Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

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themodelplumber

> Hold down the option key and then click on the text next to a radio button. WTF!!! Who designed this, this is completely non nondiscoverable.

This could be a clever designer, if for example the team decided that Mac users don't need manual resolution settings, and this designer lost the argument. So they stick it behind a keypress and make sure word gets out.

The team only cares about what they can see, a common issue with teams. So they don't notice and the designer at least knows they've saved some major pain, at the cost of some annoyance.

If you've worked with people who design for social bell-curve psychology, you have probably been confronted with this problem before. And this is just one possible explanation...

A lot of macOS seems designed this way, it took me months of using macOS daily before I learnt these little tricks, e.g. pressing option before many operations generally shows an advanced menu (advanced network connection stats, finder merge folder option etc). I'd like for there to be an option for power users where this is the default behaviour if enabled.

I've been using MacOS for nearly 15 years now, and I've only just discovered that the Finder toolbar can be customised.

In fact you can park your own shell scripts on it, although setting that up is a bit of a performance.

MacOS just hides a ton of advanced things like that behind the "option-click on things", so it's not like it's an uncommon occurence.

It’s a way to make it possible for customer support to tell people what to do, while not overcomplicating the operating system for the 99.9% of users who do not care about things like manually setting resolutions if they even know what it is.

It’s like the habit of using key combinations to interrupt the boot up sequence, it introduces necessary facilities that aren’t in the way of you don’t need them or don’t even know about them.

This is why community maintained software tends to have better UIs; you just have users and developers (who are often the same) and none of this “bell-curve psychology.” WPA-GUI is awesome for example, but you can’t sell it because it doesn’t look awesome.

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