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Mike Rivers wrote:
> In article <070920041809129694%Thebigonion@plunger.adj> Thebigonion@plunger.adj writes:
>>Dragging a drive to the trash is the same as selecting 'eject' from the
>>Finder.
> I've gathered that. But how are you supposed to learn this fact?
Story I've heard (possibly apocryphal) is the whole trash-means-eject
concept came about pretty much accidentally. Supposedly, in early
versions of the Macintosh (before it was ever released as a product),
things worked more sensibly: to eject a disk, you'd click once on
the disk icon to select it and then do some sort of operation to
eject it (like choose "eject" from the pull-down menu). This would
leave you with a "dead" icon on the desktop, so you'd want to get
rid of the dead icon, and you'd drag it to the trash.
However, when they did user testing to see how well people liked this
way of doing things, they found that the users hated it because they
perceived the menu option thing as a needless step and a waste of
time. So they simplified the process by making that step unnecessary
and making drag to trash mean eject.
Unfortunately, this really goes against the whole idea of making things
intuitive. Apple does a good job, a lot of the time, of not making
arbitrary things that you "just have to know", and that seems to be a
big priority for them, but sometimes they just totally throw that out
the window and do something bizarre like this.
It's one of those things that actually makes sense once you know the
interesting little historical tidbit behind it, but before that it
just seems totally random. In that sense, it's no better than the
original of the name of the Unix command "grep". There was a text
editor where the "g" command would do something globally (i.e. for
every line of text), and one thing you could do is specify a pattern
to check every line for, and the pattern is called a "regular
expression" (after regular languages, which of course *everyone*
knows about if they took a theory of computation class in college,
right?), and then once you have applied a RE to your g, you can do
"p" to print the lines that the RE matched. The help file summarized
this as g/RE/p (because regular expressions are traditionally
surrounded by slashes), so naturally the word "grep" means "search
a file for lines that match a pattern". Except that you would never
in a million years guess that "grep" is the right command to do
what you want if that's what you wanted to do and all you had is
a list of commands. Trash-means-eject isn't quite as convoluted
a story as that, but it's almost equally hard to guess, if not
harder since you would quickly conclude it's best to NOT experiment
by dragging things into the trash, since that destroys things.
Now, if you want to have an intuitive interface for ejecting a disk,
I personally think there should be a little boot that you can drag
onto the disk. When you let go, it kicks the disk out, preferably
with a nice stress-relieving animation.
- Logan
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