MRAB wrote:
I'd heard people say how user-friendly Apple Macs were, but when I got to use one I was somewhat disappointed.
Well, they were compared to MS-DOS and the like, which was all that was within reach of the general public when the first Mac appeared. RISCOS came along somewhat later.
in MacOS, even if I had a directory window open, I had to navigate to the directory in the Save dialog.
Yes, that was annoying. It wasn't a problem to begin with, because the original Mac was strictly single-tasking -- you couldn't *have* a directory window and an application open at the same time. And all your files were on floppies in a flat file system -- folders only existed in the Finder's imagination -- so the only real choice to be made when saving a file was "which disk do I put it on". When multitasking, hard disks and hierarchical file systems came along, there was an opportunity for a rethink, but it never really happened. Things are somewhat better in MacOSX, where you can drag a folder from a Finder window onto a file dialog to take you there, but there is still more of a distinction between Finder windows and save dialogs than there needs to be.
And don't mention the menu bar across the top, separated from the window to which it belonged.
That seems to be a matter of taste. There are some advantages to the menu-bar-at-top model. It's an easier target to hit, because you can just flick the mouse up to the top. It only takes up space once, instead of once per window. It makes it possible for an app to be running without having any windows, and still be able to interact with it.
Or the way that clicking on any window of an application or the Finder brought not only it but also all of the its siblings to the front.
MacOSX has fixed that one, thankfully. Only the window you click comes to the front, now. -- Greg -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
