Ten Things Owen Hates about Mac OS X
Posted January 8th, 2006 @ 07:53pm by Erik J. Barzeski
From this article comes a list of 10 things Owen Linzmayer hates about Mac OS X. My summary:
- Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely: So turn it off.
- Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront: Very, very rarely.
- Trashed Items Can't Be Opened: This happens to me too, but if the dang thing is in the trash why do you want to open it? Some people use the trash as (dangerous) storage, so that warning helps them realize they're in danger.
- Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties: I'd like to see it happen too, but it'd open a whole can of worms (pun intended) that would not be welcome.
- Dashboard Widgets are Modal: That's the point.
- Painful Pinwheel Pauses: Windows lags when I open four or five browser (IE) windows. I routinely have hundreds of windows (and tens of apps) running. Yeah, I see the rainbow sometimes too, but orders of magnitude less than on a PC.
- Permission Roadblocks: Very rarely does this happen. Single users are an admin by default and, when appropriate, Mac OS X prompts you for an admin username and password.
- Exposing Package Contents is Confusing: Ctrl-click. Real freakin' confusing.
- Dumb Deleting: Uh, because they can hit the "stop" button? Just click somewhere else and forget about the dialog, Owen!
- Sidebar Items Can't Be Renamed: If this makes a top-ten list of things someone hates about an OS, the OS is doing pretty damn well.
In other words, Owen was not really able to come up with much. Which, like I say in the last point, speaks pretty highly of Mac OS X.
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Posted 08 Jan 2006 at 8:11pm #
You can right-click an item on the sidebar to rename it, so now it's only 9.
Posted 08 Jan 2006 at 8:13pm #
True dat! I haven't ever had to rename something over there. And I use it in the "collapsed" (i.e. no names, just icons) mode 100% of the time anyway.
Posted 08 Jan 2006 at 9:45pm #
I like Dashboard because it *is* modal, and for the same reason I never liked Konfabulator. I don't want widgets cluttering up my screen all the time. I'd rather hit a key when I want to use a widget and have it go away when I'm finished with it.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 1:01am #
#2 is standard behavior on Windows so it's not surprising that Entourage is the culprit program in the example.
#7 is a feature. Get used to it. Windows will have it Vista as well.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 5:05am #
1 thing I hate about Owen's article: a relatively short article is spanned over ten pages. I think this annoyance tops all his points.
One thing I hate about OS X 10.4 specifically is that you can't select and then command-delete things from the Spotlight window (moving it to the trash). It's inconsistent with the rest of the behavioral aspects of the Finder. I'd like this to be enabled because I used command-delete a lot and, when I try out shareware, I use Spotlight as a sort of quick uninstall.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 5:46am #
About renaming the sidebar items ... (in response to Radu Dutzan):
You can rename them, but i screwed my home folder about 3 times because I wanted to rename the link in the sidebar, not the folder, and freaked out because these dumb apps lost all their settings - I think this is what Owen speaks about.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 7:40am #
#2 happens on OS X, but it happens a lot more frequently on Windows. This is actually one of the things I like about OS X - that apps pop to the fore with less frequency on OS X than on Windows. I used to like it a lot more in the past, because over time it seems to be happening with greater frequency on OS X… but still it's nothing like Windows, where popping to the fore seems to happen about once every 47 ticks.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 8:49am #
The trash thing irritates me a lot. I'll be trying to find an item that I accidentally trashed, and I want to be able to check what's in it to make sure I found the right one.
Imagine trying to find one specific image out of a bunch with generic digital camera names: DSC1241.jpg and the like. It's an annoying slowdown to have to relocate them all into a new folder on my Desktop just so I can open them to find the one that I don't want to erase. And then, of course, I have to move all the others back.
Posted 09 Jan 2006 at 1:44pm #
My only complaint about OS X (and I spend probably 40-60% of my tube time on 10.3) is that it's a memory whore. I use it only for Safari, iTunes and my blogging tool, and it always feels sluggish compared to Linux on x86.
Other than that, in almost all of the UI things, despite one or two minor annoyances, it's almost unfautable. I even like the Dock.
Posted 10 Jan 2006 at 10:45pm #
The funny thing is, drag and drop to an application in the dock will open an item in the trash just fine. It's only double clicking that doesn't work.