Yes - that's what it means to be a moderator.

@bmike I see. :-)

@bmike +1

@bmike MacFUSE is a bit of an odd one. (A long period of confusion before it was officially confirmed — in the Google Code area — that maintenance would not resume. Details of that maybe best discussed in Ask Different Chat, if necessary.)

From a tags perspective: a risk of continuing with macfuse alone would have been, people occasionally choosing that tag for something that is not MacFUSE, in the absence of a more appropriate tag. Normally I shouldn't care about exact tagging but in this case, there's motivation to reduce/end confusion sooner rather than later.

chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/4393533#4393533 an example of confusion around MacFUSE

@bmike Is "osx" now the term for Mac OS X? If Apple did that, they certainly have the power to; it's "their" operating system, but I hate the historical message that sends. Mac OS is dead. OS X alone sounds like some bizarre incrementation of IBM's OS/2. It seems far more intuitive to me to tag questions about a Mac with "mac" rather than some arcane code letters relating to an operating system.

While it's true that many Mac questions are software questions about the Mac operating system and not hardware questions about the computer, and while it is also true that one can run an alternate operating system on one's Mac, the beauty of the platform is its hardware/software integration, and making users distinguish between what is a feature of the physical keyboard on their computer and what is a feature of the OS behind it when they ask a question seems un-Mac-like.

Again, in my mind, tags are to filter questions so people interested in a topic can find the questions they want. We need tags to separate questions about Macs from questions about the other app-running devices (iPad, iPhone, iPod touch) and from the other hardware, software, and consumer electronics that Apple sells and are on-topic for this site. If a question is OS-specific, tagging which version of the OS one is using is sometimes helpful.

Troubleshooting questions use different skills than hardware/software recommendation questions, which are different from configuration questions, which are different than "write me a script" questions. So these things should have different tags. But on the whole, I'd like to see this site have maybe 120 tags total, not >1200. I'd like to see about 90% to the tags on this site go away.

Daniel - there are two great points that are worthy of discussion.

1) What tag do we use to denote Mac OS X questions (whether or not Apple shifts the marketing to be OSX or OS X or Mac OS X or whatever) - we get to decide what tag corresponds to the software.

2) Apple is indeed starting to shift from always being "Mac OS X" in print and web marketing and dropping the Mac.

This point 2 is a departure from the 2009 - Snow Leopard update to the Apple Publication Style Guide where they explicitly said to never drop the Mac.

You could say Mac OS on some cases - preferably with an article like "the" to define it as a noun.

But now - on the main Page for Lion - the only place where Mac is included with OS is in the URL.

We'll see if the style guide ever gets updated for Mountain Lion perhaps - and I would expect this to be a conscious decision to change the brand on Apple's part.

@GrahamPerrin Are people confused about out tags or the product itself?

The former we can address on a tag discussion. The latter is why the site exists :-)

@bmike the confusion, when it occurs, is because there arose many very different versions of MacFUSE with identical version numbers. It's too long a story for this room, I'll happily discuss (and condense) in Ask Different Chat. The gist of this side of the story is, I have very frequently seen people exasperated by the resulting confusion.

@bmike My main point, which I think I buried in my griping about Apple's shifting of its historical branding, was that we absolutely need a tag to separate questions about the two related but quite distinct families of computing devices from Apple: Macs vs. iPads and iPhones (plus iPod Touches).

For this room: through considerate/appropriate tagging we (Ask Different) can help to shift people's thinking — away from the confusion of MacFUSE, to the relative clarity of a successor product with sane version numbering.

Now the second category could be called "iDevices" but that's not official, and it includes the iMac, which doesn't belong in the category, plus an iPod Nano or Classic is really a different beast, and not a computer in a non-trivial sense, whereas the iPad and iPhone really are computers.

So ios really is the common denominator for those devices, and makes sense as a way to tag them.

@bmike key point for me is to not apply macfuse to questions where the product used is not (or no longer) MacFUSE.

But while Macs do share a common operating system (Mac OS X), and thus questions common to Macs running their stock operating system could be correctly tagged osx, I argue that the far more intuitive tag for questions common to Macs is, well, mac

(sorry that Graham's response and mine are inter-threaded here)

@DanielLawson with apologies if you're already familiar with this: meta.apple.stackexchange.com/q/1/8546

@DanielLawson I'm happy with the interleaving, but it might make sense for me to defer the FUSE-oriented chat — which could become nebulous. To me the mac and osx is clearer cut …

@DanielLawson with respect, I don't favour mac because some questions in the stack are about systems other than OS X on Mac hardware.

@DanielLawson Perfect - I think we are in total agreement.

