I have had this mac mini on my desk for a while, and I piddle with it on occasion - the interface is so alien I have taken to just assuming things are not right and I just tend to poke it every once in a while and then leave it.
That said, I have been able to beat through the interface to do things like mount nfs exports from my media servers and things of that nature, so I have worked through what I though should be pretty easy steps that turned rather torturous.
I have been exploring the option of just running VLC media player in order to play the media files that I have. I installed it tonight and I opened it and attempted to browse the nfs mounts in /Volumes/ (which, from what I could determine seemed to be the appropriate place to mount nfs shares on MAC OS...).
There does not appear to be any way to browse the /Volumes directory structure in the application - it uses what appears to be OS standard dialog boxes for the file open menu functions, and I can't see anywhere - in the dialog or the settings for anything in the application - that allows you to set the point or location of potential media.
How does one overcome this basic difficulty in this interface?
(I'm not attempting to troll or flamebait here, I'm _really_ curios about this)
Why would anyone design an interface with a limitation like this in a basic file/browse function? If the capability exists, why hide it? What purpose does it serve to make the interface so hard to use?
(I have a bit of old school programming experience, but I like to think I'm open to new stuff, but maybe my view of what is "normal" isn't...)
This is just my general experience in working with OSX so far - things seem to be moved around and hidden with no general sense of reason or purpose, and no matter how much I search and read, I can't find anything that comes even close to setting out a framework of expectation.
Anyway, in light of that confusion, I'm just wondering if anyone can tell me how to browse a specific directory structure using the standard FILE->Open dialog in, well, just about any MAC application? It just doesn't seem to be possible...
That said, I have been able to beat through the interface to do things like mount nfs exports from my media servers and things of that nature, so I have worked through what I though should be pretty easy steps that turned rather torturous.
I have been exploring the option of just running VLC media player in order to play the media files that I have. I installed it tonight and I opened it and attempted to browse the nfs mounts in /Volumes/ (which, from what I could determine seemed to be the appropriate place to mount nfs shares on MAC OS...).
There does not appear to be any way to browse the /Volumes directory structure in the application - it uses what appears to be OS standard dialog boxes for the file open menu functions, and I can't see anywhere - in the dialog or the settings for anything in the application - that allows you to set the point or location of potential media.
How does one overcome this basic difficulty in this interface?
(I'm not attempting to troll or flamebait here, I'm _really_ curios about this)
Why would anyone design an interface with a limitation like this in a basic file/browse function? If the capability exists, why hide it? What purpose does it serve to make the interface so hard to use?
(I have a bit of old school programming experience, but I like to think I'm open to new stuff, but maybe my view of what is "normal" isn't...)
This is just my general experience in working with OSX so far - things seem to be moved around and hidden with no general sense of reason or purpose, and no matter how much I search and read, I can't find anything that comes even close to setting out a framework of expectation.
Anyway, in light of that confusion, I'm just wondering if anyone can tell me how to browse a specific directory structure using the standard FILE->Open dialog in, well, just about any MAC application? It just doesn't seem to be possible...