[agumonkey]

I don't like to shit on steve jobs, he was a cultural father (like gates, or other figures of that cherished era). That said, what jobs saw was the outer layer, the shallow experience. It has hard consequences:

- it's what the user wants to feel quickly: beauty (it drives sales also)

- it's not what the user wants to have: understanding (it's .. non existent for a commercial market)

both are true, still the elusion of the underlying layer saddens me to no end.

Another example: the copy key, in mainstream OSes you copy some text, in PARC OS, you copy an object, the whole graph; it's life altering in capabilities and simplicity. It even has a dedicated key !

[robotresearcher]

On the Mac desktop copy and paste has long (always?) worked with file & folder icons, i.e. objects.

[rudedogg]

I think the parent is talking about that behavior, but extended throughout the entire OS. You can see this in some apps, one that comes to mind is Sketch and its concept of "symbols".

I think the complaint is that copy/cut/paste was weak in the beginning, and generally just worked with plain text. This weakened the metaphor to where now we don't expect much else, but it could have been much more powerful.

[agumonkey]

I believe it was a per application design. File explorer could copy folder and files (windows too). But you can't copy anything out of the box.

[robotresearcher]

The macOS Finder comes in the box. Copy paste a file icon to replicate a file. I just tried it and it works.

[agumonkey]

can you copy an application ? a window ? a structured paragraph ?

[lostlogin]

Yes to an app, no to a window and I don’t know what a structured paragraph is. I can’t explain how but being able to copy a window seems like it would break the metaphor.

[robotresearcher]

An application (*.app), yes. Window, no. Structured paragraph, yes.

Shrug.