Also, what came after this era it was either boring (standard x86 PCs) or too complex to easily maintain over decades, e.g. Suns or SGIs with failing [UW]SCSI drives that are hard to replace these days.
> Nobody can compete with Microsoft's office suite all-in-one + the kitchen sink bundle, though, so it persists.
Well, there's Google Workspace (and a few smaller, less comprehensive suites) as a very competitive alternative with everything + kitchen sink, but
- nobody ever got fired buying ~IBM~ Microsoft
- MS is already in all enterprises, so it's quite easy for their sales people to position their products
- the people who make the decision to buy M365 aren't the power users who suffer from the poor design in the products
- there's a huge vendor lock-in due to lots of legacy .docx, .pptx and .xlsx files that won't be parsed correctly by 3rd party software due to the formats' intentional complexity
Interesting factoid about Google Workspace: if you send me a google docs link, I, with any Google account (even Federated identity account) can use and modify that document as a regular user.
That's not true for Microsoft, and I was forced to buy some Office software for our business because an external company used Microsoft products. Quite infectious.
Yet they could use our tools free of charge, they just refused.
It’s similar in Germany, where truck drivers regularly kill cyclists on right turns and get away with a four figure fine and (if the judge has a bad day) a few months of license suspension.
Here in Norway, the one crossing lanes has the blame almost regardless. So with a bicycling lane on your inside, you have to be very, very careful.
However the exact limits to that are being tested. There's just been a case in front of the supreme courts here[1], where a e-cyclist in a bike lane got run over by a truck doing a right-hand turn in a busy intersection.
A similar case back in 2019 ended with 60 days of jail for the driver of the truck[2], though that one seems more cut and dry.
It's often said that if you want to get away with killing an American, first give them a bicycle. Drivers just say "they came out of nowhere" or "the sun was in my eyes" and that's that.
> Back in the resurgence of the Mac after Steve Jobs returned, the policy was to make everything as open as possible
My perception is quite different. One of the first things Steve did after his return was to revoke the licenses for Mac clones (Power Computing, Daystar, UMAX, etc). Also, the iPod, iPhone and iPad were created under his leadership and have always been very far from open in their designs, regarding both hardware and software.
Apple was (and still is) very open when it helps them, e.g. by adopting and enforcing USB (original iMac) or USB C (laptops from ca 2015 on).
The Mac didn’t have a CLI in the first 16 years or so, so there’s no traditional “execute” meaning for the Enter key. I’d argue that the thought here was that by pressing that key, you’d want to enter a new name for the selected file.
That's not a bad thought, but traditiona Mac keyboards didn't even have an "enter" key. (And nor do their current tenkeyless ones.) They just had a "return" key. The "enter" key only came around when the 10-key numpad was introduced, and it gave a different key code than the return key (which lives/lived where "enter" lives on PC keyboards).
I don't recall whether "enter" renamed files, and I can't check whether it does at the moment because all my mac keyboards within reach are tenkeyless, but "return" always has.
I find this debatable from a UI/UX perspective. I think that the designers made the right choice here, because a context menu should show actions which can be applied to the object I right clicked on. "New Document" isn't really some function of a file or folder icon. Even worse: when I right click on a folder, should the "New Document" menu item create a new doc in the current folder? Or in the one I clicked on?
It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
Nah, no different from 'Create Row Below' or some such. Hunting for white space to click in order to act on the directory is like hunting for the borders in a spreadsheet or table to click in order to add a new row
Interesting opinion. I think it would be so much less confusing to have only one menu. The easiest for power-users and newcomers alike would be to put on the top of this unique right-click menu the folder-level options (create new folder, open terminal here, paste here, ...), and the selection-specific options bellow. This way it would be predictable and we can build habits (muscle memory).
But you're right it's debatable. A matter of preference. I guess I'm just in the camp of "more explicit is better than implicit". And I'm willing to pay the verbosity cost (having a longer menu in this case). The alternative seems like a complex decision tree to me: Am I in list-view? Yes. Is my folder full of files? Yes. What menu do I need, depending on the task I want to accomplish? I want to create a new folder. Ah, so I have to find some empty pixels to conjure the menu with that option...
> It would be better to have these common tasks in a separate menu item in the icon bar where they are always available, in addition to the context menu when right clicking on empty space in a window.
In GNOME Files they are! It’s the folder menu - the one that’s connected to the location bar.
It isn’t the most beautifully discoverable of menus, but it works well, and it’s worth noting the menus have been rearranged a bit in 47.
I just gave the layout a quick spin, and it's indeed very easy to learn when coming from regular QWERTY, and it's almost eerie how much finger travel it saves. I may just go and switch to it. Thanks to the author!
(Apologies for not referencing Dvorak or Colemak in this comment)
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