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Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

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Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#341

Post by randallsquared »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #323
randallsquared wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that. When I most recently used Linux on the desktop, in 2010, I finally grew frustrated enough with Ubuntu's screen management setup (there was no way to get it to respect my wishes for it to turn off the s…

You want to use a distro with an LTS release. Switching to Arch and being surprised that pacman -Syu causes occasional breakage is not a failure of Linux at large.

I was more resigned than surprised. Annoyed, perhaps. Anyway, an LTS release would be guaranteed not to work with newer software, from my experience with them. Apologetics centering on users being prepared for normal updates to break random things do not forward Linux, in my opinion.

It's not clear to me that there's any way to get the level of polish needed for a major desktop OS without at least an army of (very critical) testers and developers, and maybe without forking most of the packages in the distro. Nevertheless, if OS X continues down the apparent path it's on, I'll be switching back again in a few years.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#342

Post by thadeus_venture »

HSO wrote: post #58
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't: > In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot. They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it. > When I click the Maximize bu…

fn-arrow left/fn-arrow right is a pretty pathetic substitute for actual home and end keys. I've never used a Mac for a prolonged period of time so can't speak to other points, but I am baffled at how people can do anything without those keys. When I try to debug some code on one of my coworkers' Macs I feel like I suddenly can't type anymore because of their absence, not bs'ing or exaggerating.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#343

Post by kitsune_ »

philwelch wrote: post #222
super_mario wrote: post #79

I currently use OS X for all my work and for personal/home use. But I have to agree with the sentiment. I have had nothing but praise for Apple and OS X up until Lion release. But this year has been a major turning point. End of XServe, end of Apple java, talk of end of Mac Pro and the whole post PC world thing, turning OS X into fisher price phone OS. Honestly, at this point I have to re-think my future and make a p…

Judging from what Apple's done so far, if they really wanted to turn the Mac into an iPad, they would just quit selling Macs and try selling more iPads. Does it actually affect you that Apple isn't selling XServe anymore? It made some sense when Macs had PPC chips and PPC had a performance advantage, but nowadays I can't think of a good use for a rack-mounted Mac. Likewise, I'm going to miss the Mac Pro too, but have…

Thunderbolt doesn't "obviate" the need for slots. Do you have 10k plus invested in pro audio or video gear that requires pci-e? All those guys are going to switch to Windows...

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#344

Post by gourami73 »

frou_dh wrote: post #272
gourami73 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...that's pretty slick but the discoverability on Windows is still better first..you'd have to know to think about what the feature is named... ...on Windows...you can invoke any menu by pressing ALT and then the first letter of the menu or a designated letter on a menu option (or you can use the arrows)...all windows menus get this behavior by default, in addition to separate keyboard shortcuts that can also be defi…

What I understand you're saying is that the keyboard shortcuts may typically be more efficient to perform in Windows. That could be true but it's a different topic from discoverability, where straight up full text search is better than collision hampered and segmented expansion of menus. Beyond the basics (cut/copy/paste/new/save/quit/...), there's a fair chance we don't know which sub-menu the function we're searchi…

...good point, the point I was trying to make was not so much the discoverability of the FEATURE (I do agree with your points there)...but of discoverability of the SHORTCUT to the feature, which is what you referred to as efficiency.

the fact that I (and apparently many others) learned about some OS X keyboard shortcuts through reading this thread indicates that there is still a problem with "discoverability"

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#345

Post by jonhendry »

masklinn wrote: post #65
hackoder wrote: post #19

For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays... Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says: Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating. More user-hostile - If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot a…

> He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Most of it being... not smart? > Right now, since I've switched to Gmail, I'm trying to back up and remove from my machine years of accumulated mail storage from mail.app. First obstacle: a user's library files are now hidden. No, the ~/Library folder is now hidden, you can see it via Terminal, by opening the Finder's Go menu with an option-click or browse it bec…

I wouldn't be surprised if the mail files were 'in use' due to Spotlight indexing.

