I find myself appreciating the more controversial changes, like reversed scrolling and hidden scrollers. I followed Gruber's advice and suppressed the impulse to switch the defaults back to Snowpard behaviors and find that I'm less happy when I have to use Snowpard now.
Meanwhile:
* Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped. It's not a small improvement over Snowpard; it has a more reasonable layout now that makes Smart Folders make more sense, and search seems to have been completely rebuilt and actually works now.
* I find myself liking Mission Control enough not to mind not having vertical virtual desktop arrangements.
* Preview can sign documents now!
* The Filevault fix is huge for me (Filevault is now a bona fide block level FDE), since it means I don't have to use PGP WDE, which was a debacle.
My sense of it is, there is zero opportunity for someone to compete with Apple and Microsoft on conventional desktop operating systems, and the problems O'Reilly has with OS X are not generally going to be shared by people like my dad, who are (a) the only people Apple really cares about because (b) they're where all the money is.
I was ok with hidden scrollbars at first, and then I started running into websites with scrollable areas that were padded by non scrollable whitespace. Without a scrollbar, there's no indication that the area is even scrollable, unless you're lucky enough to see some partially cut off text. Even then, it's hard to know where the scroll pane begins and the padding ends. Maybe web designers should either stop using seamlessly pad scrollable panes, or indicate scroll ability some other way, but in the meantime I've turned scrollbar visibility back on.
> Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped.
Totally agreed; I have been using Gmail web interface for years reluctant to switch to a desktop client, but switched immediately after installing Lion and checking out the Mail app.
People hate change. That's what it all boils down to. I've used a Mac since 10.4 and Lion was the first upgrade that annoyed me slightly. I only have one complaint though: Mission Control. I liked my old spaces. I want to arrange my spaces in a grid again.
Otherwise I'd say that if you're open to it and give the changes a chance they'll grow on you. The scrolling feels natural to me now and I have a Mighty, not Magic, Mouse. Traditional scrolling now feels strange. For reference, I do frequently use a second computer running Crunchbang Linux so it's not like I'm used to it because it's all I use.
For those criticizing- He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong. Not all posts are meant to be essays...
Briefly though, (as another user who switched from Mac OS X), I can certainly give examples of what he says:
Not all of these are specific to OS X, its the overall hardware and software that is getting frustrating.
More user-hostile
- If you replace your SuperDrive with another drive, you CAN NOT boot any operating system (other than Apple's) off usb drives or even external DVD drives plugged into usb slots. So with two hard drives, you can not install Windows or Linux. [1]
- Batteries are not considered user-swappable anymore. [2]
More buggy
- Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).
- We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?
Seriously, wtf is up with removing "Save As"? I had to copy the text from a file I was working on and paste it into a new file because the "Save a new version" option wasn't doing anything.
One you missed: really horrible auto-correct feature Apple added. It will replace a word when you're in the middle of typing it. Completely broken and totally transparent. At first, I thought that WriteRoom was just buggy.
Oh, and the "Home" folder isn't exposed under the Favorites section of Finder by default anymore. You have to go to "Go > Home". Took me a little while to figure that one out.
I don’t think you understand. This is about paradigm shifts.
Here is how it used to work: You open this old document because you want to create a new one and use the old one as a template. You either Save as right away or (much more likely) you edit for a bit and do a Save as at some later point.
If you do this with auto save you are fucked. (Well, not really. There is now Versions, so starting with Lion this is finally a recoverable mistake.) Editing your document for a bit before doing a Save as with auto save is the same as mistakenly saving your document – overwriting your old document – instead of doing a Save as. That mistake is catastrophic – I know it, I used to make it often enough myself – and users would make it all the time had Apple left Save as in.
Now when you open an old document you will be asked – as soon as you start editing – whether you want to edit the document or duplicate it, thus avoiding that catastrophic mistake. You can also duplicate documents at any time.
The transition period will be painful, that’s for sure, but the end result is pure bliss. It’s worth it.
A lot of changes with Lion are just like this. Sometimes some pain while transitioning is the price for awesomeness.
And what if my workflow involves making multiple files based off the same document? Say I making png buttons in Photoshop. I change the test to "Order" pick save as, type "order.png", change the text to "Cancel" pick save as, type "cancel.png", change the text to "Help" pick save as, type "help.png".
It sounds like that work flow just got massively tedious.
Here's my work flow when I'm writing a long document:
- Create/open "Master copy".
- Regularly Save/enable Autosave.
- When I have completed a chapter/segment, or before for lunch/supper, I Save and Save As on my backup HDD with a time-stamp/chapter number.
Like this I have one copy that I can edit and is always up to date on my main HDD and I have a whole record of copies on my backup HDDs. If I want to see how I edited chapter 3 whilst I was writing chapter 6 (they're related in the plot) I can.
I can't imagine this being something unknown of in the use of other applications. A franchisee that tracks various performance metrics each hour/day on a rolling database (month/year) sends a copy at regular intervals to the franchise owner/manager so that general franchise performance can be evaluated will have the same problem.
I can see how Duplicate -> Save is "only one click more", but the one-click solution worked well. If the "paradigm shift" is related to auto-saves, why not simply have the auto-saves create a new hidden file by default. Either the changes are saved (cue overwriting of the opened file), or the changes are saved as. If the user exits without saving, the hidden file can be marked for auto-delete in X days/hours, making erroneous exits recoverable. If there's a crash/loss of power, the hidden file is prompted for recovery at the program's next start.
A lot of programs have some kind of auto-save, here is how it works in Microsoft Word. While editing your document, it is auto-saved, but as a new, hidden file. When you manually Save, this new file overwrites the old, and a Save As does the same, but with the new name, not wiping the old document. You can argue that this is messy, and only a hack to get around the paradigm. It all depends on how people want to work, giving the program the responsibility to handle it.
