The crux of the complaint is that stuff has shifted for no reason and it takes time to learn it, not that it is impossible to learn it.
Despite your nitpicks, the car analogy is a good one. I rent cars often. It sometimes takes me a few minutes to figure out where the 5 or 6 things you need to know to drive have moved to. The pedals are always the same, the steering wheel is the same, sometimes the lights and wipers and gear shift pattern move around a bit. That’s it.
I emphatically do not need to read the manual, and I certainly do not need to look under the hood. Nor do I need (consistently) to go on to the internet to find out how to fix problems that the manual doesn’t even admit exist.
This comment isn’t directed at you, cmyk, but others above said that hiding system files and extensions is a good idea for novices and simple users. The MS model works on the assumption that (to continue the car analogy) it’s OK to lock off the hood because the normal driver doesn’t need to go there. The problem is that MS’s reliability is such that this simply isn’t true.
Actually I found MS software to be very reliable once it ditched the DOS hack OSes (ME and below except anything based on NT).
Even Vista is pretty solid. Most of my rage at it comes from what they did to the UI. It defies reason. Were they on crack?
The soundcard stab was on par with the two-button mouse stab. There was a time when you had to buy most of that stuff separately with PCs. Macs always had it standard. It’s archaic and irrelevant now. Get it?
You may find the gestures annoying, but the Mac has them, as well as a multi-button mouse (or any other third-party device you want)… What was all that nonsense about choice you were talking about?
How we interface with cars will evolve over time, but much more slowly than a GUI that has no such standards and laws that the auto industry has to work within. GUIs can change on a whim and in far more diverse ways that the mere dashboard of a car can.
The problem here is the quantity of diverse things a computer can do. There’s only so many controls and gauges on a car, albeit dozens, but they are in fixed, physical places within a vehicle. On a computer, there are hundreds and hundreds of settings, controls, files and things you can use it for. Here the analogy begins to break down, I think.
True and what I said wasn’t well put. I suppose it’s not MS reliability entirely: it’s more that file systems are sufficiently complex, and security and other problems are sufficiently common, that you can’t operate well without knowing extension types and so on.
It’s the “whim” thing that’s the problem. Sure, software is improving and becoming more powerful and we need to learn new stuff to cope with that. But when you need to read the manual to find the steering wheel because some guy in marketing thought it would be cool to put it somewhere different, you’re treating your customers with contempt.
That right there is probably the problem I have with PCs - the only ones I’ve ever used have belonged to my employers and we couldn’t change anything on them. If I didn’t have to go thru that stupid tree every time I wanted a file…
As usual the Apple crowd goes insane. Be happy with your computer! You are clearly better than the rest of us. We lowly WinXp people will just have to muddle along. Can you feed us a few bread crumbs when you get the time?
That was a very impressive dissertation. Did you try, perhaps, looking in the help menu?
In the Finder, choose File > Find.
Select the location where you want to perform the search.
Define your search using the pop-up menus.
Choose Other from the pop-up list, then select Visibility in the search attribute list. To add this attribute to the Find dialog’s pop-up menu for easy access, select “Add to Favorites.” Click OK to finish.
Choose Invisible from the second pop-up menu.
If you want, click the Add (+) button to add additional search criteria.
Type letters or words in the search box to begin searching, or click the Search Again button in the lower-right corner of the window.
Regarding de-evolution, it seemed to me that you were lamenting how much Windows (or MS apps) is de-evolving. So, I’m scratching my head as to how you can be so fed up with their product, but still have such a tight grip in defending it. Or something. I dunno.
My mother, who needs my father to turn the computer on, can operate Windows XP perfectly well. Of course, her folder organization is for shit, but she can find a file when she needs one.
OK. Fair enough. Let me amend what I amended. When I use a complicated product, I would think that the easier it is to use, the more sophisticated it is.
I’m not sure what to tell you. Works on both of mine. I see a bunch of “.” files (especially “.DS_Store”) all over my folders. I have to turn it off, because the hidden folders are annoying.