15 Things Apple Should Change in Mac OS X 936
richi writes "Two of Computerworld's top operating systems editors, a Mac expert and a Windows expert, compare notes on what Apple should reconsider as it develops Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Mac OS X 10.4, or Tiger, is (in their opinion) a noticeably better operating system than XP or Vista. But it is not perfect. OS X has its own quirks and flaws, and they set out to nail down some of the 'proud nails' for the next release." From the article: "7. Inconsistent User Interface. Open iTunes, Safari and Mail. All three of these programs are Apple's own, and they're among the ones most likely to be used by Mac OS X users. So why do all three of them look different? Safari, like several other Apple-made apps such as the Finder and Address Book, uses a brushed-metal look. iTunes sports a flat gun-metal gray scheme and flat non-shiny scroll bars. Mail is somewhere in between: no brushed metal, lots of gun-metal gray, and the traditional shiny blue scroll bars. Apple is supposed to be the king of good UI, and in many areas, it is. But three widely used apps from the same company with a different look? Sometimes consistency isn't the hobgoblin of little minds."
Not sure all of these are correct...exactly (Score:5, Informative)
And that solves the whole "no date on the desktop" one - and probably some of the others too.
WTF ? No F2 ? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, pressing the 'Enter' key does precisely that.
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:WTF ? No F2 ? (Score:3, Informative)
New features or better documentation for old ones? (Score:1, Informative)
Select the icon. Hit Return. Type. Done.
Try Control-d. Most text input supports emacs key bindings (yes you can override this to use other bindings)
Oh f*** (Score:1, Informative)
Why the HELL doesn't the Finder allow the user to sort files with FOLDERS ON TOP, instead of mixing the cursed things in an unholy and undistinguishable mess together with files? It's completely messed up navigation, contanstly forcing the user to switch between Type-sorting and Name-sorting just to find what the user wants, instead of neat and tidy putting all the damn directories SEPARATELY.
Idiots. Both the writers and the chumps at Apple.
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, I'm not trying to troll, but Linux is not really like the flavor of unix Apple has built their OS up from. Maybe you could try delving into the way Darwin and FreeBSD organize their file system.
Here are some links that might be a jumping off point:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Co nceptual/KernelProgramming/BSD/chapter_11_section_ 3.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000905-CH214-TPXREF 103 [apple.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_sys tem) [wikipedia.org]
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not sure all of these are correct...exactly (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:4, Informative)
My list (Score:3, Informative)
The good news (for me) is that now Linux on powerbooks is very, very good [revis.co.uk] - not only do all the key things like wireless (with WPA), suspend, sound, 3d acceleration etc work perfectly but with Beryl installed it actually looks far better than OS X. I was sitting in an internet cafe yesterday and people were being awed by OS X... except it wasn't OS X at all. I said almost two years ago that Linux was catching up with OS X for look and feel... well, now it has. Even with Gnome apps mixed into a KDE desktop the behavior (thanks to an awful lot of work by the Kubuntu/Ubuntu guys) is more consistant across applications than anything you will find on OS X or Windows.
Oh, and with MOL installed (so it's one button press to switch to/from full screen OS X almost as fast as on native hardware) there really are no downsides.
Re:NUmber 10 is flat out silly (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What i thought sucked about OSX... (Score:3, Informative)
1. Click on the icon to open the Applications folder.
2. Right click to get a popup menu.
3. Hold down the left button (or single button if you're using a stock mouse) until you get a popup menu.
That's what I use, and it works exceptionally well.
Re:Not sure all of these are correct...exactly (Score:5, Informative)
defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
After that, press F12 and start dragging widget.. then (while still dragging) press F12 again and drop widget on the desktop.
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:5, Informative)
mostly whining. (Score:1, Informative)
First off, "Finder" does suck. It's an abomination. FTFF.
15. Date display in the menu can be customized through the "International" > "Formats" pref pane.
14. Widgets can be placed on the "Desktop" by enabling 'devmode'
11. Windows in OS X - current OS X is idiotic. System 9 made sense - drag by any edge, resize by the corner, double-click the menubar to "windowshade" in place - once to peek behind a window, and again, without moving the mouse to put put the window back. Now, most windows can only be moved by the menubar - if you have a screen full of overlapping windows, all of the "moveable" regions are clustered at the top of the screen where they are most likely to overlap. Double-clicking a menubar minimizes windows to the "Dock", but then you have to move the mouse all the way there to put it back. idiotic all around.
10. Stick a folder of app aliases in the "Dock" like everyone is already doing to access your second tier apps.
9. My "delete" key on my standard Mac keyboard (Canadian layout) deletes right so what's the problem? For Cocoa apps, ctrl-d works too.
meh, most of the rest sounds like whining from the author of the article.