I've not used lion so am not familiar with it, but going from what someone else is saying above, you need to 'duplicate' then 'save'. If it's autosaving, this doesn't make sense conceptually either. Why would the app not be autosaving once the duplicated document has been created? Why do you need to save separately?
You still have to save one first time, else the OS wouldn’t know where to put the file and how to name it. Lion only auto saves after that. That is irrespective of whether your create a new file or duplicate a file. (Apple could have been a lot more radical here, I’m unsure whether they should have been. That certainly would have meant a lot more work and it would have been an even more complicated transition.)
I would have thought that the duplicate function would have had 'duplicate it where?' in it.
The only reason I can think of for not having this is so you could make temporary changes to a document and not have them saved - which just seems to be a different way of arranging the cart and horse compared to the 'save as' workflow. With the Save As workflow, temporary changes are simply not saved. With the Duplicate workflow, you have to dupe the document first to avoid unwanted saving, then make your temporary changes. I don't see much of an improvement overall.
The new behavior protects from the following scenario (which I think is very common): Someone wants to use an old document as a template and in the process overwrites the old document. That’s data loss and the user likely becomes unable to even find the new document since it’s saved under the name of the old document.
It used to be the case that users had to actually make a mistake in order for this to happen (i.e. they had to forget to do a Save as and do a Save instead – that happened to me way too often, though), with auto save they would make that mistake automatically and every time.
I think what Apple could do is add a “Duplicate and save” function, I don’t think Save as is salvageable with auto save.
3) The green maximize button still doesn't maximize.
This isn't and has never been a "maximize" button. It's supposed to zoom the window to fit the content as best it can without scrolling. It's up to the developer to implement it properly with their own logic.
Have you ever used a 30" display? Maximizing windows does not make a whole lot of sense there, especially considering the difference in window contents on Windows vs Mac (ie. self-contained menubar, etc).
That's where the newer Microsoft Windows method of maximizing into 1/2 the screen works well. I'd prefer if it were customizable to work in thirds, though.
I maintain that people think of multi-windowed UI in terms of windows first. Resizing a window to fit the content makes less sense than resizing the content to fit the window. People also seem to get really upset when UI interaction isn't consistent, and the Mac approach means that it varies wildly between apps.
You can drag a window to a corner to get it to fill a quarter screen. Kind of hard to hit the lower corners (it is not the screen corner but the top of the taskbar).
If you're going to criticize it, at least do so in a constructive way. In your list of 7, I see 2 real complaints.
1) Agreed, this can be annoying.
2) The buttons are visually smaller, but have the same target click area.
3) It behaves the same way it did before, so this isn't any worse.
4) The new scrolling takes a day or two to get used to, and then is better. If you really don't like it, there's an option to toggle it off. This isn't an issue.
5) Agreed, it is arguably slower and tends to drain the battery faster. It's also doing more. It sucks, but that's the price of progress.
6) As I see it, FireVault is a huge plus and not at all a drawback. Was there anything 'terrible' about the process other than that it was lengthy? And really, a one-time conversion cost for such a huge improvement to this feature was a problem for you?
7) This happens with practically every desktop OS upgrade ever and, as you mentioned, isn't a problem anymore.
So besides #1 and #5, are there other real complaints?
I'd personally add "really botched multi-touch gestures" to the list, but I'm genuinely curious if it's actually that much worse or people are just piling onto this rant.
When I saw the previews for Lion I thought autosave seemed like overkill. When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress. The last time I experienced significant data/progress loss was probably about 3 years ago before I developed this habit. I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.
The problem is: Most people don't do that, especially new computer users. (Or, these days, people who are used to web apps, which don't use command-S.)
They don't learn until they've been burned, probably quite badly. If the computer doesn't HAVE to burn them in the first place, why should it?
> When I'm working on anything I "autosave" by reaching over slightly and hitting CMD-S every time I make any small amount of progress . . . I don't see what problem they're trying to fix.
Um, that?
The concept of "save" was good for a time, but having everything autosave is absolutely forward progress.
My Macbook Air just kernel panicked about 20 minutes ago (which, admittedly, shouldn't happen). I had to hold down the power button, and then turn it back on. Less than one minute after the crash my laptop's state, opened programs, tabs, files, unsaved progress, was restored.
Like you, I also have a tic of hitting command-S. However, I don't think requiring the user to develop a tic to keep their data safe is very good usability.
Hahah, maybe, but I'm happy doing it. I have control that way. I can't tell the computer to stop auto-saving can I? That way I can take risks when I'm coding etc and always revert what I did if it was a mistake.
“We all know how annoying the switch to Mission Control was, right?”
No, we certainly don’t. I love Mission control and I think it’s an improvement over Exposé. Don’t pretend I’m agreeing with you.
For me personally Lion has been a solid improvement. Quite a few things that used to suck about OS X still suck but I have seen nothing but improvements or neutral changes with Lion. (Yeah, I have some minor quibbles, but mostly about apps I hardly ever use anyway.) I had no technical issues at all. Again, that’s for me personally.
The thing about mission control is that they could easily have left the old expose intact as an optional alternative, but nooooo they had to remove it completely and fuck up thousands of users' workflow habits. I mean you have to admit the way mission control stacks windows on top of each other for each application is pretty ridiculous. Other than that it's fairly useful.
But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.
It reminds of when they released the magic mouse and you could no longer have expose mapped to a third mouse button. Surely wasn't the only user dependent on such a useful feature.
> But there was no good reason to remove the 'all app expose' feature, leaving only the within app expose. They either just overlooked it or want to brainwash users into some sort of app centric paradigm.
Do you mean the "Show all Windows for the current app"? I'm pretty sure it's still there. Might have a different gesture tho.
