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Favorite quotation: Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes, that way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - Jack Handey

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Library Folder Names

Sent to Apple:

Please avoid having folders in /Library and ~/Library that share the same first word. It makes keyboard navigation a huge pain when you have folders with names like:

/Library/Application Scripts

/Library/Application Support

and

/Library/PreferencePanes

/Library/Preferences

It means in order to keyboard-navigate to the correct folder, you have to type the entire first word, then the first letter of the next word! This is bad design!!

I have been using the Mac since 1984. I would gladly come on your team as a person whose job it is to make sure the Mac is Mac-like and keeps true to the level of user-friendliness and intuitiveness that it should have. I was losing hope for awhile but Mountain Lion showed that you really are trying -- I think it's the best OS X version in a long time.

However there are still several areas where MacOS 9 was easier to use, such as: printing, scanning, managing system extensions, managing installed programs, drag-and-drop text clippings and graphics clippings, interface customization, control strip, tear-off applications menu, fonts, sounds, the Finder in general, and a few other areas. I think if 10.9 could be made to match MacOS 9's ease of use on these areas, then it could revolutionize the industry.

There are some good ideas that will ALWAYS be good ideas. Some solutions to certain problems will always be the best, no matter how style changes or how fast technology moves, because users are still humans and evolution acts on a geological timescale, not on Moore's law. Apple needs to revisit some of the solutions to human-interface and user-friendliness problems that it already has, that were features of long-forgotten software, but which are still the best solutions to those problems they were designed to address.

Contact me via e-mail if you want my help, and I will gladly move to Cupertino and devote the rest of my life to this. I already applied and you have my resume. I know you probably get a bajillion applications, but I there might be no one who spent more of their childhood and adult life using the Mac and who knows its long history better than I do.

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