An interesting article has been making its way around the internet the past few days, titled "Top 10 Usability Highs Of Mac OS". Mac OS X indeed does some things very, very right, just like many other operating systems and graphical environments do some things very, very right. The issue with the list of the article in question is that many of the items on the list are not exactly examples of "Usability Highs" at all.
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Member since:2005-11-21
OS X has no intention of having it's user's live in Finder and have it morph into a WebKit Browser called Safari.
Since 4.1 I've hardly touched Konqueror because it's so damn slow on pages burdened with Flash. It's painfully slow in many sites under Debian Sid.
The new KDE Menu has several searched applications that come up and upon clicking them do NOTHING. Then I go to konsole to launch from command-line and with some verbose output showing it's work in progress:
Example: knotes
knotes (4:4.1.0-2)
knotes
QLayout: Attempting to add QLayout "" to KNote "libkcal-897350935.789", which already has a layout
knotes(2049) KFontSizeAction::setFontSize: KFontSizeAction: Size 0 is out of range
QLayout: Attempting to add QLayout "" to KNote "libkcal-897350935.789", which already has a layout
Several applications that aren't even KDE 4 base are also having problems launching from that newfangled menu.
Konqueror 4 and Konqueror 3.5.9 are definitely different beasts with different goals.
KIO Slaves are what we call in the NeXT World as Services from the Services Menu. Try it some time. The more Cocoa-ified OS X and third party apps are the more useful the Services Menu becomes.
Member since:2006-01-12
I haven't yet used KDE 4.1 for more than a few minutes but I know something about Debian unstable:
Don't use it for a month when they do a major KDE (or GNOME for that matter) upgrade. I've lived through a few of them (btw. gcc upgrades are just as bad for KDE as gcc breaks their ABI every second release) and it always takes some time until the packages become usable again.
If Debian's currently moving KDE4 into unstable, now is a good time to expand your horizon. Try Gnome or Xfce or fluxbox or e16/e17. Then in mid-September look if the KDE 4.1 packages are no longer broken.
Member since:2006-02-15
Some of the metaphors are only intuitive once you've been shown them. The drag-and-drop installer is one of those. Completely baffled me, but of course it's so obvious *once you've been shown*.
It sure baffled me too, I actually had to search and read how to install apps in OSX 
So, no, it definitely isn't as intuitive as people make it out to be. And uninstallation of apps is rather annoying since there is no consistency..some apps require using uninstaller application, some has to be found via Finder and dragged to trash and so forth.
Same goes for dragging a device into the trash to eject it.
I definitely didn't know this! Atleast my brains doesn't automatically think of "hey, lets drag my devices and all to trash" as a good idea.
Member since:2007-02-17
True but if you've been a user since the old Mac OS days then things have stayed pretty consistent throughout the lifetime of Apple's premier OS. While dragging devices to the trash to eject them isn't ideal in some cases and confusing (though that is why apple has that nice little eject button in the far right of their keyboard), I personally wouldn't have it any other way. For a windows user who has never used an Apple OS before, then yeah its confusing, but that behavior has been consistent on Mac OS since the beginning. It does two things that I like 1. It forces the user to un-mount the drive before ejecting (which the OS does as it ejects). In Windows this is an issue. You have to go the far right corner of your screen to un-mount your devices properly and sometimes it doesn't work properly at all because there is some window or process that hanged still using the device. In OSX removing the device usually kills all process related to the device and all windows as well. I've never gottena device busy error in OSX. I'm sure it happens but I have yet to come across that issue.
2. Apple trains their users to use the context menus as little as possible, I personally like that a lot. Sometimes the tendency in GUI's is to put way to much functionality into context menus without giving users the option of not using the context menu. Things that can and should be done with drag and drop operation are stuck in a context menu somewhere. In Gnome/KDE un-mounting and ejecting a device for the most part requires you to use the context menu. For a new user who has no idea what they are doing there has to be a better way to allow users to eject their devices without relying solely on context menus. There is an eject applet for Gnome, I'm sure there is one for KDE as well. Macs don't have eject buttons on their disc drives and that has been true since the floppy drive. I think Macs use of a dedicated eject key on the keyboard is the key, though I did like it better when it was used to power on the Mac. First time I saw that I though it was so darn cool.
Member since:
2005-07-07
Some of the metaphors are only intuitive once you've been shown them. The drag-and-drop installer is one of those. Completely baffled me, but of course it's so obvious *once you've been shown*. Same goes for dragging a device into the trash to eject it.
I've been using a Mac for a year, and found the transition from KDE quite difficult. However, I absolutely love the interface now that I'm used to it. There's almost a sense of 'feeling' your way with the interface.
There's just one usability issue I can't get past: Mac OS has nothing equivalent to Konqueror/KIO parts. For home use that's no biggie, but for systems admin work, Linux/KDE is essential.