No I mean there used to be two forms of expose - show all within app, which I almost never used (it would only be useful if you had a truly ridiculous number of windows open, really), and show all windows across all applications including the finder. They've taken away the latter, which was the useful one.
Most times I hit expose in the past it was to go to a window of another application. For instance switching between the code I was editing in Coda or Textmate to the webpage I was building in Safari, or the graphics I was manipulating in Preview. In fact I did this constantly. Now it's a two step process: select the app in mission control, and then do expose once you're in the app. It wouldn't be so bad if the way Mission Control stacked the app windows wasn't so useless - when you expand them they should at least fill the screen so you can see everything, instead they become just slightly less bundled together, forcing you to footer about with the pointer to get what you want.
Expose was one of the best GUI innovations ever, IMO, and they've bloody ruined it.
1. I don't have money for an SSD right now, and Mission Control can take up to 10 seconds to start, presumably because some stuff on another Space had been swapped to disk. I just used a friend's 800 MHz iMac G4 at a party and damn, Exposé was instant!
2. I don't even want to see stuff on another space. I move apps on spaces to FOCUS, not to see my unwritten report at the top of my desktop when switching apps on one space.
> He has given one example of what he thinks is wrong.
Most of it being... not smart?
> Right now, since I've switched to Gmail, I'm trying to back up and remove from my machine years of accumulated mail storage from mail.app. First obstacle: a user's library files are now hidden.
No, the ~/Library folder is now hidden, you can see it via Terminal, by opening the Finder's Go menu with an option-click or browse it because you know the path (cmd-shift-G, for instance). This change is sensible: how often does a user need to go into the Library folder?
> Finally find them (thanks Matt Silver), back up the files to an external disk, and then delete them. But then when I empty the trash, an ungodly number of files--going back years--claim they are "in use" and can't be deleted. So here I am having to click "continue" every few thousand files (if I'm lucky) as I page through more than 400,00 files to be deleted. I know this is actually an old mis-feature - but why the devil wouldn't they give you an "ignore" checkbox or a "delete whatever you can checkbox"? This has been a problem for years, but never fixed, while they add new gloss all the time.
He hates OSX now because of something which has been there forever? Like the trash refusing to delete open files you moved there?
There are issues with OSX and there are debatable changes, but his post is simply nonsense.
Battery life degradation when moving from SL to Lion. Apple forums are full of examples. [3] (78 page thread, no confirmation or fix from Apple).
Wow! 78 page thread! Almost all are saying me too. And no sound in blogosphere! Just imagine if same thing happens in microsoft discussion forum. Tech bloggers really cut some slack for apple.
I currently use OS X for all my work and for personal/home use. But I have to agree with the sentiment. I have had nothing but praise for Apple and OS X up until Lion release. But this year has been a major turning point. End of XServe, end of Apple java, talk of end of Mac Pro and the whole post PC world thing, turning OS X into fisher price phone OS. Honestly, at this point I have to re-think my future and make a platform switch. I have invested well over $30,000 into Apple so far, but going forward I will most likely end up with Linux for software development and Windows for Photoshop and video editing (personal use).
I'm really just waiting to see what post-Lion OS X looks like, and if they keep moving towards iOS/iPhone, then I really don't want anything to do with Apple. I don't need a computer/OS from a phone company.
I dont see why valid criticisms of what Apple is doing get such a negative response. A lot of us love Apple software and hardware, and have invested a lot of money in various parts of the ecosystem. We are not windows fanboys who are making a fuss without having ever used Mac OS.
A lot of changes I can understand; moving forward may mean annoying a portion of your users. But a lot of these changes do not change anything for the better. There are no reasons for them at all, as mentioned elsewhere in the thread.
TBD. Incorporating user feedback and giving users options are pretty fundamental to Microsoft's standard operating procedure, so my guess is that the next public preview or beta of Win 8 will force a lot fewer changes on the user.
Really, the desktop mode of Windows 8 doesn't change all that much for power users, it just replaces the utterly broken Start Menu with a fullscreen start screen. It also makes this start screen the default environment for unsophisticated users, which is probably a reasonable move.
Aside from (IIRC) not letting you set a preference to default into the desktop mode on launch, the biggest problem with the start screen for power users was the low information density. This should be a setting, just like the default for Explorer is these giant icons and tiles for files, but you can easily switch it to use "Details" if you like to get real work done.
I think the end result for power users on traditional systems is likely to be that they deliver a desktop mode with only modest differences and a start screen that serves as a much more usable replacement for the start menu (and possibly the option to turn it back off). The start screen also provides a better replacement for some other ambient things like the desktop widgets that nobody ever sees because their apps are on top.
Meanwhile, that start screen, set to a lower information density (as was previewed), should be a pretty nifty base interface for tablet users and basic/new desktop users.
I'm sure there will still be some people up in arms, and possibly rightly so if there are some things they don't fix between now and the final release. But Win 8 has the potential to be a significant step forward without being too coercive on people who already have a good workflow in Win 7.
Seems like one of the smaller Linux variants will have to save us. At the moment, I'm quite taken with Fedora/Gnome 3. Although Ubuntu+Gnome 3 and the upcoming Linux Mint with Gnome 3 are solid options...
Just installed Linux Mint - I love it! A real improvement over the bloated Ubuntu 11.10 release and Unity. It's fast to startup and shutdown, responsive and has a lovely UI.
Judging from what Apple's done so far, if they really wanted to turn the Mac into an iPad, they would just quit selling Macs and try selling more iPads.
Does it actually affect you that Apple isn't selling XServe anymore? It made some sense when Macs had PPC chips and PPC had a performance advantage, but nowadays I can't think of a good use for a rack-mounted Mac. Likewise, I'm going to miss the Mac Pro too, but have you gone to spec one out? It used to be you actually needed a Power Mac to run Photoshop fast enough, or to compile. Now they're just overpowered and overpriced, and Thunderbolt obviates the need for slots.
