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>you are a frigging master of the computer universe. Strange because this is exactly why I love OS X. Because it's empowering and gets out of the way. For instance, it's the only OS where multi-touch gestures for desktop/window management works instantly and controls everything as I'm doing it. A common thing to do is to select some objects on one desktop, click and drag them with the trackpad, then swipe with 3 additional fingers to move to another desktop, before dropping. It just works. The browser works like a tablet and I can zoom and pan and navigate back easily. The OS is smart enough to reposition all my windows to their previous location when I unplug and replug an external monitor, instead of giving me a bunch of cropped apps in the corner. Renaming or moving a file makes apps pay attention and save to the new location. Preferences apply just by changing them, labels and controls everywhere update to track underlying changes, every listing is live. I can instantly preview anything with a spacebar tap, without losing keyboard focus on the finder window I was working with. Even the little icon in the titlebar of a document window is interactive, letting me drag a file I have open to a new place without making me go find it again, or right click it to get a dropdown menu to all parent paths. Plugging in devices and drives, managing audio inputs and outputs, managing network interfaces and VPNs, backing up to external devices, it's all right there and instantly accessible, without 3 layers of legacy control panels or a bunch of config files to go dive through. All of these things preserve my flow state by letting me manipulate the objects and the state of my desktop without having to make a chore out of it, by acting exactly like the natural and traditional objects around me. When I turn on the light, I don't open the "light preferences", click a checkbox and hit "Ok", I don't go edit /etc/light.conf, I just switch on the light. Why "professionals" think it should be any other way keeps amazing me, but then, I recall a study a while back that said that when it takes a lot of small steps to perform a particular task, it seems faster, even if it actually isn't. |