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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#181

Post by _Simon »

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...

Other than the fact OS X is a certified UNIX and the NT kernel isn't UNIX, yes...

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#182

Post by Shivetya »

revscat wrote: post #89
meaty wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was unbearable because the abstraction was inconsistent when it came to: a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract. b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent. c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This…

> a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract. So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities? > b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent. What were you trying to do? > c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at. man mdls

I have had run ins with iPhoto as well, sorry but if I cannot quickly locate my pictures in Finder something is wrong.

Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?

I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.

I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#183

Post by pifflesnort »

meaty wrote: post #128
pifflesnort wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

In my experience, there are two kinds of people:

1) People who don't use the Microsoft technology stack.

2) People who use Microsoft's proprietary technology stack, and then get annoyed at products that fail to interoperate with it seamlessly, despite the fact that it's undocumented, proprietary, and notoriously difficult to interoperate with successfully.

There are very few people who use MS stack and don't get annoyed at interoperability concerns, because those people realize that the fault lies with Microsoft, and stop using Microsoft's stack.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#184

Post by taude »

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…

I switched full-time to a Mac a year ago. Multiple-monitor support is pretty horrible, especially when combined with the newer full-screen app mode. It's almost like no developers at Apple use their laptops plugged into a monitor full time. Granted, there's several 3rd party options available, but I hate paying the $10 - $40 for OS-level features that should just work in 2013. When I have my Macbook hooked up to an external monitor and make an app full-screen, the whole desktop slides off of the second monitor, making a dual monitor setup frustrating.

Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc...

My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere.

Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues.

These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.)

Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#185

Post by taude »

wamatt wrote: post #81
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…

I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS. At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder. Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises. [1…

I tried a bunch of Finder enhancers/replacements a year ago. I didn't see this one...thanks.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#186

Post by pheo »

I am very disappointed to see this posted where, when, and how it is. Comparing Linux to Mac is like comparing apples to Lamborghinis. I can get an apple, cheaply if not for totally for free, locally, anywhere at any time. Lamborghinis are very expensive, both in up-front cost and maintenance, and truly don't perform relative to the cost. What i hear is someone moaning about how much effort it takes to choose the best kind of apple, Gala? Granny Smith? Sour Green? Golden? Macintosh? I'd rather have an apple than Apple.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#187

Post by gyom »

wamatt wrote: post #81
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…

I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS. At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder. Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises. [1…

This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX.

Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#188

Post by revscat »

b1daly wrote: post #158
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.

Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window. This turns out to be something I do a lot. So I wind up opening another finder window to do this. Inevitably I wind up with finder windows of different shapes and sizes all over the place. It boggles my mind that the Apple UI team can't see how inferior Finder is. I've worked with different utilities, and c…

> Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window.

Uh, so does Finder. What are you talking about?

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#189

Post by Evbn »

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.

10 yeas on, I have never finished waiting for Spotlight to index my drive and serve a query.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#190

Post by dsego »

larrik wrote: post #58
ultimoo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.

And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how. That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.

wow, for linux people I have no nicer response than RTFM!
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