Some of these are just ignorant... (Score:5, Informative)
2. Renaming Isn't Easy. The process of renaming files is highly mouse-centric on the Mac. There's no F2 option (as there is on Windows) that lets you select the file and press F2 to expose the filename-editing mode. The mouse process requires very precisely timed mouse clicks. Anyone who has ever been forced to rename a long list of files under both Windows and Mac operating systems will likely agree that the Windows way is easier. --Michael Cullison
Hey Mike - arrow key until the file you want to rename is hilighted - and push enter. Wooooooo, scary hard.
Re:Window Management (Score:5, Informative)
Why, in general, do we even need to resize windows? The answer, 90% of the time, is that the window is the wrong size or shape for its contents. That's what the green "optimize" button is for -- to resize the window automatically to the same size as its contents, and properly implemented, this does just what you want. With Safari, it makes my web browser just wide enough to view the current page without scrolling, and tall enough to show all or as much of the page as possible. With Pages, it resizes the document window to fit the exact size of the document at its current zoom level. I practically never need to resize these windows.
The problem comes mainly with apps that haven't implemented the optimize button properly. The list of offenders includes Camino and all those expensive turds Adobe sells (which break almost all the rules of OS X consistency).
Re:That's good and all... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple tends to be secretive about a lot of its stuff, but in the ramp-up to a new release of OS X they always get into bragging a LOT. Developer feature previews and what not are plastered all over Apple's website. I have NEVER seen an example of Apple waiting until launch date to unveil a "key technology" in their OS.
b. Leopard is still very early in development
Huh? Apple has already shipped more than one 10.5 developer preview so far. I believe they have a lot of folks in Cupertino already shifted over to it (as a beta test), and it's slated to come out sometime this spring. They first announced it to people over a year ago, so they've probably been working on it for at least two years. That is not early development.
How familiar with Mac OS X are these people? (Score:5, Informative)
Point 10: It's awkward to find applications too rare to put on the dock? I dragged my Applications folder to the dock as a folder. If I mouse over to it, I get a drop down menu of every app in the whole folder. Or I can double click on it to open the folder. Or I can go to Spotlight and type the first couple of letters of the application name and have it find the app very quickly.
User Point 3: The Apple mouse doesn't have three buttons. I spent a whole $9 for a Logitech optical wheel mouse, and all the buttons (including the scroll wheel) work just fine with no configuration.
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, so YOU want locate? Well, since you obviously know it exists and what it does you must be a power user... therefore you should either know how to enable the database maintenance or put a little effort into a two minute Google search to find the answer.
Your objections don't stand up. Remember, OSX is made for the average user... if you want your power tools that'll get you UNIX functionality you need to put in a little more work. However, that amount of work is still significantly less than your average UNIX requires to be user-friendly.
Oh, and in response to the GGP, you've obviously never used an flavor of UNIX other than Linux. Linux is NOT UNIX despite what some might want to tell you. It's inspired by UNIX but doesn't follow many of the forms that became common in true UNIX platforms. OSX is closer to BSD than Linux is, and as such I'm quite comfy in that environment having cut my teeth on NetBSD, FreeBSD and AT&T UNIX (yes, the real deal). Just because nothing is where you expect it coming from a hobbyist UNIX platform, doesn't mean it's automatically wrong. In fact, OSX has more in common with most commercial UNIX's (Unices?) than Linux will ever have. As a result, I think it's a better UNIX.
Just as an aside, is it wrong for Apple to make X11 an optional install that runs after the main GUI? No, because that's what OSX does. The average user doesn't need or want X11... and if you want or need X11 you're a power user almost by default. As such, you should be comfortable with installing it. If you really want to make OSX more Linux-like, download Fink and start installing some more GPL tools... I am a power user, and I'm glad I put in the extra work to learn OSX properly. I've used OS/2, Windows (since 2.0 and up to and including Vista), Mac (from the original MacOS to OSX), GEM, Linux, UNIX (various), AmigaOS, OS/400, S/36, and quite a number of embedded and RTOS's. I have to say that for me, OSX fits the bill. It does everything I want it to, very little that I don't. It's not perfect, but no OS has ever been perfect. I use it because it just works... because I can get my work done. I can tinker with the internals if I want to, but I rarely have to.
And by the way, app bundles are the bomb. Sure, they use a little more disk space... but disk space is cheap. Think of your applications as a folder (which they literally are in the UNIX filesystem) that contain all of the stuff you need to run the app including configs in some apps. Right click on an app and Show Package Contents sometime... it's quite educational. And download the dev packages and learn something about the OS. Even if you have no intention of developing software, the development kit is incredibly deep and will teach you more about the OS than you ever thought possible.