Yes, Apple is consciously conceding the server and raw CPU markets, probably to Linux. I myself would choose Linux over Mac for those applications, too. But when I want to SSH into that server, or Skype with my girlfriend when I'm away from home, or write some code, it turns out my MacBook works just fine for that.
Thunderbolt doesn't "obviate" the need for slots. Do you have 10k plus invested in pro audio or video gear that requires pci-e? All those guys are going to switch to Windows...
>If you are a PCIe adapter manufacturer and want to make your product compatible with Express Box 3T, please contact Marketing(at)Magma.com to join our Partner Program or Join our Interest List and let us know that you're a developer.
And how many PCIe card makers have patched their drivers to work with this thing?
So it's a software problem rather than a hardware problem. Fine, maybe it's not a finished solution yet--but Apple hasn't stopped selling Mac Pros yet, either.
I'm not sure why that would be seen as a problem. The situation where Apple were maintaining their own Java implementation was at least slightly anomalous; returning responsibility to Sun/Oracle and OpenJDK makes a lot of sense.
I came from a windows background, tinkered with Linux for a few years on and off, and when I started my current job I was given a Macbook Pro. After a few months of using it I as so frustrated, and found myself spending more and more time in my Ubuntu virtual machine, that when they were ordering new MBPs for the design team I offered to give mine up to a designer and buy a ThinkPad, thus saving the company over $1,000. I've been running Ubuntu (and recently Linux Mint) full time for both work and personal use for a year and a half.
In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.
When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size. I saw an app a while ago that would let you control how your OSX apps are resized when you maximize them, but if I have to buy an app just to make my OS do what it should do anyway, there's something wrong.
I need 10 different apps on a Mac just to do what I can do out of the box in Ubuntu. Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.
On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.
I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard? Why do I have to google it and use a 3+ key combination to enable showing hidden files? I'm all for keyboard shortcuts, I'm a keyboard man, but until I learn and memorize them, you should put them in the menu where I can find them with a little hunting.
And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder? I prefer an address bar, where I can type a path to a directory I want to view, but noooo, I have to click around, and if it's a really deep folder I'm trying to get to I'm screwed.
I like Home and End keys. Where are they?
In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.
Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them. Maybe some people love learning the myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac, but I prefer Ubuntu, I can get stuff done a lot faster and without wanting to kill myself.
Suum cuique but some of your concerns really aren't:
> In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.
They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.
> When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size.
There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.
> Nautilus can access Windows network shares, SSH/SFTP/FTP access, and can mount NTFS, HFS, and pretty much any other filesystem type there is.
> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.
Darwin ports? Fink?
> I just want to see hidden files in Finder, why is that so hard?
> And that reminds me, why can't I type a path in Finder?
CMD-Shift-G
> I like Home and End keys. Where are they?
Erh, fn-ArrowLeft/ArrowRight ?!
> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.
The keyboard tab in Terminal's preferences? Or switch from Emacs-like to Vim-like navigation in the terminal?
> Maybe for some people this locked down, dumbed down environment works for them.
As I said, to each his own and there are valid concerns/tradeoffs about OS X. But in this particular case, the only thing "dumbed down" here is your rant.
>> On a new linux machine I can apt-get most anything, but if I do need to compile something I just apt-get build-essentials and I'm ready to go, on OSX you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source.
> Darwin ports? Fink?
I've used both for the past near-decade (fink for 4 years, now macports for the past 3), along with a Debian desktop, and they're much worse imo. They do the job sort of, but it's a mess. Stuff just outright breaks much more often than even in Debian 'unstable'; you'll install a package and it'll fail to compile, fail to link, a script will die, etc. Dependencies are a mess, especially as regards versions of interpreted languages (python/perl/etc.), and anything that interacts with X11 tends to be flaky. And the use of binary packages is still very spotty, so a simple install, if it pulls in big library dependencies, might spawn an hour or two of compilation, rather than a few minutes of installation.
It gets the job done somewhat, but I'm not really happy with the situation overall; for many things I prefer to use a Debian VirtualBox install, despite that also having some awkwardness.
Building from source isn't necessarily a bad thing: some Linux packages have the same behavior (e.g. Portage, on which MacPorts is based). There are pros and cons to both approaches.
Package management is definitely a disaster on OS X, though. Regardless of whether you use Homebrew, Fink, or MacPorts, packages tend to break often. Some of this may be unavoidable: there are enough differences between Linux and OS X that compiling programs developed for Linux for OS X is bound to cause problems.
I'm using both Linux and OS X regularly. Apt is awesome, without a doubt, particularly for the breadth of software available. And on the whole, I agree that Homebrew is considerably inferior. But there is one aspect I'm liking better about the Homebrew/Mac approach. With Homebrew I can have the latest software without a problem, because the OS itself is not so hooked in to the web of package manager dependencies. In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that. But I do like the ability to upgrade software without so many inter-dependencies.
In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that.
When I most recently used Linux on the desktop, in 2010, I finally grew frustrated enough with Ubuntu's screen management setup (there was no way to get it to respect my wishes for it to turn off the screen completely, until I finally killed the power manager entirely) that I switched to Arch. That was superficially better (stuff mostly worked as advertised), but the rolling release means either keeping up to date and dealing with constant breakage ("Oh, look, the new kernel has a broken driver for my audio card", or "Oh, another update, another few hours troubleshooting Wine. Yay"), or waiting a while and having the update become riskier and riskier.
Linux will be ready for the desktop when updating doesn't mean near certainty that something breaks. I realize that things used to be more broken, but when I used Linux as my primary desktop back in 1998-2003, my expectations were lower. Being a Mac user for 5-6 years seriously reduced my patience with troubleshooting random problems just to get all the functionality that the system I'm using claims to provide.
