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Comment by jlg23 | Hacker News Reader

The article describes the issues I had with discoverability very well: As a European I always refused to pay the insane prices for apple products there. When I finally needed a mp3-player to survive daily commutes in public transport, I got an ipod touch. Without any printed documentation, I had to ask experienced apple users how to perform certain actions.

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This is why, for me, the iPod ('classic') remains one of the greatest products Apple created. They managed to get so much of it right, almost uniquely. Hardware and software working very well together. Of course, it had a very specific function, which makes the task much easier, but I just wish they could follow it up with something remotely approaching as nice an experience.

I've been wanting to replace my iPod Nanos for a few years now (they're 10 years old already, and the batteries are starting to go), but everything nowadays is touch-screen, and so completely unusable for me. Why? With that tactile single click-wheel, it was very easy for me to put the iPod in my pocket and not look at it for the entire flight, even when I wanted to skip the next song or replay or pause.

I know! Similarly, what I've been pining for are smart watches with several tactile buttons that can be used as input for apps. I've been waiting on programmable generic buttons for AGES. Having a display would be icing on the cake.

FYI there is a big market for non-touch music players if you know where to look. Over at HeadFi [1] you can find a large amount of reviews and discussion of players from iRiver, Sandisk, Sony, together with more niche brands like Fiio and HiFiMAN.

[1] http://www.head-fi.org/products/category/digital-audio-flac-...

Imo all they have to do to get the new music app to work is to copy-paste the old iPod user interface into the Music app and add a decent search field. I don't know why that's such a hard challenge for them.

As a new Macbook user this year one of my favorite examples of this is screenshots. On Windows I've always had a prt scrn keyboard button, Macbooks forego that. As of windows 7 I think, there was a program to screenshot a portion of the screen or a specific window, Apple don't have one of those. All the screenshot commands (screen, window, portion) are behind a 3 key keyboard shortcut that I have to look up all the time.

Edit: Csydas, I got a HN notify with a reply from you, it's a shame you deleted it - you brought up good points and I agree with you. If you were down voted before deleting it wasn't me.

Mac OS X has always shipped with a screenshot utility called "Grab".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grab_%28software%29

Ha you're right, thankyou! In my defence, the first Google hit for OSX screenshot is this Apple page [0] that doesn't even mention that utility - and "screenshot" in Spotlight doesn't suggest Grab. It's in the "Other" folder of Launchpad which I don't think I've ever opened.

But really, thanks - this is really helpful :)

Wow. Context is everything. It's been the same 3-key shortcut since 1984, so I never have to think about it. The command-shift-number pattern was used for a good handful of common system-wide functions on the classic Mac OS, so it was just a matter of remembering which digit corresponded to which action. They were basically function keys, since the original keyboards didn't have physical function keys.

I'm in the same boat. I've used both Macs and PCs for years and I find the Mac's shortcuts to be easier to remember and, overall, more useful than the PC's. PrintScreen to capture the whole desktop is nice and easy, but anything outside of that is a pain in the ass. I love that Cmd+Shift+4 lets me select an area of the screen with 1 hand. I'd be hard-pressed to remember, much less find, if Windows has suddenly added that capability and, even if it did, you'd have to use 1 hand for modifiers and one hand for PrintScreen. Macs have always had it so it's muscle memory now. If Windows added it, it was recent and requires 2 hands.

Windows has had the Snipping Tool since Windows Vista. Print screen is obsolete though it still does work. Snipping Tool is really great, you can even make a free form snip.

Any combination of modifier keys excluding the 'menu' key will combine with PrtScn with one hand under Windows - all the modifier keys are available on the same side of the keyboard as PrtScn on a standard keyboard.

Most of the time on Windows you want full screen (PrtScrn) or a single window (Alt+PrtScrn). Windows definitely wins here vs Apple's Cmd+Shift+3 and Cmd+Shift+4, with the additional modifier to copy to clipboard instead of save to desktop.

On the other hand, Apple's accent input (old style, not the new style that stops key repetition grrr) is vastly superior than alt codes. Yeish.

It really depends on the person and their setup I think. I personally love OS X key combos because they’re commonly tied to phonetics (Command-Q for quit vs. Alt-F4 for instance).

Low reliance on Fkeys is also great for two reasons: 1) It makes it easier to use keyboards with Fkey rows (like my beloved HHKB) 2) It frees up an entire row of keys for me to use without worry of overriding system shortcuts — for instance, I have F1 assigned to Spotlight, F2 assigned to a drop-down terminal, F3 assigned to quick open in Xcode, F4 assigned to search documentation in Dash, etc etc.

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