Re:Some of these are just ignorant... (Score:3, Informative)
Command-O. (i.e., the key with the cloverleaf and Apple symbol)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:5, Informative)
The behavior you want doesn't make as much sense in OS X. I mean, why make the window bigger if it is to show more whitespace and keep you from dragging content to/from an other Window?
Re:What about combo boxes? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:That's good and all... (Score:2, Informative)
Now, who said macs where more expensive?
Re:12. Documents and App Instances on the Dock (Score:3, Informative)
I can't tell if the writer is unhappy that you can't do this on the Dock without the context menu or if he thinks that context menu on the Dock is the only way to get a list of windows. It isn't.
Also learning the keyboard shortcut Cmd-` (beside 1) to switch between an app's windows is your friend.
Re:Some of these are just ignorant... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:5, Informative)
Works in Cocoa apps such as CyberDuck and TeXshop.
Doesn't work in TextWrangler
Does weird things in Finder, esp. on a multiple monitor machine
Sort of works for Safari
All of which is a good argument for why Apple shouldn't've knuckled in to Microsoft and Adobe and should've stuck w/ their Rhapsody plan and never have wasted time on the foetid mess which is Carbon.
William
(who wants TIFFany instead of PhotoShop, Altsys Virtuoso instead of FreeHand or Illustrator and thinks that PasteUp could've been as good as InDesign and that FrameMaker would still be available on Macs if we'd had Rhapsody)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:WTF ? No F2 ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:3, Informative)
If you're looking for a cheaper alternative, get an external Firewire enclosure and throw any 3.5" 7200 RPM hard drive you like in it. That did wonders for my G4 mini's speed, I was able to reuse an old drive from my PC, and it's easier than trying to pry a mini open with a putty knife.
Re:CLI (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:5, Informative)
On Windows, pressing the maximize button, maximizes the window so that it takes up the entire screen (well, except for the task bar as you mention).
On Macintosh, there is a button called zoom. It resizes the window to show all the contents of the window. In some cases, this is (considerably) smaller than the entire screen.
The problem is that Windows Users (and apparently Linux Users) expect the zoom button (on the Mac) to take up the entire screen, so that it hides all other open windows. it doesn't do that.
Conversely, when Mac users use Windows, the maximize button really isn't what they want. They want to make the window bigger, but the don't want to obscure other windows, because they still want to see and use content from the other windows.
Both implementations have their uses. The confusion lies when you try and work in multiple environments and expect the same functionality.
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:3, Informative)
172:~ pete$ locate whoami
172:~ pete$
I love spotlight, but I'd love it even more if I knew how to tell it to index the whole machine..
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Worst thing about OSX is... (Score:3, Informative)
Some of these are soluble... with extra software. (Score:3, Informative)
#14 - Konfabulator/Yahoo Widgets or Amnesty. I use Konf/Yahoo Widgets. The problem with Amnesty is that Dashbord widgets are CPU hogs. Putting them in their own layer means you don't have to care because they're only running a small part of the time.
#13 - I've used a combination of applications working together to make the middle mouse button bring up the window menus as a context menu, but Apple should ABSOLUTELY make contextual menus available from the menu bar the way Services are, and make the main menus and Services available with contextual menus. There's five places that are close to the mouse under Fitt's Law, and the fifth is... where the mouse is right now.
#12 - The Dock needs a lot more work than this. In NeXTstep the Shelf (the equivalent of the right half of the Dock) was a real place... you could drag documents into it and out again, so that it provided an intermediate place to "pause" a drag and drop operation while you shuffled windows. The "Poof" is cute, but it's a bad user interface design... if you want to trash a Docked object, the trash is right there.
I use XShelf for this.
#11 - If anyone knows of software that fixes this, I would love to hear of it.
#10 - I used to use third party apps, but now I just have a folder containing aliases pointing to the system and personal application folders, and certain places in the Library, in the Dock. And, yes, this could be made a lot better.
#9 - "The rest of the world long since accepted that IBM makes the best keyboards" - Indeed. I would dearly love to be running OS X on a Thinkpad instead of a Macbook, mostly for this very reason. (Yes, I know that's Lenovo now, but the principle's still valid)
#8 - CUPS MUST DIE
#7 - The low level user interface isn't even internally consistent on the Mac. Every application has its own UI for configuring hotkeys - this should be a single "hotkeys and input" item in the Preferences, that lets you assign ANY key or corner combination to any application using the new "input manager" they create to implement this.
