Expletives deleted. [1]
I am sold on the Apple ecosystem. It makes so much easy and predictable. I am resigned to not being able to effectively share photos with my parents who are on Android. I am resigned to regularly shelling out money for new devices because my old one reaches planned obsolescence. I do all this for convenience and consistency in self-centered experience.
Yet, the Mac Finder is incredibly frustrating and breaks the experience of using Mac. I regularly find discrepancies between ability to take actions in various flavors of file management on the Mac. Windows IS BETTER. Windows has consistently been better.
I love to organize and file, yet I have files everywhere on my Mac. I realized this is because creating folders is total ****. An uncommonly large %, (I have no idea what this % is, it just feels big) creating folders is unintuitive. This may be because the create folder button is in a different place in a dialog or finder, it isn’t showing up, or worst… when I click “create folder”, the folder goes in an unintuitive **** place. If I’m navigating a Finder tree, and I have made a single selection 3 folders deep, and I click “New Folder,” I want the new folder to go under my selection. Finder puts it at the top level. To actually get the folder 3 levels deep, you have to click into that folder, making it the root, losing the context of the tree.
I can hear the Mac Fanboys saying “get over it,” but… no, this is the level of experience and intuition that Mac has always promised. Moving on…
Why does drag and drop work half the time and give you 0 clues on what the **** is wrong when it isn’t enabled? I had this trouble today when trying to drag and drop files from the downloads directory to a place where I can find them later. I will select or multi-select files and then click drag and … nothing. No sign that I have grabbed the files and they sure don’t move where I want them. I can command click and I see “Copy,” but no “Cut,” the corresponding “Move” action. WTF!?
Then, just when I get so frustrated I start a blog post and then try really breaking down the different behaviors, it starts to work. Magic! The self-healing Finder. It just takes frustration and break of my flow to make it work. This is why I use the Apple ecosystem. [2]
I can hear the Mac Fanboys saying “get over it,” but… no, this is the level of experience and intuition that Mac has always promised. Moving on…
There are other idiosyncrasies in Finder, but these are enough that I run into them EVERY TIME I TRY TO ORGANIZE MY FILES, and the result is that I DON’T ORGANIZE MY FILES. For a trillion dollar company that has billions in the bank, put a designer and two engineers on Finder for two weeks. Please.
[1]: A little context… I’m big on compassion and engaging in collaborative dialog, but sometimes I just want to release my passionate frustration. This is something Steve Jobs was known for. I think I’d like to reserve this for 1% of the time. The time when it really matters. This is practice.
[2] Honestly, Finder and sharing photos are my big complaints… well also that damn butterfly keyboard that is on both Mac laptops I own. Oh, also, why can’t I charge my iPhone off my Mac without a dongle?
A Sense Of 