You want to use a distro with an LTS release. Switching to Arch and being surprised that pacman -Syu causes occasional breakage is not a failure of Linux at large.
I was more resigned than surprised. Annoyed, perhaps. Anyway, an LTS release would be guaranteed not to work with newer software, from my experience with them. Apologetics centering on users being prepared for normal updates to break random things do not forward Linux, in my opinion.
It's not clear to me that there's any way to get the level of polish needed for a major desktop OS without at least an army of (very critical) testers and developers, and maybe without forking most of the packages in the distro. Nevertheless, if OS X continues down the apparent path it's on, I'll be switching back again in a few years.
Yes, you should try switching to a rolling release distro. Arch is great. I've been using it for the last five or six years now and have had no desire to switch to a new main distro, though I try out the major ones periodically and install them for certain applications.
Arch is definitely the best workstation for a developer. The convenience of binary packages, the flexibility of PKGBUILDs (analogous to Gentoo's ebuilds, but much more reasonable), vanilla packages and quick releases make it a dream workstation for a developer, despite a rare wonkiness here or there. It works much better than Ubuntu et al for a development box.
If you're installing that many large UNIX packages I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are probably a lot of reasons you'd be better off on Linux.
Homebrew tries to use the default libs and utilities that come with OS X / Xcode.
MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities. They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.
MacPorts and Fink try to create their own little microcosm of a Linux system complete with all libraries and utilities.
That's more like a philosophical (and failure prone) difference that both Fink and MacPorts intentionally abandoned through experience, not really a "miles ahead" difference.
Not reproducing Apple's OS dependencies is a nice idea, but let's say I want to use python2.7 with openssl 1.0. Apple only shipped openssl 0.9.8 in Lion. If I mix modules that use OpenSSL 1.0 and OpenSSL 0.9.8, weird stuff happens. Now what?
(The answer is: now you have to start reproducing OS dependencies. This only gets worse as the OS dependencies grow more stale).
They generally seem to fail at this because major packages are broken all the time and conflict in a million little ways with the system ones.
They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it
He meant, you can click anywhere in the window and use Alt. If you left-click, it moves the window. If you middle-click it (apparently - I did not know this) will resize the window.
Mac OS X has oddly small targets for many of the Window management things. You have to be careful with the mouse when finding a resize corner (Lion makes it a little better) and the traffic light buttons are such a frustration that I'm led to believe they are not really meant to be used in an efficient work flow. You're better off enabling double-click-to-minimize or using Cmd-H to make a window go away.
There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.
But that green button is still there and still behaves strangely.
It's funnily called the zoom button.
Naturally when you click it in iTunes you expect the iTunes window to.... shrink down to a compact size.
I know the purpose of it is to 'change the window size to fit the content' - a nice concept but doesn't seem intuitive or easy to grasp for everyone.
Darwin ports? Fink?
Haha. I tried to get rdiff-backup or duplicity installed using MacPorts on Lion - it started by trying to install python2.4. And failed.
Anyway, this is not much of problem with Mac OS X - but despite being a Unixy system, I found it odd that certain tools are actually easier to run on Windows that on a Mac (not all but some)
Overall I like Mac OS X - it has great boot/shut down/sleep times, it can run a bash prompt as well as Photoshop and Word. But I'm skeptical about its usability being, on the whole, better than a Windows 7 system.
> Mac OS X has oddly small targets for many of the Window management things.
I actually like this about OS X. When i heard that Lion added resize-from-any-side, i was annoyed, because i feared it would be Windows 7-esque (in that on W7 there is this 20- or 30-pixel dead zone around the edges of every window where you can't get anything done except resize). I found the final implementation on OS X to be surprisingly good.
> Naturally when you click it in iTunes you expect the iTunes window to.... shrink down to a compact size. I know the purpose of it is to 'change the window size to fit the content' - a nice concept but doesn't seem intuitive or easy to grasp for everyone.
iTunes and Finder are outliers when it comes to what the zoom button does. To Apple's credit, a few versions ago they did try to make iTunes more consistent by making the zoom button work as described. However, there was an ENORMOUS backlash from people who liked the former behaviour and found the keyboard shortcut (OpenApple+M i think — it's in the menu somewhere, but i never use the mini-player because it's stupid) too excruciating to use instead, so they switched it back around for the next version.
I was one of the vocal complainers when CMD-Shift-M didn't do what I expected it to do in iTunes. And I know it breaks the HIG but having the controls tucked in a corner was better than having the entire application disappear to the Dock.
FYI, I just installed duplicity and rdiff-backup through Homebrew and it worked flawlessly. Agree that MacPorts is crap. But Homebrew is actually pretty good.
Last time I looked, Homebrew wasn't even trying to deal with conflicting dependencies, or any of the other hard corner cases of package management. MacPorts at least makes a decent effort on that front.
Edit: Yup, flawless installation and fast. Thanks again! I wish I had found this when I was trying to re-install Python Imaging Library after upgrading to Lion. I might have saved half a day.
I think some of the points are valid; there may be solutions but they are so obscure that people obviously never discover them. I've had a MBP for nearly a year now and never knew that Fn+Left/Right substituted for Home/End (thanks for the tip, btw). I can't see myself guessing Cmd+Shift+G to type paths into Finder either...
They're valid solutions but normally Linux is (not unjustifiably) castigated for requiring obscure wizardry to do things, I don't see why OSX should get away with it either.
Actually, I liked text manipulations shortcuts in native text input fields. They are very consistent and easy to get used to.
Option (Alt) means "word". Opt+Left — move one word left, Opt+Right — move one word right.
Cmd means "all". Cmd+left — move to beginning of line, Cmd+right — move to the end of line, Cmd+up — move to the beginning of the text, Cmd+down — move to the end of text.
