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Comment by blakeyrat | Hacker News Reader

> Humans organise and memorise things in hierarchies,

Humans also track a lot of things based on spatial memory, which no OS since Mac Classic has even tried to make use of, which is a shame.

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True, with the exemption of iOS spring board. It's a great spatial memory comeback and a testament to the easy of use of the model, even if it doesn't scale well when you get into the 100s of items.

How did Mac Classic make use of that?

In Mac Classic each folder you opened created a new window which remembered all of its settings for size, position on screen, scroll position, icon size/layout, etc. This window is an explicit and exclusive representation of that particular folder and attempting to open the same folder again does not create a new window, it simply shifts the focus to the already-open window. The change in Mac OS X towards a browser for navigating the filesystem hierarchy caused an active debate over spatial[0] vs. navigation (or browser)[1] file managers.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_manager#Navigational_file...

Very interesting, thank you.

Ars did an amazing series of articles about the (IMO) missteps made in OS X, and presented a theoretical design that would satisfy both Mac Classic fans and fans of "browser-based" windowing systems.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2003/04/finder/2/

Any software developer interested in designing usable software should read and digest this. Alas, nobody working at Apple did, so I'm no longer an Apple customer.

Thank you for this! I vaguely alluded to this (active debate) in my comment but I had forgotten the source. I'm going to read through this now! :)

The short answer is: stuff stayed where you put it. Every icon, every window, opened up exactly where you left it last time you saw it.

So you had the option of remembering "Excel is the icon below the Special menu" and you could be confident that the Excel icon would always be located below the Special menu, exactly where you put it.

One of the reasons I switched from OS X to Windows is that Apple threw that brilliant design in the garbage. Shame.

I wouldn't say no OS has tried, the windows 8 start screen was designed to exploit spatial memory for instance.

Project Xanadu had something like that. Of course, it is barely working.

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