Or, OS X could wait until the appropriate time to offer you the option of messing with your disk.
1. Don't ask about using the disk for Time Machine. When the user goes to Time Machine because they want to use Time Machine, then have a button in the sidebar "Use drive blah for Time Machine" for any non-time-machine external drives present.
2. Have a button at the top of a finder window in which icons have been re-arranged saying "preserve layout in this folder" (which you only have to click the first time, of course it remembers along with the layout). (Also, make it more convenient to default all folders/finders to list-with-details view, for people who have any idea what they're doing.)
3. When the user opens Spotlight, have a button in the sidebar "index this drive for Spotlight" for any un-indexed drives present.
In all these cases, it's still super duper easy to use all these things, without always bothering people who don't want these things.
That is this kind of thinking of engineers vs. regular user.
You know why Windows users are so prone to viruses and such? Because they learned to click "OK". They learned it, because they always got the question/offer if they want to proceed or not. But a regular user don't understand those technical details and you know, they don't _want_ to understand those details. So we learned them to click "OK".
The best UX for the regular user is any UI where regular users have less choices of technical details.
I said that already the other day: as an engineer myself, I were chatting with another engineer about a product they have done (device integrated into a car for special purposes). I said to him, that something feels wrong with the interface. Yes, all the required information is present. Yes, probably I myself would have designed the UI the same way. But over the time I've got some sense in terms of UX, which a product makes it compelling or just doing its job.
The same you see with smart home. For how long there are HVAC controls out in the field by Honeywell and others? The better one are all programmable in all regards. But only Nest, which removed a lot from the interface made the big wave.
That's not a good argument against my proposal. How is
Want to use this drive for Time Machine? [OK]
better than going into the time machine app / prefpane / whatever, and seeing [use drive WD-BOOK for time machine] on the side, non-modal? so people who don't know what they're doing don't have to click or even see anything?
UI/UX designers do a lot of really stupid stuff in the name of making things "simple" and "easy". Engineers who think they're more of a people person and know some UI/UX probably do it even more. Give up the gimmicks, the ridiculous space between elements. The material design, the flat-aqua design, it's all crap.
I've seen "regular users" fail to use all these things, and need my help find a way through the increasingly hidden and opaque interfaces to what they're trying to do. Usually because things that are supposed to "just work" instead "just don't work" and there's no way to fix it. Except for me. So interfaces designed for me would probably not be a bad idea ;)
Most of the users I know wouldn't know where to go to set up a Time Machine drive. The fact that it prompts them flat out is how they even got it set up in the first place.
Ugh, OS X pseudo simplicity is the worst. Want to align the dock in a corner? Want to tab through dialog options? There's an arcane terminal command for that. The list goes on, I have these to on top of my head.
At least the first two problems are the exception not the rule.
I want most of my USB-Drives not to be used as a Time Machine, therefore it should be the rule: Drives are not used for Time Machine unless noted otherwise. Since there's a pref pane for it, it wouldn't even need an extra button.
Most user's will not prepare the layout of the files and folders in some fancy way, so just show them arbitrarily, unless otherwise noted. Just hide the option in the "Get Info" dialog.
Drive Indexing options could be hidden in the "Get Info" dialog, but I'd be fine with keeping it enabled by default.
As a Kubuntu user and dedicated nerd, I fully agree. But as somebody who has spent some time trying to make user interfaces understandable to people, I'm a little more pragmatic and can see that pseudo simplicity still yields good results.
The Time Machine thing is pure marketing, of course. It drives conversions. That's its own brand of terrible, but even THEN you could argue that pushing people to do backups in whatever way isn't necessarily pure evil.
It is useful but it's proprietary and could possibly leverage their own backup drives. Personally, I prefer the explanation that it's there to drive users to create backups. Maybe because Apple knows how reliable HFS+ is ;)
I think skore's point is right though: reminding users to make backups is the lesser evil.
I actually meant both - You CAN consider it the lesser evil while it also has the nice side effect of clearing the market (for simple backup in OSX) from competition as early as possible.
Sorry, should have clarified - Marketing in the sense of: converting people into using an apple solution early, so they won't use one from another vendor later on.
I have no numbers to back me, but my impression is the vast majority of OS X users can't be bothered with doing backups even with a built-in Backup solution, much less a 3rd party one.
Time Machine isn't going to stop someone who places value on doing proper backups from doing them, and if it makes it easy enough for my mom do back up her files, then that's a net win — not marketing.
And hey, it only took me reminding her 5 times before she got the external drive and set up Time Machine — no family tech support involved.
The central problem with backups is that no one makes them but everyone should, without a question. That’s an attempt to solve that problem, even going so far as to purposefully annoy people! (Remember, everything is a trade-off and usually you will never be able to make everyone always happy.) This dialog box is the furthest thing from a marketing gimmick I can imagine. It’s comically far removed from that. (And, I think, exactly the right move. Yeah, people who know about backups already probably will not use Time Machine – but for everyone else that is pretty great!)
Would you dare an (unverifiable) guess at the percentage of people who plugged in a USB drive to copy some files and were enlightened to use it as a backup unit by the Time Machine dialog?
If I had to, gun to the head, I'd say that no one ever was.
I seem to remember that Windows pops up a baloon in the system tray every once in a while nagging you to configure the system for regular backups. That seems much more sensible.
1. Don't ask about using the disk for Time Machine. When the user goes to Time Machine because they want to use Time Machine, then have a button in the sidebar "Use drive blah for Time Machine" for any non-time-machine external drives present.
2. Have a button at the top of a finder window in which icons have been re-arranged saying "preserve layout in this folder" (which you only have to click the first time, of course it remembers along with the layout). (Also, make it more convenient to default all folders/finders to list-with-details view, for people who have any idea what they're doing.)
3. When the user opens Spotlight, have a button in the sidebar "index this drive for Spotlight" for any un-indexed drives present.
In all these cases, it's still super duper easy to use all these things, without always bothering people who don't want these things.