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What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

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Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#41

Post by miles »

I wrote this back in early 2007, and it still applies:

Four things OS X can learn from Windows 95 http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/mac/200703210700_four_things_...

You would think that after all these years, Apple would have copied these simple yet essential abilities from Windows 95:

1. In Spotlight's search result window, files should be able to be deleted, copied, moved, renamed, etc.

2. Spotlight should offer an "In Folder" or "Location" column rather than forcing the user to press the tiny "i" symbol for each result.

3. The Trash should have two more columns: "Date Deleted" and "Original Location".

4. The context menu in the Trash should offer a "Restore" option to return files to their original location. This is especially useful in putting back the 20 or 30 files from 10 different locations that Adobe asked you to remove and then realized they shouldn't have.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#42

Post by holygoat »

cpr wrote: post #15

You really want to run OS X on the hardware, to take advantage of all the details of the various hardware nooks and crannies (power management, wireless hardware, etc.) There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke. Highly recommended. (BTW, the way that F…

Do you have a citation or two for your Fusion point? I'd be very interested to read more.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#43

Post by bretthoerner »

tsuraan wrote: post #33
mmc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine just got his first mac recently, and he mentioned this same complaint to me - I had no idea, because I almost never use the Finder for file management. (I assumed you could do cut & paste) I always just use 'mv', etc. from a terminal. So this is genuine curiosity - is there something that other people do for which a Finder window and cut and paste is better/faster/less prone to mistakes, or is it jus…

Sure, if you need to move a bunch of files whose names don't match any particular pattern, then using a GUI tends to be more efficient. Suppose you have a directory with a hundred documents in it, and you want to categorize them into subdirectories. With a shell, you'll probably actually need to have two terminals open, one to keep the full list of files available, and one to type commands. You'll mv file1, file3, fi…

I agree. But in the rare case that I need to move a bunch of weirdly named files - I have no problem hitting Command+N to open another Finder window, get it to where I want to be, and drag the files to there.

I just can't imagine a hacker workflow that involves doing that even once per week, much less day.

I'm not saying I don't miss Cut/Paste on those occasions, but it comes up so rarely and I feel like I gain so much more by using OS X that I just don't care.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#45

Post by GHFigs »

jseliger wrote: post #19
kleinsch wrote: post #18

The green button has inconsistent behavior by application - firefox maximizes to whole screen, safari sizes to the window, iTunes goes back and forth from mini-Player No cut and paste between windows - But I use the command line for most things, so it's not that big of a deal

Yeah, I hate the inability to maximize windows. In addition, I wish "paste plain text" had consistent keyboard commands across applications.

You can make the keyboard commands consistent in the Keyboard pane of System Preferences. I find it best to do it per-application as the menu item title isn't always the same, e.g. "Paste and Match Style" in Apple applications, "Paste With Current Style" in some others.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#46

Post by cpr »

holygoat wrote: post #42
cpr wrote: post #15

You really want to run OS X on the hardware, to take advantage of all the details of the various hardware nooks and crannies (power management, wireless hardware, etc.) There's no real downside to running any Linux distro in a VM. (Again, I recommend VMware Fusion.) You can put each VM in its own full-screen space and switch around between them (and Mac OS X) with a keystroke. Highly recommended. (BTW, the way that F…

Do you have a citation or two for your Fusion point? I'd be very interested to read more.

http://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2008/02/fusion-geek-spe.h...

This blog entry contains a video of the talk along with some other relevant links.

The talk is quite entertaining, reasonably deep, and highly recommended if you're interested in such things.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#48

Post by cpr »

cjlesh wrote: post #47

OK -- I might be alone on this, but I have a 30" Dell monitor, and the single top menu bar concept simply does not scale to large monitor sizes.

Funny, I've got both 24" and 30" Apple monitors, and decided that the 30" was just too large for my field of view (plus the newer 24" LED displays are just too beautiful not to use).

But your point is well-taken.

Fitt's law helps here, though--you can ram your pointer up top and generally hit the menu bar.

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#49

Post by cpr »

If you're an Emacs user with (3!) decades old-finger habits like me, Mac OS X is a dream come true--you can customize the Cocoa text environment to be a quite decent subset of Emacs, available in most system apps now (most importantly, Safari).

Oops, this is an anti-annoyance. ;-)

Re: What are some common Mac annoyances that you face day to day?

#50

Post by cpr »

stonemetal wrote: post #24

Apple has Balkanized their OS's API. Most software out there only supports the latest release. The rest only supports two releases back. In fact with 10.6's release imminent it is hard to find software that supports older than 10.4 anymore.

What's the point of running older OSes?
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