More specifically: within the five tag limit, I would be more inclined to apply up to four tags that help to define/differentiate the question, plus one tag for either (a) the system; or (b) the version of the system.

iOS to tag that operating system (as opposed to the hardware whether similar like home button or different like iPad / iPod / iPhone )

OSX to tag the operating system (as opposed to Mac where it's a bit more complicated. All macs share many hardware commonalities - but there are also sub tags for MBP MBA MP MM IM to differentiate the Pro Books from the Air Books from the Pro from the iMac and the Mini )

@bmike +1

The difference between Mac (hardware centric focus without respect to the OS) and OSX (software focused without respect to whether the hardware is virtualized, sanctioned or hacked) is a much finer point to sit and discuss as an armchair exercise.

I like to go back to a specific - the edit I made to your question -

Do you think that was a positive change or a negative change?

(and a second question - is it in keeping with the tags - I have seen some times when a negative change for a question was also positive for the tag system - so there is sometimes a conflict between an instance and the general rule)

@bmike and in the Ask Different context (where we encourage respect of Apple's license agreements), windows is always implicitly on Mac hardware; so no need for mac in such questions.

@GrahamPerrin Not true - I like the windows tag to identify someone using safari or iTunes on that OS regardless of the hardware running

Many apple products are supported with windows or on windows without needing to own a mac, no?

@bmike my mistake — excellent point.

@DanielLawson /me now sees that Daniel Lawson is a moderator — sorry I didn't recognise your name!

@bmike Personally, I see it as a negative change -- I'd like to see osx stop existing, so I don't want to see more uses of it. It is certainly consistent with current usage. I just don't like current usage. Not that my likes should be mapped onto tagspace.

@GrahamPerrin I'd rather see mac assume Mac hardware and Mac software; while one can run other operating systems on a Mac, and one can hack the Mac OS to run on other hardware, they're meant to be used together.

People with question about other OSs on Mac hardware are welcome to ask them here, but I'd rather see the mac tag refer to the Mac experience, which is a hardware/software combination.

A Mac isn't just hardware. A PowerBook running FreeBSD isn't really a Mac, I'd argue.

@GrahamPerrin Just because I'm a moderator doesn't mean anyone has to agree with my wacky tag ideas. I have opinions, but they don't appear to match everyone else's. And that's okay.

I'll advocate for my ideal tagspace, but won't try to impose it unilaterally.

@DanielLawson :-) wacky is different, Asky Differenty

@DanielLawson mac is multiple combinations; of Apple hardware with a variety of systems

From my perspective (retag privileges) I simply wouldn't use it.

I'd use lion or mountain-lion in lieu of osx with only part happiness.

I might recognise a question as being not specific to a version of the system, in which case 'tying' it to, say, [snow-leopard] could falsely decrease the value of the QA to users of a different system

@GrahamPerrin I hear you, but I disagree. A Mac is a user experience, and it's my strongly held belief that that experience comes from hardware and operating system combined. A PowerBook (or whatever they're calling their successors today; the term escapes me) is a fine piece of hardware, and people do install different operating systems on it, but I'd say someone running a non-Apple OS on it isn't getting the Mac experience.

@DanielLawson total agreement that the OS X experience is very Mac-related. However I hesitate to describe my (frequent) use of Windows on Mac as being a Mac experience.

Have you handy an example of a question where you would prefer to see mac in lieu of osx?

@GrahamPerrin Well, I hear you on that one. A question about a feature in common to Lion, Snow Leopard, and Mountain Lion, for instance, should have a common tag that encompasses all of them. And that tag could be osx. But that either makes mac and osx redundant or else only makes mac about hardware, which I'm not comfortable with. So either mac or osx is unneeded, or mac is a hardware tag. The status quo is hardware tag. My opinion is one should die.

:-)

Or any other post tagged osx

@DanielLawson in all honesty, I wasn't aware of a status quo in this area. Aware of some of the recent changes and planned changes, but honestly I've never noticed hardware-oriented tag in relation to Mac questions.

hardware-oriented tags in relation to iOS questions are more noticeable.

@DanielLawson Ah now that's a question that was OS specific, which has grown to include answers for a different OS :-)

To me osx is a perfect fit for the question. The temptation is to add ios but the temptation is purely because that particular Q&A is an extraordinarily useful point of reference.

Since the iOS-related answer has a positive vote, the other temptation is to remove the OS-specific tag, but then … no part of the Q&A relates to Windows etc.. So we do need an OS-specific tag.

IMHO mac would be a poor fit for a question that has naturally (and happily) evolved to include an answer for iOS.

@DanielLawson I'll take that concept for a spin this week and ask myself - what if we tagged everything I come across as Mac instead of OSX. It's really good to know what you think is ideal - helps me reconsider things. I really like having things kind of how I assume they are - but I have the same "ideal tag" idea in my mind - which isn't what really happens or even convention as far as I can tell.

@bmike and @DanielLawson questions that I definitely would tag mac … example, someone asking whether an NVIDIA card removed from one Mac would be usable with different Mac.

apple.stackexchange.com/q/31522/8546 I see a tag I never noticed before, hardware. That's the sort of question where I would apply mac (without removing hardware).