Tuesday, April 30, 2013

MacOS - Why It Has Became So Non-Intuitive

So I was one of the earliest people to own Apple ][ and anything they made afterwards including the Newton. I have been and I am a big fan of Apple products. But lately, I am getting to start to think, it is no longer not as intuitive as I thought it should be.

Case in point.

How can you quickly change the audio input and output.

The typical Apple Support Forum answer that, if you post it, would be that it should either be too ovbious to you, or another good one is "why would you want to do that?"

Well it so happens that in my setup, there are many input devices that are connected to my Mac. Sometimes I want input from my musical instruments and sometimes I want to input from my headset with a mic for conference calls. Sometimes I want the output to go to my stuido monitors and sometimes I want to listen to the audio with my headphones or any combinations thereof.

On Windows, things have become more consistent lately. Whatever extra stuff I need to do, just click the right mouse button.

Well, on my Mac, a click the right mouse button (and yes I am using the Magic Pad by using two-finger gesture) on top of the volume control on the menu bar does nothing.

Instead, I had to remember to Option then click.  And it requires some searching to find this out. Problematically there is nothing that interfere with right-mouse click on the audio icon on the menu bar.

So why on the Finder option click does not provide a menu?

On Windows, if you right click the "speaker" icon on the taskbar tray, it comes up with various options for audio along with "Properties" in which you can do more stuff. I feel that on Windows it has became much more consistent over the years.

I am willing to bet that if Microsoft had said that you would need to press the ALT key to get to these audio options, I know Apple fans would make a good fun out of it. And that's exactly the situation going with the Mac OS.

Apple fans, please make more demand out of them to keep it the systems most intuitive system rather than just be in so much love with it and stop protecting it just as soon as someone post anything a bit negative about its products. Things are changing rapidly and I do not want to go back to the Emilio days again.