misunderstand something. You seem to think that the Windows method is preferable for some reason. On a purely user intuitive level it's actually not. Users, if encouraged to do so, will expect that if they can do an action in one situation that it will equally useful in another, possibly completely different situation.

On the Mac OS you are encouraged to use drag-and-drop functionality repeatedly which is augmented by key-commands and menu items. These same conventions have been applied to disk images, discs and hard drives, as well as all other forms of mountable volumes. By continuing this convention they make it easier for Mac users, new and old, to navigate the OS in a simple and concise way that only further reenforces behaviours they have been taught elsewhere in the OS.

Quote

So true. Actually the original case was "ejecting CD from CD drive" where things get confusing, disk images are whole another thing - they don't really matter if you eject them or not. Physical eject button on the computer would be nice but that's just the way it has been so I think it's not gonna change.

There is one on the Mac keyboard which comes with iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, Mac Minis and can be bought in-store in USB and Blue-Tooth form. So I'll ignore the eject button issue.

As for whether or not it matters if you eject a disk image, as a base argument it's personal choice but it is important to note that they still follow the same functionality as CDs and all other volumes.

Oh, and the original debate was about running apps from disk images because people didn't understand the drag-to-install functionality.
Message was edited by: dougoftheabaci
Automatic formatting error.

[jarilehtinen]

> Mighty mouse has a secondary button? Didn't know this, where?
[/quote]
I don't know how they should change it (maybe there's no better way), I was just pointing out that if it's problematic to (new) users, there's something wrong with it and should be fixed in a way that the behaviour is clear to everyone. Then it would be perfect but as I earlier said, everything can't be perfect and there will always be users that don't know how to do something without help.

[jarilehtinen]

Quote

There is one on the Mac keyboard which comes with iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks, MacBook Pros, Mac Minis and can be bought in-store in USB and Blue-Tooth form. So I'llignore the eject button issue."

Oh, the keyboard actually has the eject button, my bad there. I haven't just spotted it and I've been using Mac on a daily basis for about 4 months now. :)

Don't get me wrong, I like OS X and even it has some flaws I prefer it over Windows (I've been a Windows user for almost 15 years and will not even start to discuss about the bad usability in Windows). In my opinion any user interface should be so simple that it doesn't require any help, assuming user knows what a keyboard and a mouse is. But this would be in perfect world.

Actually when we think about the current situation about the Eject-functionality, there's at least 3 ways of doing it when there could be only one and a really simple one: the button on the computer case. :) It's not because I prefer PC way of ejecting but just because people uses almost every day other appliances that have the actual eject-button. And yes, Windows has the right-click eject functionality too but that's totally unnecessary and could be removed completely (perhaps programmer had nothing better to do when he/she made that up).

Quote

Oh, and the original debate was about running apps from disk images because people didn't understand the drag-to-install functionality.

Yes and I was trying to end this off-topic talk before it got interesting, I apologize.

But to get back to the original subject, the installation procedure should be always done in a way where the designer/programmer asks him of herself "what if a novice user saw this, what would he/she/it do?" Whether the final outcome is a drag'n'drop icon, explanative text next to the icons or something else.
Message was edited by: jarilehtinen (why is this editor is constantly messing up the paragraphs...)