The workaround for that would probably be to tell Spotlight to not index mail.

Or else, perhaps, to delete them from within Mail.app?

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#346

Post by quanticle »

sjs wrote: post #278
megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

If you asked a friend or searched Google instead of writing your problems here perhaps you would have found the solutions. You took time to learn how to use Linux and the shell, why not take some time to learn how to use OS X as well before complaining that it doesn't do what you want? It does do most of the things you mentioned, and when it doesn't it's by design. Resizing from any side: Legitimate complaint. Fixed…

>Your expectations don't make it broken.

It's not 1990 anymore. All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions. At the very least, one should offer a way for the Windows user to discover what the new conventions are, rather than having to Google and find websites that other people have made when they made the same transition.

What makes this worse is that every windowing system appears to use different terminology for its UI widgets and behaviors. Sticking to a standard terminology (even if it's Windows' terminology) would make things much easier for a convert to figure out how make their machine do what they need it to do.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#347

Post by mambodog »

js2 wrote: post #75

Re: "maximize" button that is being complained about in this thread. It's not a maximize button, it's a zoom button, and while I don't like its behavior, it's always been this way in OS X. From the current HIG: Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window’s size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the…

I would say a more accurate name would be the "fit window to content" button, as that is what it does.

If you're looking at a document in Pages, clicking that button will fit the window to the document, not wasting any screen space with blank unused area, but also not obscuring any of the document (screen space permitting).

The problem is that some third party applications ignore this and just implement Windows-style "maximise" behaviour. In addition, for some applications the 'content' area is likely to be larger than the screen (see Logic and Final Cut), so maximising actually makes sense.

What I imagine Apple's designers were considering is whether "maximise" behaviour actually makes sense. What are you gaining when you maximise a window? For applications such as Word, you're just filling the screen up with empty grey space on either side of the document. For most web pages, the content will appear within ~1000 pixels of horizontal space, with any additional space being wasted (or worse, the page has liquid resizing text, resulting in hard-to-read loooooooooooong lines when the window is maximised).

One argument may be that maximising a window blocks out distractions, but surely something like a full screen specific mode would be more appropriate for such a situation.

Ultimately I think that the problem is that users already have an expectation of what that button does; it is another casualty of the thoughtless interaction design that Windows has normalised to the general computer-using public.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#348

Post by abduhl »

cubicle67 wrote: post #330
click170 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, because taking up the whole screen is what many people expect said button to do.

because they've come from Windows where that is the behaviour. Much like using ctrl or cmd as a modifier - when you become accustomed to one, the other takes some getting used to.

How is this an argument? If users expect a button to do a certain thing then that is what the button should do. Where the behavior was learned is irrelevant.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#349

Post by click170 »

cubicle67 wrote: post #330
click170 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, because taking up the whole screen is what many people expect said button to do.

because they've come from Windows where that is the behaviour. Much like using ctrl or cmd as a modifier - when you become accustomed to one, the other takes some getting used to.

You would have a point there, except that the zoom button, as I believe it's called, behaves differently in different applications. An example, in some browsers clicking zoom will zoom to the page width, however in iTunes clicking zoom shrinks you to the miniplayer.

The different behaviours are confusing and difficult to remember, and not only goes against user expectations but isn't user-configurable.

Re: Tim O'Reilly: I am really starting to hate Mac OS X.

#350

Post by duairc »

megamark16 wrote: post #39

I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,0…

This is exactly my experience of trying to use OS X, thanks for putting it into words! The Home and End thing is by far the most annoying one (for me, but only because it's always the first one I run into whenever I find myself having to use a Mac).

It's so ridiculous that there's this mentality (everywhere) that "power users" are bad people whose needs always contradict those good, "average" users. That mythical "average" users are more noble a target audience than "power" users and so software should be made to ignore the needs of "power" users, because that's what's required to satisfy the needs of "average" users. It's nonsense and doesn't help anybody.

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