{"id":318,"date":"2008-11-06T21:38:53","date_gmt":"2008-11-06T21:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=318"},"modified":"2010-10-27T18:16:37","modified_gmt":"2010-10-27T18:16:37","slug":"osx-breaking-the-principle-of-least-astonishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=318","title":{"rendered":"OSX Breaking The Principle Of Least Astonishment"},"content":{"rendered":"

Normally OSX is quite good when it comes to useability and not breaking the principle of least astonishment (roughly computers should avoid doing things to ‘surprise’ the user), but I re-encountered one poor area again tonight.<\/p>\n

I was burning a CD image to a CD-R – something which is admittedly an action most commonly done by the geekier users. I normally use my Ubuntu workstation for things like that, but I suspect my CD drive is going south.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I did the obvious thing – selected the ISO file in Finder and selected “Burn to Ubuntu.iso to Disc”. Yes you chortling OSX experts out there in the back, I did indeed end up with a CD containing a single file named “Ubuntu.ISO” on it. Or in other words I had a CD containing a file with an image of a bootable CD in it – which won’t of course boot.<\/p>\n

So what did OSX do that was wrong ? Well there’s two things :-<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The message saying what it was doing should have been clearer; something along the lines of “I am about to burn a CD containing one file called Ubuntu.ISO” would have indicated that I was doing something wrong and given me the chance to hit Cancel and avoid yet another drink coaster.<\/li>\n
  2. Finder should be capable of realising that something that looks like an ISO image needs to be burnt “as is” rather than making a file system containing that file.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And yes I did eventually realise that I needed to use “Disk Utility” to burn the CD.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Normally OSX is quite good when it comes to useability and not breaking the principle of least astonishment (roughly computers should avoid doing things to ‘surprise’ the user), but I re-encountered one poor area again tonight. I was burning a CD image to a CD-R – something which is admittedly an action most commonly done […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[640,641,170],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-it","tag-cd","tag-least-astonishment","tag-osx","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-58","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1408,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/1408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}