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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

It seems like several Mac OS utilities get no or negative attention. QuickTime, Image Capture, Disk Utility, and the Finder itself are broken or are missing features. I doubt Apple will repair them.

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The Disk utility downgrade is still annoying to this day.

The worst example of neglect though imho is how finder still doesn’t have an option to cut when you right click. How hard would it be to add that so folks don’t have to learn a keyboard shortcut?

Well, technically it does. After copying an item, when you right-click where you want to paste it to, if you hold the ⌥ (option) key, the 'Paste Item' option in the contextual menu will change to 'Move Item Here' (effectively making it into a Cut & Paste).

Finder is also broken for AppleScript as it doesn't refresh itself when AppleScript makes changes. Plus, its refresh logic (probably related) is slow.

I find Image Capture to be perfect with the exception of the default file naming scheme (please just name the first file ‘Scan 1’, that would make so much more sense). QuickTime on the other hand is an embarrassment but I guess with alternatives like IINA it hardly matters.

My current beef with Image Capture is that in either Big Sur or Catalina (can't remember which), they defaulted to converting HEIC to JPG, rather than preserving the original format, and moved the checkbox that let you know it's doing that to a menu you have to hunt for. If an image downloader is doing conversions, it should be more transparent about it.

Also, some of the options don't actually do anything. The delete after import is broken and it won't default to a directory of your choosing like the previous version.

Say what you will about Disk Utility. I’d still pick it 10 times out of 10 over Windows Disk Management. It’s still unchanged in Windows 11.

Making a comparison to windows is just picking low-hanging fruit.

GParted is still hands-down the best.

I’m also a big fan of the diskutil command line utility.

Absolutely. I find it much more intuitive than fdisk, for example.

well sure, but fdisk is a command line utility that you don't use unless you have no other choice, the windows equivalent to disk utility is disk management (inside computer management), but it's been as "not updated in forerer" as quicktime on macos.

Don't fix it if it ain't.

Not sure if this is a hot take or not, but Finder is the worst file explorer I've used. Feels like your file structure is hidden from you, because heavens forbid that I can go to my home directory quickly. Honestly, it's not awful, but Gnome Files, Dolphin, and Windows Explorer are all more user friendly IMO.

With Finder defaults, I can see what you mean, but after turning on Show Path Bar (with either ⌥⌘P or View → Show Path Bar), Finder is much nicer to use.

As for quickly navigating to your home directory, you can either spam ⌘↑ (or Go → Enclosing Folder) to go up to parent directories, or simply use ⇧⌘H (or Go → Home) to go straight to your home directory.

Thank you, these are nice to know!

No prob, glad to help!

Was just thinking this about their Photos and Music apps on Catalina. Pretty bad UX but they’ve had plenty of time to fix them and haven’t. I guess snooping through data after customers throw them loads of cash for their devices is the new business model.

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