To me, needing to issue a TERMINAL COMMAND is HELLISHLY more complex than it needs to be. It is not “simple” by any stretch of the imagination. You COULD use Powershell/CMD to do crap like this but the point is that in Windows basic stuff like this is EASY to do and follows LOGICAL, PREDICTABLE steps.

Obviously, as someone who has debugged hundreds of thousands of lines of assembly in IDA Pro, it’s not “hard” for me to use the terminal to show hidden files or create an archive, but I really don’t care about whether it’s “hard” for me. The point is that it is outrageously harder IN COMPARISON to Windows to achieve the same thing (create a simple Zip file without added thumbnails/metadata). Using a command line to accomplish things is virtually NEVER easier unless you (a) have a photographic memory (b) there is no other way. Unix/Linux/Ubuntu did not become more popular/usable by ELIMINATING graphical options.

Saying “oh here’s the solution, just download a third party application to correct the problem” is basically agreeing that Mac has failed to do anything better than the competition, since that is basically how Windows/nix work. The whole point of Mac is ALLEGEDLY that is does things better/more simply out of the box, but in fact it requires terminal commands to make basic changes…

There are a couple solutions here. https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1640973?start=0&tstart=0

IMHO, VII hit the nail on the head when he said that Mac is going mainstream. It invalidates the “We are not stupid” point as well. As Mac tries to sell itself to the average stupid user more and more, expect crap like this. Your best bet is to just use the command line, or roll your own script, which were made for the smart user.

The “Redundant” point is a memory/CPU time tradeoff. Rather than have a user recreate this metadata from files, which takes CPU time, it’s stored in the zip file and available immediately to the user after it’s unzipped. There is a legitimate reason for this, then. That said, I agree the metadata could probably be stuffed into the archive somehow that gets ignored by normal zip programs and picked up by the Mac zip program.

If you are SMART then you shouldn’t ask such a stupid question, read the article again, you’ll figure it out.

Now, after you create your zip archive, just drag it to the icon. It will ask you to confirm and then replace your zip with a “clean” zip that you can use on Windows.

I’ve been using Unix (the real thing, not the cute
but amateur wannabe Linux) since v7 on the
PDP-11. I don’t think I’ve ever logged into
anything with a GUI without starting a
terminal ASAP – even my iPhone has a local
terminal window (jailbreaks are wonderful).

All metadata is stupid if you don’t want it, and
ranges from useful to indispensable (by existing
apps) if you do.

About half of any given group of people is average
or below. If there are enough people that never
used anything but the graphical console on (for
example) Ubuntu, probably a fair number of them
won’t know what a command line is either.

OS X mostly does its part by having a way
(at the command line) to produce portable
archives either with metadata or without
(although at the present state of affairs, doing
anything useful with metadata is quite nonportable). It falls short by not including
a GUI way of producing portable archives
either with or without nonportable metadata.

That leaves it to the users to exercise their brains
a bit and either discover the command line or
at least realize they’re doing something that
might not be helpful and track down one of
the ways to extend the GUI to create
unpolluted archives.

I think the real problem isn’t one OS vs another.
The real problem is that anything that starts
out with a shallow learning curve lets people
pick up enough to be more or less useful
very quickly, but seldom offers much incentive
for them to discover more advanced functionality.
Most people are lazy; they don’t read labels or
instruction manuals or anything they don’t
have to. (Put a MOTD on a timesharing system
way back when, days in advance of an outage,
and notice that it doesn’t reduce the number
of phone calls when the system goes down;
this even with a population of users that log in
just about every day.)

The other problem is when people have only used
one OS, or one mail client, or whatever; esp.
when one person is communicating to many.
When one person is communicating to one other
person, it’s maybe ok if they share the burden. But
when one person is communicating to many, they
really ought to work harder to produce an efficient communication rather than waste a few minutes of many people’s time with something that overlooks
differences. (Common example is emailing MS Word docs created with a recent version of Word
when many in your audience still use an older
version that can’t open the new format.)

Sadly I’d expect this to only get worse. Blogs,
texting, IM, Twitter, and other social networking
sites encourage young users to routinely blurt
out TMI in incoherent fashion. Unless counteracted
by teaching writing and oral communication for
precision and clarity from an early age on, we’ll
end up with a generation that doesn’t know
discreet from discrete not only because they can’t
spell, but because discreet (and concise) are
concepts completely without foundation for them.