(On the flip side, Windows' select-a-directory dialogue of the same vintage is such an utter piece of garbage that I can't imagine there being any overlap of designers between the two dialogues.)
I hadn't realized that KDE was copied from Windows 95. I'm surprised no one here has mentioned NeXTSTEP. Here's a demo by Steve Jobs from 1992: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gveTy4EmNyk
- Click the FILE tab
- Wait two full seconds while it replaces my screen with something else
- Click Save As
- Click Computer (because Microsoft wants you to do everything in the cloud)
- Click Browse
- Finally proceed to saving your document like you would be able to do immediately on any other system
A habit that I've developed from earliest computer classes in elementary school is to save the file in the location you want as soon as it's named, so ever after Ctrl+S saves it with no hassle.
I agree it's very ridiculous.
[1] 'Backstage UI' is the bit that looks like this: https://kiatplayground.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/save-to-o...
I would extend your argument to Windows Explorer in general.
Sometimes I feel like the developers don't want stuff to work similar to Windows. Because that would be admitting that Microsoft actually did something right.
It's not the same vintage. It's a carry over from Win 3.0.
Windows 3.0 didn't have any standard system dialogs, these were introduced in 3.1, but that is not the main point. In Windows 3.1 the directory selection dialog was exactly the same as file open/save dialog (Figure 8 in the article) but didn't let you to choose files (and there are still places in windows where standard open dialog is used for choosing directory).
What is typically used as "standard directory selection dialog" actually isn't even documented standard WinAPI dialog, but originally internal dialog of the explorer shell (and it would not surprise me it it was not present in original Windows 95 RTM but introduced in some slightly later version), also it does not select directories (ie. pathname as string), but shell folders (ie. ITEMIDLIST).
Apple have a tradition of being really bad at this. Many of the (slightly more) advanced features are completely hidden behind undiscoverable key combinations or very hidden features. The slide-to-reveal pattern on iOS (now mostly fixed with augmentations) is a good example. Middle clicking the titlebar in Finder to reveal the directory parents is another.
For example: I literally can't know how I can save a file using Gnome's dialogue in the general case, e.g. if the dialogue opens at /foo, and I navigate to /foo/bar using the dialogue, but then go back to /foo ("bar wasn't the right place after all"), I can't save the file there any more. "bar" will be selected. Clicking "Save" while a directory is selected will not save, but navigate instead. Now I'm in "bar" again. I go back to /foo and try to click something else, say a file. This changes the to-be-saved-file's name to the selection.
After I asked someone who uses Gnome as their main desktop they told me "that's easy: you just have to ctrl+click on the selected directory to de-select it, then you can save in the current directory".
That, my dear readers, is indeed unusable garbage.
But, I only realized it now because almost none of the apps I regularly use make use of Gnome's default file open/save dialog. Linux's extreme inconsistency has some benefits ;)
Oh, and talking about Gnome, the only reason anyone uses it is that after configuring a few basic stuff, you can completely ignore it, just run your apps, forget that there's an actual OS with GUI somewhere beneath them. Heck, if even the applications running on it ignore Gnome and its "standard widgets", its biggest strength is that it can be easily ignored!
That's one of the most absurd and glaring usability bugs I've ever heard.
That is the most annoying part to me. Windows does this as well. It's such a rare thing to want to overwrite a file for me, I find it so irritating that if I accidentally click on a file name instead of a folder, suddenly I lose the file name that I wanted to save as. Usually I just cancel and start again. So stupid.
It's not like the Mac way saves screen real estate or anything. It's like the way Firefox lets me close a tab by middle-clicking on it. Most users don't know it's possible, but it doesn't actively harm them to have the feature there.
I really like the fact that the Windows save dialog is basically Windows Explorer, and I really miss those features when an application uses the older file save API (which gives a more Windows 95 / 3.11 interface).