this is just to say that

[calimac]

I have sworn eternal hostility against every claim that Apple device interfaces are "user-friendly." A more frustrating, illogical, incomprehensible, inconsistent screen I never hope to see. Bah.

Comments

[calimac]

ipad mini. The curse came with trying to put icons in the bar at the bottom of the screen and then to make them stay there.

The Mac committed terminal suckitude in its first edition by having "eject disc" and "delete file" be the same 'trashcan' command. That alarmed me so much I was frightened off for good.

[voidampersand]

I don't know why icons didn't stay in the dock. The iPad is more like a phone with a big screen than it is like a Mac. But the iPhone has had a dock from day 1 and it works. Sometimes these things are more complicated than they should be.

i remember dragging the floppy icon to the trash. It was not the greatest metaphor. But in context, the original Mac remembered a diskette and kept its icon on the screen even after the diskette was ejected. This was to work around the very limited storage capacity of the diskettes, and the lack of a hard drive. Originally, if you were done using a diskette that you had ejected, you could drag the ghost of its icon to the trash, and the Mac would forget about it. That kind of made sense - it was deleting not the diskette, but the reference to it. Then logically, if you drag a mounted diskette to the trash, it would both eject it and forget it.

Did the Mac delete the data on your diskette when you dragged it to the trash? No. The Mac engineers were very careful to safeguard user data, regardless of the alarming metaphor.

Apple did not keep the drag disk to trash metaphor for long. They added a Command-E for Eject shortcut, control-click or right-click on the disk and select Eject, an eject icon for the disk in the Finder side panel, and even a dedicated Eject button on the keyboard.

[calimac]

"That kind of made sense ... very careful to safeguard user data" Yes, but we were talking about whether the interface was user-friendly. "alarming metaphor" is the relevant point. Good thing they soon changed their minds about having it.