PgDown/PgUp/Home/End mean the same thing as in other systems, but without moving the cursor. All this might be a little frustrating at first, but it's muscle memory and you can figure the logic out in a couple of days. Don't fight the system, embrace it.
As for cmd+shift+g, you can look these shortcuts up in the menu, if you are not sure where to look, use help/search, type go to and the top item will be what you are thinking about. That said, finder still sucks.
As a relatively recent Mac convert, the whole "Option (Alt)" thing still gets me. I regularly see shortcut hints and then have to sit there for a few seconds thinking "Which one's the Option key again?"
The confusion is in part perpetuated by Apple, who can't seem to make up their mind on the matter.
My UK MacBook Pro keyboard has "alt" and doesn't mention "option" at all. They have also shipped keyboards that just say option (no mention of alt). Many of their keyboards have both printed on them.
In most of their user-facing documentation it is referred to as the "Option" key. In Cocoa, it is the "Alternate" key.
The menus don't mention either: they use the ⌥ symbol. Which is on some, but not all of their keyboards.
One handy thing is that because OS X uses Command for most of its window-management and application hot-keys, control + key is almost always unmasked by the application. Why is this important? Control-A and Control-E work in almost any text input! They work in Adium, they work in Chrome for the location bar and this textarea, and I'm sure many others.
I was pleasantly surprised because the Windows/Linux systems tend to mask Control-A for select-all.
To me I think of it as Bash bindings, because that is where I learned them. For text editing I've been using vim bindings, but I never found the vim mode to work quite like I want it to on the terminal. I should look into that more.
Yeah, the only reason I knew about Fn-arrows was because my old MacBook actually labelled them: http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/15837.jpg
For some reason the labels are not part of the new design (no numeric keypad emulation either). I guess they thought it was too busy a design?
End? What does that mean? Does it quit the current app? Does it shutdown? I’m really confused! And this strange Home key, what’s that for? Going to my start page? Showing the desktop? Start menu? What’s going on?!
It's pretty easy to push a key and find out what it does compared to imagining a key combination and trying to figure if that key combination even does anything
Not only that but, as a new mac user, it seems like there are several common keystroke types. Fn+x, ctrl+x, alt+x, cmd+x, cmd+shift+x; maybe there's some logic behind it but i can't find any. It seems like the windows system is a bit more understandable.
Cmd: this is an important command we expect you to use a lot.
Shift-cmd: wow this program has a lot of commands that people want shortcuts for.
Shift-ctrl/alt: holy shit this program has a lot of commands.
Shift-ctrl-alt: this program is probably old enough to vote, and has a huge ton of commands
Alt: rarely used alone outside of terminal
Ctrl: see alt
Fn: NOT ON ALL KEYBOARDS. Used to force f-keys to output f-key codes instead of doing media control stuff, or to change cursors into page-up/dn/start/end.
The canonical shortcuts are Cmd-left/right/up/down, which move the cursor to the absolute left, right, top, and bottom of the document, respectively. This makes perfect sense.
Home and End behave differently, they move the viewport to the beginning or end of the document but do not move the cursor. They are like scrolling in that you don't lose your position. I'm not sure, but I think that page up and down (Fn-up and Fn-down) behave similarly. I never use these though.
There are home and end keys on a full-size Mac keyboard, too. They're not there on the compact keyboard layout, but many Windows laptops have home/end mapped to other keys, as well. Granted, that's usually is indicated on the keys, whereas it's not on the Mac, but you still have to go hunting for them the first time you need them and one time is all it takes to learn their location.
...those home and end keys unfortunately don't take you to the beginning or end of a line like on Windows or Linux...they take you to the top/bottom of the document! one of the more painful parts of my switching process was un-training myself to hit home to get to the beginning of a line (these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis)...you're almost better off without having those keys.
> these is no way to remap system wide either, you need to do it on a per app basis
That isn't true. OS X actually has a very powerful and easy-to-use (but NOT easy-to-discover) method of controlling key bindings, and it applies instantly to ALL Cocoa applications (which, now that Finder and iTunes are Cocoa, means every common GUI application except Firefox).
This isn't my link, but here is an excellent site that describes the Cocoa text system:
And, if you're interested, here is the DefaultKeyBindings file that i've use on every OS X-based Mac i've ever had to fix Apple's default Home/End/PgUp/PgDn implementation:
The issue there is that coming from a Windows environment the terminology isn't exactly the same. The command is called "go", hence Cmd + Shift + G.
It would be useful if one could enter keystrokes into the search bar in the 'Help' panel. That would solve a lot of keystroke identification issues and familiarize them with OS X fairly quickly.
> They changed that in Lion to every corner, every side. And you don't have to press ALT to do it.
You don't have to hold down ALT - you can do it without, holding down ALT increases the window edge hit area to make it easier to resize it.
> There's now a full-screen mode that takes care of that.
And makes using multiple monitors even more pathetic on OS X by effectively disabling other outputs - on top of the age-old problem of the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor, etc, etc...
the age-old problem of the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor
That sounds very easy to fix when talking in a forum, but I bet there are a million corner cases. Worse, real users (as opposed to people who can look around a web page when a button moves) would have a hard time. "I have two file menus now, I'm scared!"
OS X isn't perfect, but, for the problem it's trying to solve, it does a really good job. I still don't have a better alternative for my needs that range from scripting and compiling through photoshop and sales presentations. Especially one that works so reliably in a consumer environment.
I'm about to buy a new laptop. I've been putting a lot of thought into it, and Linux just isn't there yet (mostly 3rd party apps I need) and Windows lack of unix underpinnings means fighting Cygwin or running a VM all the time (though I'm finally starting to get the mid-to-late 90s taste of Microsoft out of my mouth :).