#6 - There's a million apps for this, and none should need to exist. Plus... laptop fan controls, keyboard illumination, sleep/hibernate behaviour, and all the rest of the laptop configuration crap that you shouldn't haveto deal with but in the real world you all too often do.
#5, #4, #3, #2, #1 - Finder is two separate programs that don't work well together. The old OS 9 Finder should be pulled out and restored fully for the benefit of the folks who like a spcial Finder, and the old NeXT File manager should be pulled out and restored fully for those of us who prefer a file browser.
On the reader peeves:
#1 - If I select shut down, and some application wants to know if I really want it to close, give me a window that says "yes, kill it and the rest of the pig-dogs, I WANT TO SHUT DOWN NOW". In fact that should be a button on the "shut down" dialog. "Cancel, Shutdown, Kill the pigdogs". Same with "sleep". And give me an option to go into safe sleep AND power off in a single operation (you could call it Hibernate
#2 - It's in there. Almost. RETURN on a file SHOULD put you into edit on the file name. Except when it doesn't. See points #5 through #1 in the previous section.
#3 - YES. Steve, old man, nobody kicked sand in your face for putting two buttons on the NeXT mouse. It's time to give up on this whole passive-aggressive single-button-mouse thing. See also "putting OS X on a Thinkpad". You got IBM japan to help you out on one of the Powerbooks (3400, I think)... you can do it again. Nobody will call you a wuss.
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a big fan of MenuMeters ( http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/menumeters/ [ragingmenace.com] ) for showing different loads on my system.
Also, Apple's website has a huge knowledge base about all the internals of the system. There's a good amount on specific differences between what they do and general linux principals.
Re:Window Management (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:5, Informative)
This was particularly true for true-Carbon applications. MetroWerks' PowerPlant Carbon framework, used by many applications (still today) kinda standardize the actual behavior and Cocoa under OS X also makes this somewhat more predictable.
But applications can still control the size they can zoom to.
This is why you wont find a system-wide switch to control this behavior.
Re:Window Management (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A more fundamental problem with dual monitors (Score:2, Informative)
I'm pretty much a total mac fanboy, but I have to concede this point. I never tried multiple monitors on a Mac until a few years ago when I got my first iBook and discovered that a simple firmware adjustment was all that was needed in order to allow spanning instead of mirroring when hooking up an external monitor. I was really excited at first, but soon learned how annoying it is to have the menu bar only available on one of the screens- especially when you want to have one app running on one screen and another on the other.
For single monitors, I still believe that the stationary menu bar at the top of the screen is a superior UI. If you don't believe this, you need to spend some time observing how many users of Windows/Linux keep every window maximized- they are in effect simulating the stationary menu bar effect. However, for multiple monitors, the menu bar in the window paradigm of Windows/X11 is currently better. I think that Apple could easily fix this by having the Mac's menu bar move from screen to screen with the mouse. They could even make it's appearance 'ghosted' on the screens where the mouse currently is not. Placing a menu bar on each screen would then allow different apps to be in the foreground on different monitors. I've made suggestions along these lines on the OS X feedback page, but, sadly they have yet to realize the brilliance of what I'm telling them. ;-]
I have a feeling that they've concluded that there is not enough multiple monitor use to warrant spending time coming up with a more elegant solution.
Re:Some of these are just ignorant... (Score:3, Informative)
You could open the Help window and search for "rename file" and learnt the shortcut.
But coming from windows or linux, you probably wouldn't have thought about that either!
The help texts are actually very useful on OS X.
Re:What I think they should change... (Score:3, Informative)
Yes.
it installed nice drivers for your printer (no, I'm not talking about those crapy GIMP drivers)
The printer was a network printer, so I had to tell CUPS what IP it was on and what make it was. After that, yes it worked well.
and it also configured 3D acceleration to your graphic card.
I had to download the nVidia driver myself, exit X, and run the installer. After that it worked well.
You didn't had to configure fstab to mount your windows or other external partitions,
The Debian installer found all the other partitions and asked which ones to put in fstab.
nor to configure your bluethoot device, and you TV card worked right out of the box
Don't have those, so I don't know.
Also:
* My sound card and modem were autodetected at boot time and setup correctly.
* DVDs play right out of the box with Kaffeine. (No need to install a DVD codec like Windows.)
* K3b located my CD and DVD burners automatically.
None of these required messing with stuff in
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Window Management. Maximize? (Score:3, Informative)
Are you sure about that? Cmd-F is Find on mine...
Agree about Adobe Reader, though :)
Re:Not sure all of these are correct...exactly (Score:2, Informative)
You meant command-shift-f (Score:3, Informative)