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How I ended up with Mac

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Re: How I ended up with Mac

#131

Post by kayoone »

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 ...

oh come on...

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#132

Post by rnemo »

larrik wrote: post #51
jug6ernaut wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really could not disagree with you more. At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser. Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that devel…

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

How is Terminal.app embarrassing? In most of the ways that a traditional terminal is important, it acts exactly as expected, and still has convenient "new" terminal things like tabs and profiles.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#133

Post by threedaymonk »

jsnell wrote: post #67
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…

No. I used a MacBook Pro (2007ish model) for about 2.5 years. It was a miserable machine, where nothing ever "just worked" [1]. If I'd ever needed to use it more seriously than for occasional VPN access for ssh / a web browser, I'd have ditched it within months rather than wait for it to die of natural causes. [1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot.…

> It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot.

That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk.

I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier!

When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#134

Post by nicholassmith »

stock_toaster wrote: post #123
tptacek wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed, I spend a significantly large amount of time with 5-8 terminal tabs open and I've never been bugged by it. It's just very feature bare compared to iTerm.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#135

Post by nicholassmith »

I've had to use Windows again for a work project, it reminded me exactly why I switched to OSX. People have really different needs from their OS, we should be thoroughly glad we have 3 real contenders these days that you can use.

Although after using Explorer again I think Finder is no where near as bad.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#136

Post by blub »

kstrauser wrote: post #88
meaty wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well. Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I'v…

> No - email on iOS is a piece of shit. It regularly drops connections to exchange, mail bombs people when sending a message and IMAP is unreliable as hell as well. Not only that, it starts to lag unbearably after a few days (up to iOS 6). I send and receive a LOT of email - it just can't handle it well. Fire your email and/or network admins. I'm serious. I only receive a couple hundred emails and send a few dozen, s…

iOS latest version fixed a problem with Exchange, so I would not be surprised.

Nokia Drive is not like the apps you listed. It's free, high quality, world wide navigation. On my iPhone I use Apple Maps right now. It has potential but besides the already discussed issues my number one annoyance is that it's absolutely not offline! I got bit by this twice, the app is completely useless without a sufficiently fast connection.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#137

Post by meaty »

cgh wrote: post #112
meaty wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it should be—they've had time to work on the issues and should be competitive by now. Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems. OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting…

You click a button marked "Install" in XCode and it installs the tools into /usr/bin. That sure is tough. OS X userland is pretty stock BSD. It may be unfamiliar if you are used to Linux.

That's an installed toolchain, not a properly working one.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#138

Post by coldtea »

tolmasky wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

>This is needless (and incorrect) semantics.

Incorrect in what parallel universe?

>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").

Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.

>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.

Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#139

Post by Spiritus »

tolmasky wrote: post #121
coldtea wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I reckon Joe the average user is perfectly fine with that. Way better than my girlfriends "New folder X", where X is like 1-15 because she can't be bothered with sorting them while manually importing. It's way too time consuming.

Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.

We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.

Re: How I ended up with Mac

#140

Post by meaty »

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…

Pain in the arse because there is no easy eay of determining which was the master. Instead of a hierarchy, you have a hierarchy with a temporal aspect as well poorly mapped to a non temporal hierarchy.

The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.

Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.

I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.

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