> And makes using multiple monitors even more pathetic on OS X (the menu for a window on a secondary monitor being displayed on the primary monitor, etc, etc)...
Yes, that's one of my gripes too. Note that I didn't say OS X was perfect. I took issue with this pompous litany of faux issues.
> I took issue with this pompous litany of faux issues.
You are either accusing the poster of out-right deception in order to make OSX look back, or you are attacking the user for real issues that he/she came up against. Which is it?
(If it's the later, then I view this as the Mac version of the Linux literate telling new users to 'RTFM' instead of being helpful.)
I'd take the "pompous" back if I could. But yeah, "RTFM" (Mac edition); it's a good idea to put in some minimal search effort before writing a long list of pseudo-issues. There are real issues that could have been discussed instead and compared between systems to learn sth.
Perhaps it is better to answer the "why is that so hard?" question instead.
I expect that it is because most people don't need or want that option. You could make an argument that there should be a checkbox for it in Finder preferences like in Windows, but even that isn't as straight forward as it sounds. Microsoft has split "hidden files" into multiple levels with UI checkboxes for two levels, "hidden" and "hidden system" files, though there are other files which are more hidden and never appear in Windows Explorer. Even people who want to see some hidden files probably don't want to see them all. And we've not even gotten into files which are backed by multiple file streams - you could make an argument for making it possible to show them too, since you might want to save disk space by deleting one stream but not the other.
But the real answer, I think, is that it is hard because these are the sorts of things you should probably be doing in the terminal in the first place, where ls -a works just fine.
There is a distinction between "doable" and "usable".
I should switch to Terminal every time I want to toggle hidden file visibility?
Or write a service to install on my Finder toolbar. (I did this, because I'm not Joe Sixpack, but it's still annoying. If I wanted to write my own UI, I wouldn't have gone out and bought one.)
Apple has decided that regular users should never see hidden files. I can see how this might be annoying to you, but I don't think I can be convinced that it's a bad justification.
Someone wrote a little app that toggles it, but honestly, if you care that much about it to ask, just leave the hidden files visible all the time. I've found it to be the path of least confusion.
Homebrew is far superior to Macports or Fink IMO. In some ways I prefer brew install'ing to apt-get'ing. The packages are often far more up to date. I am not a fan of the transition from spaces to mission control. At least you can rearrange windows in mission control, before that update I was pretty unhappy with OS X.
I think your comments just highlight the user unfriendlyness. Am I really supposed to enter some cryptic shell command I copied from the internet to be able to see my hidden files?
I can never remember keyboard shortcuts, even for screenshots I have to Google every time because I make them only infrequently.
Instead of buying an alternative file manager, why not just install another OS...
> I think your comments just highlight the user unfriendlyness.
More like I invested some time to learn the system I use.
But I'm curious, which system do you suggest is so "user friendly" that everything is instantly and intuitively discoverable without resort to documentation or google whatsoever? Or are you telling me that you learnt, I presume, Linux incantations from staring at the keyboard and deep breathing?
> Am I really supposed to enter some cryptic shell command
Yes, you are. It's a standard shell command. You can even look it up on Google in 5 secs. You want every option and contingency printed on the screen or keyboard?
> I can never remember keyboard shortcuts
My rule is, if I really need a shortcut, I'll remember it because I use it so often; if I only need it sometimes, I look it up in my notes or on Google; and if I only use it once or twice, what's the use of the shortcut in the first place? I disable it (if it's on by default) and save the combination for sth I might actually use.
> Instead of buying an alternative file manager, why not just install another OS...
Yeah right, and if a fly flies through your window, I assume you also pull out the flame thrower, yes? :-D
There are a lot of options that are modified by the plist mechanism ("defaults write ..."). They tend to be little things of a very unixy character that serious nerds would like.
It makes about as much sense as changing a .login or .profile or .ssh/config or .emacs or .exrc or .Xdefaults or ... . At least it's always the same tools and the same file format.
Like you, I don't remember the screenshot shortcuts. I know vi and emacs bindings backwards and forwards, but I don't much like remembering special-purpose bindings. So I just use "Grab", the screenshot app (comes standard with OS X).
The full-screen mode is terrible. It leaves everything but your main monitor completely empty, making it essentially unusable for anyone with multiple monitors.
Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.
> Homebrew is awesome but it should be way easier to compile from source without installing Xcode.
If it was a real issue someone would have packaged up GCC or LLVM. There is absolutely nothing that prevents anyone from doing this. The truth is that nobody actually minds installing Xcode to get a compiler. Or at least the few who do don't actually care enough to do something about it.
As someone who works at a software startup where the engineers use Macs, trust me we mind when we have to dig around to find the correct Xcode installer for Snow Leopard or whatever. Just because Apple has decided Xcode 4 should be in the app store, does not mean that our developers running Snow Leopard (which has fewer bugs with our mission critical apps like vagrant, for example) should be SOL.
People who realize how stupid it is to install several gigabytes of Xcode for a C compiler also tend to get irked by other weird Apple policies, thus a significant percentage of them switch operating systems instead of packaging up GCC to try and change the Apple ecosystem.
> > In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.
> The keyboard tab in Terminal's preferences? Or switch from Emacs-like to Vim-like navigation in the terminal?
Here's some Terminal editing text:
- `alt-left / right` skips a word in either direction (these work in the entire cocoa text system)
- `esc backspace` deletes an entire word
- `ctrl-a and ctrl-e` skip to the beginning and end of the line respectively (again, entire cocoa text system)
- `ctrl-k` deletes any character from the cursor to the end of line (ditto)
Also, learning how to use these bash tricks will make your life a lot easier too:
- `!!` will repeat the previous command, and you can prefix it. Say you forgot to `sudo` something, just type `sudo !!` to repeat it.
- `!whatever` will repeat the last command in the history starting with `whatever`.
