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Red Hat Diaries/0035

Peaches & Pears, Apples & Oranges

It's funny how the things I find anathema on the PC seem totally natural on the Mac.

Take the Trash as an example. On the PC I hate it. Maybe it's the way it works on the PC, recreating those annoying directories whenever I move a file or don't hold down Shift in Explorer (or hold it down in X-file). Maybe it's knowing - since way back in the days of the 'Sigma', Norton Unerase and Radsoft's own Quick 'n' Dirty - how to undelete files at any time, or use the tools available in the Windows environment to do so. Maybe it's just the look of the PC versus the look of the Mac. Maybe it's the fact that I am not familiar enough yet with HFS+ and can't begin to ferret out orphaned sectors.

But on the Mac it seems so natural, so logical. There's the trash can - you drop something on it when you no longer want it, and after a while, when you're really sure you don't want it back, you hit Cmd+Shift+Delete and it's gone.

Or take the Explorer/Finder interface. On the Mac the methodology makes more sense, as Mac files have forks and their graphical data is eminently more accessible. But still and all, most savvy Windows users regard the explorers with distaste and distrust and have long since learned that these bloat collectors undermine the smooth running of their operating system.

While the Mac Finder seems perfectly applicable: it shows bundle directories as applications, and of course this is correct, as the method effectively hides unnecessary details from the goal-oriented user. And to be sure, I will have to write a version of X-file for OS X, but that's not the point. The point is that on the Mac, the Finder works, while on the PC, the explorers don't.

It's peaches and pears, apples and oranges.

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