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Comment by cptskippy | Hacker News Reader

I really hate these articles that bemoan poor UX but in reality are a failure of the author to take the time and look at the problem from a different perspective.

Sure the Mac printer selection experience is great when you have a laptop that you carry from work to home and print from a single printer at either location.

It sucks when you have a desktop at work and you can see the entire corporate network. That printer sitting across the hall might be 10 hops from you on the network but the printer on some exec's desktop might be 2 hops even though he's 2 floors up.

Or maybe you're a home user who never takes your laptop anywhere but you have a document printer and a photo printer. Or a kid and they have a printer for school work in their room. Then you have to check every time you print.

* Neither OS adds a printer by default so the scenario I described isn't really feasible and none of the OSes behave as I or the author of the article described.

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I haven't used printers from a Mac at all, but reading the article I thought the implementation was that the Mac would keep track of a preferred printer depending on what network you're connected to.

If it's as I was thinking it would work without problem for the scenarios you described.

I just checked and nothing really lines up with what the author states.

MacOS Sierra and El Capitan default to the "Last Printer Used". The UI is the same in both and there is no indication in the UI that this a per network preference.

Windows 10 defaults to "Let Windows manage my default printer" and has clarifying text under the option that states "Windows will set your default printer to be the one you used most recently at your current location". Which appears to be the feature the author loves about OSX.

Windows 7 sets the first installed printer as the default printer and when you install a printer it asks if you would like to default to it in the future.

Personally I prefer the Windows 7 approach over macOS and Windows 10. Having a network/location default would be ideal in my mind and that doesn't appear to be an option for macOS or Windows.

> Having a network/location default would be ideal in my mind and that doesn't appear to be an option for macOS or Windows.

That's too bad.

The crux of the author's point appears to be that reducing the choices the user has to make is generally good, but I feel that modern designers are often over zealous in that pursuit.

Intelligent defaults is something that feels like a good blend. You're working with the computer, it recommends something it thinks is smart (I set this local printer as the default) and if you disagree you can modify it. One must be careful to not overly increase the mental overhead of the user this way, but smart defaults can prevent the complexity of the user trying to reverse engineer and fight unspoken rules.

I believe I have seen this work in Leopard through Lion, particularly Snow Leopard. I remember re-making the addressing of my home network once I changed jobs and the internal subnets were no longer different. More recently, I no longer print with the same machine at both sites, I will check it out.

This is not an explicit option, such as a default setting for printer for a named network. What I noticed back then was that printers located on the unreacheable networks were never the default offering, provided the routing could be used to distinguish where I was. So, if both home and work networks were using 10.0.0/24, it would not work.

It may be possible that binding to the name of access points is a more clever way to do it today.

Care to offer us a design that solves the problem?

Which problem would you like a solution to?

The sea of printers at the office. How do you simplify when "you see the whole network" as you put it?

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