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Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

That’s anecdotal, but my mother who "grew up" on DOS and Windows was never able to grasp the relationship between the top menu bar and the application window on MacOS. I bought her a Mac in 2010 because they are supposedly more intuitive and I didn’t want to provide PC support anymore, but it was no better than Windows for her at all (also not worse overall I guess).

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The first time I discovered that "dragging an icon to the trash" was one of the few ways to uninstall an application on Mac, my mind was a bit blown. I was struggling so hard to find an "Add/remove programs" equivalent or an uninstaller.

I believe it’s because that literally just deletes the application file/directory, there’s no hook for application-specific uninstall routines.

Remember when the way to eject a floppy or other removable disk on a Mac was to drag its icon to the trash? That was weird.

With OS X (maybe even OS 9?) the interaction was changed so that when you dragged a disk to the trash can icon, the icon changed to an eject icon (⏏), but it seems that this has been removed at some point in the last 18 years since when I went to check it, it doesn't happen anymore. On the other hand, the disk icon now has an eject button next to it in at least some Finder views.

Exactly, wave goodbye to any attempt at user consistency. Same with Win10, it launched 7 years ago and they still haven't made the the new UI standard. Try changing user passwords or system sounds or..etc. In all honesty find Linux Mint with XFCE far less mental grind than either of the predominant platforms. It has a rough edge here and there but that's it - things in general stay in place. As a result I dedicate more time to end result of my computing rather than the medium.

there kindof are, though it's very inconsistent. For example, yesterday I installed the AdGuard app, which adds a proxy and some Extensions.. When I finally realized I didn't need it and it was a paid service, and I really just needed the free AdGuard DNS, I dragged the icon to the trash....

And that also prompted me to confirm that it would delete the proxy and the Extensions that were installed.

I remember a few more apps being like that. So there ARE hooks, just not used universally. AND it won't delete personal files or preferences related to the app, which is what users are expecting these days when they delete an app, UNLESS it's an app installed from the App Store, because those store prefs and data in a different folder than regular apps..

> And that also prompted me to confirm that it would delete the proxy and the Extensions that were installed.

I would be interested if someone could point me to the mechanism used for that (triggering application-specific uninstall logic upon dragging the application to the trash).

Good question, I unfortunately have no idea of the mechanisms for this, I just know they exist and have encountered them before as a user...

Another anecdote, my mom was essentially a lifelong Windows user. I would have to answer basic tech support questions for her several times a month.

She's switched 80% of her use to an iPad and the rest to a Mac laptop, and I get a question about once a year.

YMMV.

I ended up switching my parents to iPads as well, which was a huge improvement.

I spent years thinking they [EDIT: Apple's always-top-of-screen application menus, that is] were dumb for that reason. It never occurred to me that major software vendors would be stupid and/or user-hating enough to ditch the standard top menu, when they have a whole bunch of stuff that should go in it.

I seem to recall Steve Jobs saying the reason the menu is at the top of the screen is that it's easier to hit it with the mouse, you just push it all the way up. I think it's a valid point.

I've noticed it's really nice if you like quarter- and half-screen layouts (or anything else that's sorta tiling-like). Four different programs on the screen, only one "file, edit, ..." menubar eating space.

Apple's HIG used to have a bunch of these nuggets - things about predictability of where inputs are, what was clickable, etc. Not sure how much has been preserved over the years, but the original docs are pretty legendary.

One nice thing about this too is that when you have something like a full-screen video playing, pushing the mouse to the top of the screen will reveal the menu pretty much universally. Trying to get to the application menu in full-screen on Windows is going to vary from one app to the next and has poor discoverability.

At the same time they don't utilize the 4 most easy to reach points of the screen, the corners. Windows always used those for essential interactions so the interface was really fast to use: for the start menu just throw your mouse to the bottom left corner; to close the window throw your mouse to the top right corner; to show your desktop throw to to bottom right; not sure anymore about the other corner as I am on Mac for a while already. Since switching to Mac I am always thinking about how stupid the interface is for disregarding important user-friendly details like these.

Apple has Hot Corners (configurable in the Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver section of Settings) that can replicate some of the functionality that you described.

I have had my second monitor on top of my main one for the last 20 years, when I switched to a Mac this was the hardest thing to get used to.

The top menu made sense when computer screens were small and the mouse pointer thus never far away from the top, and applications were fullscreen most of the time anyway.

To me it seems the top menu bar is a holdover from early Mac OS. I saw a demo of one of the early versions of the OS, and it made a ton of sense there. The OS could only run a single application at a time, but that application could have multiple windows. From that perspective it's very sensible that whichever application had full control over the screen would want a menu bar global to its own windows.

Now though, it's just weird to have the menu bar at the top of the screen. And it's especially strange when there's no windows for the application left but the menu bar for it is still visible (something that wouldn't be strange in the single app at a time model)

Except that in this scenario, the application is still running, it just has no documents open. It's a nice thing to have because you can close all the documents in say Word, do some other work, and then when you need to open Word again, it's there ready to go without having to load again. The Mac seems to do a better job of having apps hanging out in the background than Windows does.

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