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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#121

Post by tolmasky »

coldtea wrote: post #113
meaty wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively. My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't w…

> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers. That said,…

> iPhoto is an application. Not the OS.

This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#123

Post by stock_toaster »

tptacek wrote: post #106
larrik wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, iTerm isn't even Terminal, and Terminal is pretty embarrassing.

I'm interested in your reasoning for why Terminal.app is embarrassing. It seems significantly better than, say, rxvt to me.

I think Terminal.app used to be pretty darn bad (leopard/snow-leopard era).

I find the current version (in mountain lion) to be quite reasonable though.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#124

Post by stock_toaster »

ImprovedSilence wrote: post #52
jug6ernaut wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad! With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder. [1]: http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

I've switched over to mac as well. However, Finder is my #2 annoyance. #1 being I so fricking love Winamp, and nothing has come close to that on a mac (or linux) for that matter. And sure, winamp did come out with a mac app, but it was useless I found...

play[1] and cog[2] used to be good, but it doesn't look like either of them have been updated in quite a long time...though the bitbucket repo for cog is showing some action, so maybe it will become active again at some point.

Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).

[1]: http://sbooth.org/Play/

[2]: http://www.cogx.org/

[3]: http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#125

Post by stock_toaster »

MikeKusold wrote: post #102
Wilya wrote: post #7

I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351]. Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen o…

> or you want to connect to a Samba server I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ? Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?

or ...focus finder forward (click empty desktop or command-tab to finder or click dock finder) and hit command-k.

... or right click dock finder and choose connect to server

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#126

Post by jychang »

revscat wrote: post #104
meaty wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So... doing "find . -type f -name ' .jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?* No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse. b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent Automator + Photoshop. > c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto…

> No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse. In what way? > Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem. Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag. What were you trying to do? I do a…

The problem is, you're moving the goalposts too. "It just works" wouldn't apply if you need to hack together automater script...

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#127

Post by bad_user »

My main gripe with Novel and now Xamarin is that they don't provide packages for Debian and Ubuntu, arguably the most popular Linux distributions.

For instance if you go to Mono's download page to checkout the options, the only Linux distribution supported by them is OpenSuse: http://www.go-mono.com/mono-downloads/download.html

Of course one could argue that Debian (and Ubuntu that relies on Debian's repository) has a culture of packaging stuff by themselves and indeed in the case of Mono there are people that do just that. But those packages are always behind the current version and you can't blame the maintainers for that. And lots of software companies, including Google and Mozilla, are providing packages for Debian/Ubuntu for the latest versions by themselves. It's actually the norm with Ubuntu to setup third-party PPAs that provide packages for something missing from the main repository.

So Miguel here complains about fragmentation on the Linux desktop. It's funny, because they ignore the largest distributions around. At least if instead of OpenSuse they supported Red Hat, I would understand.

Also, my experience with OS X has not be so pleasant. Miguel is a damn good developer, but he must be using a really simple toolchain.

When you are working day-in day-out with Java, Ruby, Python, Javascript, Mysql, Postgresql, GCC, Casandra, MongoDB, Memcached and dozens of other technologies, installing that stuff and having it work on OS X is amongst the most frustrating experiences I ever had, no matter if you're doing it by hand or with MacPorts or with Homebrew. All available options on OS X suck. I couldn't give a fuck about binaries of commercial software packages working, as long as I can't manage the toolchain I depend on daily.

Another thing with OS X is that it just works, until it doesn't. After that you're in Windows-land again, the preferred option being to just reset/reinstall everything. Linux can be painful sometimes, but for most problems you can find documented fixes.

Also, he's a little out of date. Ubuntu has been rock solid for me on my Thinkpad for the last couple of months since I got my current laptop. Of course, I preferred a model with Intel HD 4000 instead of a Geforce, so a little research into hardware may be needed to ensure good compatibility, but on the other hand you can't run OS X on anything else other than a couple of Macbook models. Try building a Hackintosh sometimes and your appreciation for Linux will change.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#128

Post by meaty »

pifflesnort wrote: post #110
meaty wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, so maybe I'm not a heavy user like you are, but I literally can't remember the last time Mail.app crashed. It's always worked, day in, day out, and without failure. I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. O…

> I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. Color me surprised ...

We're also an oracle java certified and redhat certified and VMware certified and more of our kit is on Linux, so it's not biased :)

My point is that we're citably competent all the way through.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#129

Post by kayoone »

stephenhuey wrote: post #117
revscat wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.

Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.

windows explorer has had that feature for years as well

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#130

Post by radio4fan »

blibble wrote: post #83
revscat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. You and I have had vastly different experiences. I have spent the morning trying to get Rails installed on a Win7 box. This has required numerous painful hoops to jump through, and I am actually not even finished. I finally got 1.9.3 installed, but am hung on some OpenSSL requirement. It has been a massive, huge waste of my day. The default command shell sucks…

believe it or not Windows has actually had a POSIX subsystem since the NT days, and MS still provide it for Windows 8. I'm not sure what POSIX certified means, but Windows is UNIX in the same way Mac OS X is...

Wikipedia has this (and more) to say on POSIX:

Not to be confused with Unix, Unix-like, or Linux.

POSIX (pron.: /ˈpɒzɪks/ poz-iks), an acronym for "Portable Operating System Interface", is a family of standards specified by the IEEE for maintaining compatibility between operating systems...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posix

The old MS POSIX subsystem was replaced by the amusingly named SFU (Services for UNIX). Then that got replaced by the bought-in Interix.

Mac OS X is UNIX because it's certified under the Single UNIX Specification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

Windows is not in any way UNIX. There aren't even any certified Linux distros (AFAIK). Mac OS X is UNIX.

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