I’ve been a loyal Apple guy since the 80s (I still have a functioning Apple IIe along with lots of other models) and use Macs every day in critical production work — but I fear the romance is over. Indeed, it appears that this once loved champion of quality user friendly creative technology is becoming like everything else: market share and profits rule… and screw the people who’s backs you built it all on.

Not good. Maybe the world needs a new “Apple.”

Cheers,

deej

go to ~/.porn.noindex

The inital period keeps the folder from being seen in the Finder and the .noindex extention on the folder keeps Spotlight from index it’s contents. Woohoo!

I agree that the “Go To Folder” command is useful to access normally invisible folders, but that’s a pretty specialized requirement. The average user is not really supposed to access invisible folders.

I tend to avoid comparing Apple’s tech notes to the competition. It’s just too depressing :).

I still feel that this tech note is particularly bad, because the error that it describes and supposedly helps you solve can happen to anyone who uses Mail, i.e. just about any kind of user.

On the whole, Apple’s kbase articles are usually pretty good. Dantz’s Extensis’s and Quark’s kbases are much worse. It is nigh on impossible to find things in the Microsoft kbase, and are usually extremely technical when you find them.

Using the “Go” menu is the easiest way to get people where they need to be, with the minimum amount of fuss. These tech notes have to be relevant to the lowest common denominator – in this case, the “hard of understanding”

2. Error messages _are_ a hard thing. And I doubt that programmers will ever be able to cover all possible errors adequately. (When tinkering with iTunes’ resources, for example, and accidentally breaking them in the process, I got an ‘not enough memory to launch iTunes’ message when launching the application the next time. Obviously this was easy to understand for me in my situation, but it is a _real_ error giving a misleading message.)

3. The Go Menu: I suspect that this may be less a fondness of Unix-style clunkiness but rather a consequence of the whole Finder having become highly illogical and unpredictable. There are so many different ways to set up your Finder and so many different way for it to display its windows – which can change from folder to folder depending on what you did before – that using the Go to Folder command may actually be the most straightforward and just works™ way to describe these steps to people.

3a. I use the Go To Folder command quite regularly btw. To go to the /tmp folder for example. Way better than having to open a Terminal and type open /tmp.