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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

It's supposed to be the "Share" menu, but that stopped meaning anything very fast because they just crammed everything into it for lack of other UX for system services.

Macs have the problem multiple times over, because now they have the normal menu bar and toolbar, and a Share menu that just gets arbitrary stuff dumped into by App Store apps, and the Services menu that shows up in some contexts but not others, and the Quick Actions menu that shows up in some contexts but not others, and some services can just add things directly to right click menus.

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Apple UI designers wanted to avoid the Android hamburger so much that they doubled-down on the share menu to duplicate hamburger menu functionality.

I guess printing it to paper is a form of sharing so they may have the last laugh.

Windows Explorer supports its own equivalent to the "Share" menu, dubbed "Send To". It was there already in the original Windows 9x. Printers are generally not listed though, there is a separate "Print" option instead.

There's a very reasonable argument behind that, though.

"Sending" a file to another disc or on the network is non-transformative. At the far end, it's still a file.

But "printing" is inherently transformative-- you're expecting to get something clearly not a file (print-to-file pseudo-printers excepted).

I can see the desire for minimalism-- having seperate rows for "share/send" and "print" is, well, two seperate rows. But if you offer adaptable and configurable interfaces, I could see suppressing one or both depending on context or user preferences. (You have no external drives or registered share-recipients? No "Send To/Share")

Maybe I've been in Linux land too long but sending a file to a printer seems pretty obvious to me. Yes it's transformative in a way, but you could equally argue that my word document with A4 layout is a digital version of a document, and the print out is equivalent.

To me there seems to be more difference between sending and share. One is pushing something somewhere, the other implies making it available for someone/thing to pull.

I'm not particularly saying you're wrong btw. We are talking metaphors, and there's no 'correct' way to do it.

Obligatory:

https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-with-ne...

Good point. Its a mess. Come on apple get someone to fix this

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