-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Nov 30, 2006, at 6:44 PM, Greg Ewing wrote:
> Barry Warsaw wrote: > >> When I switched to OS X for most of my desktops, I had several >> collisions in this namespace. > > I think on MacOSX you have to consider that it's really > ~/Documents and the like that are *your* namespaces, > rather than the top level of your home directory. That's not how a *nix developer is going to think, but OSX does straddle the line between my grandma's OS and a Real Development Platform. It usually does a pretty good job of letting the *nix geeks pop the hood and play in the sandbox they're used to (to mix some metaphors :), but letting you ignore all that stuff if you want, like when I'm just using it to write some music. I actually think it does a pretty good job here too, or at least as good as can be expected. But it does create collisions where I've generally not had them on e.g. Linux or Solaris. Maybe I'd see more of that if e.g. I actually tried to use a Linux desktop in grandma- mode too. > Also, I think MacOSX has a somewhat different philosophy > about hiding things. The Finder hides the internals of > things like application bundles, which is fine, but > the application itself is visible, so you can move it > around or delete it if you want. The Finder is for my grandma, the terminal is for me. Sometimes I / want/ to put on my grandma's clothes and pretend I'm just a desktop consumer. When I do, I'm usually fine with letting Finder protect me from all the hungry-wolf dot-files. > With ~/.local, you're hiding the fact that the applications > or libraries or whatever are even there in the first > place. You've got all this disk space being used up, > but no way of seeing where or by what, and no > obvious way of freeing it up. I think that's bad HCI. Yes, but who are they hidden from? Dot-files aren't for my grandma, they're for me (in my normal clothes). I'd expect that a geek who installed stuff into ~/.local would know enough to know how to find it, delete it, etc. To me that's good adaptive HCI -- novice users don't care and won't use it or see it, advanced users know how to take advantage of it because it fits in, or at least relates to, their world view. OTOH, the fact that most OSX applications don't store their data in dot-files but instead in ~/Library is fine too, because their data needs to be visible to grandma occasionally. - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (Darwin) iQCVAwUBRW95u3EjvBPtnXfVAQK7fgP/ZfmTIg+x2QqrmDcRiomcYzioS6J8YXEY K0Iiy/uYjux/XfDYbCHUatl2hO/pIGH6NOPHOWZ3/eub+9BfKaIkIn3sIvxVOzd/ cN/AN0OVsHUAPqWiotrALFqAUNj6uP+UUs6/cmlx9LtkNiIIFs6eg16993vNu2eZ pWSK6CKeBnQ= =vzU5 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
