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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

>Your expectations don't make it broken.

It's not 1990 anymore. All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions. At the very least, one should offer a way for the Windows user to discover what the new conventions are, rather than having to Google and find websites that other people have made when they made the same transition.

What makes this worse is that every windowing system appears to use different terminology for its UI widgets and behaviors. Sticking to a standard terminology (even if it's Windows' terminology) would make things much easier for a convert to figure out how make their machine do what they need it to do.

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> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.

That sounds like the worst way to innovate. I'm not saying that Apple's way is innovative but I say we are all better off if OS manufacturers try difference things to come up with better way of presenting UI.

For example, if apple followed the Window's way of displaying every single window in its Dock, then application based taskbar in Windows 7 would have never come about.

Trying different things should never be criticized for just being different. If that different way of doing things is bad, criticize it but don't point finger just because it's different.

> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.

Umm, no. I've always tried to avoid windows and it's unbelievably annoying UI conventions. Well, at least until Win XP the last windows version I have used.

And after using Linux almost exclusively for 14 years OS X feels great. And the best part is: I don't feel like I have to spend days and days trying to figure out which of the myriad of available settings I have to change to feel at home.

And the missing maximize button: Big deal. So I have to pull some windows by hand to the size I want them to have. Most applications save the last window state.

They have of course spurned your counsel about catering to windows users throughout the last decade, all the way from "close the stores and give the money back to the shareholders" to somewhere in the neighborhood of the most successful company ever. All the while thinking it is still 1990 (the significance of which is a little hazy.)

If they didn't follow this advice when they were on life support, what would possess them to follow it now? It's hard to imagine that one could overlook the evidence (here, and everywhere) that if success is the goal, mimicking windows should be closer to a prohibition than a mandate.

> It's not 1990 anymore.

All the more reason not to have a maximize button. Displays only get more pixels year to year.

It's easier to have more windows on the screen, but it's still no easier to manage them. It's not a problem of pixels, but of cognitive load. For many people simply having more windows visible is distracting, even if those windows are in the background and can be ignored. Its the same reason that people would prefer a clean desk, with only one or a few things on it than one that has lots of things on it. A cluttered desk, no matter how well it's organized, is still harder to manage than a clean desk. A cluttered monitor is the same.

That's exactly what Cmd-h and Cmd-Opt-H are for. This is a solved problem on OS X.

There is probably more work to do out the box to change this perception though. OSX needs to introduce the user to this when they first open an app then make it dead simple to control.

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