Hello, I'm Still a Person!" So... it seems my computer hates me. I was looking for a way to remove files off a live USB and I thought that the obvious way to do it was "Open Disk Utility" and click on the partition. Nope. Well, that's good, I can see the files on the partition so I know they're there, but it's not there. A friend said it was a known issue and I needed to unmount/eject to get to the right partition and then add it to the sidebar that's still in the "Open" portion of Disk Utility. So I get the right partition. I don't want to nuke it so I try to right click and delete it, only it won't give me the option to do that. I keep on right-clicking and it does nothing. So I restart my Mac... and then finally I get Disk Utility to list all the files/partitions on my USB. The files are there, so I can see them, but I can't delete them (as the article says). I reboot again. Now I see my files and the computer hates me. Is it me or does this guy have a way too high of a standard of expectation for the tools that he uses? I had to go through like 5 other ways to fix the permissions on my files because of his stupidity! Or perhaps this whole situation is my fault because I didn't know enough about the OS to know about "right clicking" on stuff to be given that little right click menu you have to get for doing so. This isn't a rant against a specific tool, this is about how hard it is to "navigate" in general when you are just figuring out a new piece of software. ~~~ wccrawford "I keep on right-clicking and it does nothing." If it does nothing, then it isn't a right-click. ~~~ lukifer But when you "right click" and there's nothing, does it make sense to blame the software for failing to detect what you're not doing? ~~~ wccrawford No, because right-clicking isn't an action, it's a setting. Clicking, though, is an action, so you click a UI element and expect the action to be done, like you're used to. ~~~ NelsonMinar The context in which "right click" and "click" are used are entirely different in a Mac UI. You have to know the difference to use this OS effectively. So if you can't click on a file, then perhaps you shouldn't try to delete it. ------ Turing_Machine That was a great article, by the way. The only problem with it is that it's so short. ------ J3L2404 _He gave me an awesome answer and I wrote this in response to that answer._ It's a Mac and the right click menu is missing. It was his answer that was awesome. ~~~ kristopolous This is the first article on Hacker News I've ever liked... This guy is some kind of genius :) The world is full of shit and I like this article. I don't care what computer you have, right click has a place in your life. And that's for the "right click", for that I mean the actual keyboard instruction of doing it... ------ S_A_P While I can understand trying to teach the basics here, there is a very important thing to remember- You don't always have to be "in a position" to do the right click. You can right click without having to go "up one click level". So the fact that this seems so hard for the author is understandable. You need to consider that for the average user, right clicking isn't something you are doing in everyday life. If you can't find it on your computer then maybe it doesn't exist? Just an idea. For an article meant to teach how to use Mac OSX(or any OS for that matter), I think a nice next step would have been to ask about why the right click option is disabled in the first place. It would be easy to assume that the point of this article is that if you can't "fix" something you just move on. Not my favorite article for sure, and admittedly I skipped half of it, but the actual article as a whole is what I would expect from Ars Technica. ------ smoyer I'm not sure that it was a mistake to post this as an article - my guess is that it will be interesting to a lot of HN readers who have never used a Mac before but may have a more "teachable" interface than another OS on their desktop. Of course you're not allowed to be "done with the article" if you haven't even figured out how to boot your own computer :) For those of you who've read articles like this before, can you make a few comments on whether this is a little more difficult to use than any other platform you've used (or are familiar with)? I'm thinking that this may be good starting material for a "Mac Hate" thread. ~~~ smoyer I guess I'll have to add that this _is_ a Mac Hate thread! While the content is interesting, it's the attitude that really turns me off. Maybe it's just me though ... in the grand scheme of things I don't think I've ever found a computer user to be as hateful as this guy is. The whole "I don't do windows" sentiment really gets me steaming. ------ melling Here's a couple of useful links. Apple has done a good job of keeping the OS as simple as possible. You don't even have to know the name of a file manager: right click -> "get info" ------ jzwinck This is brilliant, and could be a good basis for an intro to OS X course. When you click on things, does a context menu appear? When you select something, is a new menu (like the one to the left of this post) automatically displayed? If not, try pressing space or something like that. I remember when I installed Windows Vista for the first time and there was no explorer, nothing to browse the file system (okay, there was Windows Explorer, but that didn't count). I had to look for some sort of app or other thing to use as a file manager. For me Windows always feels clunky because of this: it feels a little like I have to learn a bunch of new user interface things every time I move from machine to machine. ~~~ wccrawford You should start by learning the basic things like that. You have to learn a _lot_ of things that a lot of people take for granted in order to understand that computers have multiple levels of menus. ~~~ bratsche What are these multiple levels of menus? I've always found one menu, and used the shortcut keys for the rest. ~~~ wccrawford Mostly they aren't hidden in the menus. They're on the same menus, but they're not obvious. For example, if you're looking for 'Printing' in the System Preferences, you might expect to find it there, but if you're in that window, you can't see it until you go to the 'Printers' menu. On the other hand, if it was under 'Window' like it was on Windows, you'd never find it in the menus. So when you're looking for something specific, there's usually not one obvious location you can just check to see if it's there or not. Instead, the menu has several different locations it can be in. If you don't know about them, then you won't find it. This is different for Windows because the menus are pretty much 1:1 for what you can find in them. ------ fierarul I think this article has a serious flaw -- the author complains about how he has to type ls to list files and folders. Right-click