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0 pointsdoix3y ago0 comments

> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives.

Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.

> Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work.

Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

> Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries.

Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt?

> Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides.

This is pretty universal.

> Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets.

I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.

0 comments

sirn3y ago

>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

On macOS, there's a concept called "Proxy Icons". These are little icons that are shown in a title bar of a document-based applications (e.g. "[ICON] My File.txt"). You can interact with these icons as if they are an actual file on the disk.

For example, you have "My File.txt" open in TextEdit, and you want to reference them in Terminal, you can just drag the icon into Terminal.app window and it will resolve the full path. Or you're editing the file, but realized you need to make a copy of that file before making changes, you can alt-drag on the icon and copy it elsewhere. Or you're working on a file and want to navigate to the containing directory, you can right click on the proxy icon and it will show the full hierarchy for navigation, etc.

This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

tyfon3y ago

Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path.

It's how copy/paste intents are supposed to work, the receiving object or program might want to use the object sent in various ways so you can extract image data or path if it's an image for instance. Konsole just grabs the path from all that is sent to it that is not clear text.

I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :)

I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.

yamtaddle3y ago

Drag n drop being something you can actually use and that usually does the thing you'd expect, rather than something you train yourself never to do outside things like moving files around in Explorer or whatever, because it usually breaks things, is one of the things that makes it hard to switch away from macOS once you're used to it. Last time I tried KDE a couple years ago I crashed an app in the first five minutes by trying to drag n drop, and was like "oh yeah, that's why I didn't used to ever try to drag and drop things".

jemmyw3y ago

And yet they redesigned preview and hid the damn icon. You can still get the drag thing sometimes, but every time I struggle to find what to drag... is it the title text or just next to it? Sometimes it doesn't work with anything, did I forget where to drag from or does it not work from this file? Who knows, it's very frustrating.

sirn3y ago

It was very frustrating when they hide the proxy icon behind an obscure modifier key trigger and a delay in Monterey. Thankfully enough complains were made, and they've since added a toggle in Monterey 12.1 to always show proxy icon (Accessibility -> Display -> [ ] Show window title icons).

1 more reply

andrekandre3y ago

and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...

somat3y ago

One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits.

The other really nice part about the sgi file explorer were the little buttons above the address bar to quickly go to a specific part of the hierarchy. Windows got this in 7(10 years later) and it works well but is via a hidden state. I am less familiar with mac's finder but I think it can do it, again via hidden state.

https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg

here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3y ago

Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.

masukomi3y ago

> Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

You can "just drag", but if you alt/option drag you get a copy operation instead of a move operation.

Sure, using option/alt to get a copy isn't "intuitive", but that wasn't the point. The point was to note that the consistency in macOS is such that even less known things like alt dragging has been consistently implemented essentially everywhere.

ethanbond3y ago

IMO this consistency and composability is a large part of intuitiveness if nothing else. It does help with a different part of the learning curve than what people often are obsessing about with the word “intuitive” though.

ihatepython3y ago

> Is intuitiveness the right word? I make the same arguments about Vim, that it's one of the most logically consistent editors once you learn the basic set of primitives (not perfect of course). But I don't think anyone would call it intuitive.

As far as I know, VI is actually an acronym that stands for Very Intuitive

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 pointsdoix3y ago0 comments

> I don't really agree. The really interesting part of intuitiveness is how it scales once you became familiar with the basic set of UX primitives.

> Take, for example copying. You can alt-drag a surprising number of things across many different apps and have them just work.

Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

> Or holding alt in menus to show additional entries.

Why does it not show all the options all the time? How are you supposed to know to press alt?

> Or holding shift or alt to resize items to preserve ratio on one or two sides.

This is pretty universal.

> Or take dragging and dropping references to the current file from the proxy icon in the window top bar. Or dragging and dropping selected text as snippets.

I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

The disk image stuff is cool I guess, but I'm guessing it's possible because Apple controls the hardware and software. I'd be pretty pissed off if some tool automagically changed my boot records.

0 comments

sirn3y ago

>I have no idea what you mean, but you can drag lots of stuff in windows to different places and stuff happens.

This is something I missed quite a lot when using other OSes.

tyfon3y ago

Things like this actually works in KDE, I can take a file from the file manager and drop it into konsole and it will copy the path.

I did try your text file example from kate (text editor), but that didn't work. otoh, kate does provide the path to the file for easy copying right below this icon :)

I can drag the file from kate, however konsole doesn't accept the object. I suspect kate doesn't encode the path in the copy/paste object, perhaps something I should fix.

yamtaddle3y ago

jemmyw3y ago

sirn3y ago

1 more reply

andrekandre3y ago

and to think, they caused all this problems just to make mac app window titles look more similar to ipad apps...

somat3y ago

One of the nicer ui elements on sgi's was the drop pocket. a specific identifiable spot where dropping a item would do something, it is a ui feature I wish had been picked up by other toolkits.

https://software.majix.org/irix/screenshots/screen.5.big.jpg

here you can see a drop pocket(the blue folder icon to the left of the address bar) that takes paths. and the very nice irix address bar.

AnIdiotOnTheNet3y ago

Sounds a lot like drag and drop saving, which as I recall was a feature first introduced in RiscOS. That UI was way ahead of its time.

masukomi3y ago

> Why do you need to alt drag? Why can't you just drag? You can drag a lot of stuff in windows and it "just works".

You can "just drag", but if you alt/option drag you get a copy operation instead of a move operation.

ethanbond3y ago

ihatepython3y ago

As far as I know, VI is actually an acronym that stands for Very Intuitive

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse