OS X love
I am such a forgetful person, I think that’s probably the characteristic I hate the most about my brain and yet again, I had something I wanted to blog about but I haven’t a clue what the fuck it was.
Oh well, instead… I came across What Sucks About DEs, pt. II: Apple, MacOS X on OSNews yesterday, it was actually written a week or so ago but must not have caught my eye at the time. Anypoop, this article struck a chord in me because I haven’t read anything in such a long time that I disagree with more. This guy (or gal) has somehow managed to pick the things I love the most about mac os x… as his pet peeves!
- “The MacOS does not exactly feel fast….” It’s quite a chunky OS so this is possibly fair, I wouldn’t say the UI itself is unresponsive though. It depends on what the guy is comparing it too, for instance ubuntu always seems zippy whatever you run it on. But with windows, if you haven’t re-installed it in the last 2 years and the start menu is full of stuff you rarely use, and the registry is full of 2 years worth of installing apps that register pointless COM controls which demand to be invoked whenever you click on something in explorer…. IT IS SLOW!
- “MacOS X is an inconsistent mess….” WTF, has no-one ever told this guy that variety is the spice of life? Why the fuck should every app look the same. On 64MB systems when resources were scarce there was a reason for all windows looking the same. But Apple know now that they have resources to make eye candy. People have somehow got the idea that there being varying windowing themes in OS X 10.4 is some kind of mistake… That Apple didn’t realise. IMO, what Apple should do now is make every single app look different, then people will understand. In fact it isn’t just eye candy, its useful. For instance, if you see just the small corner of a window underneath a load of others and its brushed steel, you know its finder (well OK it could be safari but you know what I’m getting at).
- “One of my biggest pet peeves: that annoying Google search field in Safari.” Hmm, he’s moaning here that he can’t opt out of having a google search bar. Um, why would you want to remove it?
- “Tiger has some serious issues with… Screen remnants.” That would be damn annoying, but I’ve never experienced it so I dun know. Maybe it happens if your system doesn’t suppose quartz extreme or something.
- “Macs need an indicator LED for HDD activity.” If you’re that desperate I’m sure there are apps you can download to display a HDD indicator somewhere.
- “Mail.app is a pointless email client, and I am flabbergasted I still use it every day. ” I think he’s miss used the word “pointless” here because he goes on to moan about it being too slow. Which is totally at odds with my own experience, even on my iBook G4 (1.33 GHz or something) it’s fast, and thats with about 4 years of accumulated emails. He’s probably too dumb to know that you’re supposed to archive older emails into other mail folders. He also mentions the lack of vertical display, which I’ve solved with the addition of a small UI addon.
- “Where GNOME has an evil taskbar, MacOS X has an evil dock.” This guy seems to have a problem with exaggerating. Anypoop, this may be a me thing, but in the early 90’s whilst at school I had the pleaseure of using RISC-OS which had a dock very similar to OS X. I then spent the rest of the 90’s and some of the 2000’s waiting… very patiently for another OS to do the same. MAC OS X does and I love Apple for resurrecting such a perfect idea from RISC-OS. You do not need to messily display texturally every single bloody window thats open or minimised, it’s messy, its lots of bland rectangles and text, in fact it is not very UI is it. The only problem you ever get with dock is where an app is badly designed and doesn’t offer an obvious or quick/easy way to get between its documents. Sadly some of Apple’s own apps are like that.
- “OSX needs a decent uninstaller, supplied with the OS” I appreciate what the guys saying but I’ve still to need such a thing. I’ve never removed an app that has dumped anything more that a couple of tiny config files in mine or the systems library. 10KB or so is hardly worth losing sleep over.
- “Apple needs to put more effort into backwards compatibility.” Ah, actually I agree with this one. Too many times I’ve noticed apps require you to have the latest OS X, essentially meaning that every single mac owner absolutely has to spend 100 quid every year. Hmm, actually I think I read this one wrong. Oh nevermind.