- `!$` will evaluate to the argument of the previous command. so `ls Desktop` followed by `echo !$` will echo "Desktop."
DarwinPorts/MacPorts, Fink, and Homebrew all require the OS X developer tools, so "you have to download a DVD just to be able to compile stuff from source" still applies.
fn-arrow left/fn-arrow right is a pretty pathetic substitute for actual home and end keys. I've never used a Mac for a prolonged period of time so can't speak to other points, but I am baffled at how people can do anything without those keys. When I try to debug some code on one of my coworkers' Macs I feel like I suddenly can't type anymore because of their absence, not bs'ing or exaggerating.
When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size. I saw an app a while ago that would let you control how your OSX apps are resized when you maximize them, but if I have to buy an app just to make my OS do what it should do anyway, there's something wrong.
If you're going to judge it based on your existing preconceptions, of course it's going to come up short.
Windows: The button makes the open window fill the screen.
Mac OS: The button instructs the app to make the window larger to fit the open document.
With larger and larger desktop screens (27" iMacs, 30" Cinema Displays), the old idea that you'd want the one window to fill the screen doesn't hold as often. Then came the rise of the laptop and it does hold again. So Lion gained fullscreen.
This doesn't mean it wasn't frustrating, or badly done by many programs, but I object to you describing one way as "what should happen" as if there is a standard, or as if OS X < 10.7 claims to do fullscreen but fails to. You're buying an App to make it work like another system, because you prefer that behaviour.
If you're going to judge it based on your existing preconceptions, of course it's going to come up short.
Guilty as charged. I used a Mac for about 9 months, and I never got used to it, I never stopped being frustrated by the things that were difficult, annoying, or just plain Fisher Price dumbed down by default. I'm a developer, I could (and for a lot things I did) figure stuff out, tinker with stuff, but I just wasn't that in love with the whole package, so I didn't put forth that much effort to make it my home. If I had been moving from Windows, maybe I wouldn't have had as much of a a problem making the transition, but I found that I had been so spoiled by Linux, and fallen in love with the whole idea behind it, that I just couldn't cope. Is that the fault of OSX? Surely not, it was a personal thing, but I really love Linux, and I think I'm going to stick with it.
With that being said, the hardware is stellar. If I hadn't run into so many problems trying to dual boot I might have held onto the hardware.
I share your sentiments. Me too couldn't get used to OSX even after months of trying. While, with its underlying unix philosophy, it is close to Linux, it's never quite there, and what bothers the most is the obviously intentional decision to disable all kinds of UI customizations. Put a proprietary codebase on top of that and we, as regular Linux users, feel stuck and helpless most of the time.
What I do right now, as I didn't want to refuse the company's MacBook Pro, is dual boot Debian on it. Except for the fact that I couldn't get integrated GPU to work instead of the discrete one, I haven't had any problems with them working together. Excellent OS on excellent hardware (I wouldn't call it stellar though, I have few complaints there as well).
I went from being a total Windows junkie to loving OSX since I switched over in May. No regrets. My windows desktop is left sitting, while I use my MacBook Pro all the time. I don't know exactly what you consider dumbed down, while some parts are now hidden, they can easily be found with minimum effort.
It's certainly not dumbed down compared to Windows. Shoot, you've got a full bash shell included out of the box! It only felt dumbed down (or maybe I should say "locked down, and candy coated") when compared to my Linux desktop, which gives me a huge amount of customization freedom and built in power tools. I went from Windows to Linux, then to OSX, and I missed a lot of things about Linux while not feeling like I gained anything extra. I'd take OSX over Windows any day, but at the end of the day I want to be working in Linux.
"Mac OS: The button instructs the app to make the window larger to fit the open document."
As others have pointed out, the zoom button is completely arbitrary, and doesn't simply fit the open document.
--- Examples ---
Terminal: fills the entire screen
Safari: instructs the app to fit the open document. (what happens if you have multiple tabs open? which documents gets fitted?)
iTunes: SHRINKS the entire player to a mini player (how did they determine that a "zoom" button should shrink something is beyond me)
---------
These are all apps that come with the system, so there is really no excuse for such arbitrary behavior. There are numerous other 3rd party apps (firefox, filezilla, etc) that simply fill up the screen.
I call it the Surprise Button because whenever you click it, you have no idea what's going to happen.
Basically, yes. More specifically, they could have responded to Windows's fullscreen button years ago, or consumer griping years ago, I think it most likely that they saw iPad as a success in terms of doing one fullscreen thing at a time, and they built an OS X version 'for' the 11 and 13" MacBook Air with fullscreen.
I.e. I don't think they made fullscreen primarily for imac, mac pro, or 17" mbp users, or to copy windows or Linux for feature checklist purposes.
> In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.
What? I don't think you understand how terminals work! The terminal commands (on every terminal I've used for the past 20 years) are interpreted by the server. If your terminal is connected to a unix machine then generally emacs key navigation is the default. This is true for Mac OS X. Meta-F and Meta-B go forward and backward by words. Meta-delete deletes a word. C-a (and the HOME key) will go to the beginning of a line. C-e (and the END key) will go to the end.
That being said there's a couple annoying (for powerusers) defaults in Terminal. I always use the "option is meta" setting so I can type Option-f when I mean M-f. Otherwise I have to type ESC-f which is harder for me. The other is that the naked HOME and END keys are by default bound to scrolling the terminal window and you have to press SHIFT-HOME and SHIFT-END to get Terminal to actually send the HOME and END character sequence through the terminal (same for page-up and page-down which are also stupidly backward). If you come from Linux and are used to using SHIFT-PAGE-UP for look at your scrollback then it can be annoying. But luckily those are easily fixed.
And those commands have to be interpreted by the shell (e.g., bash) and not by the terminal emulator, because power users expect the shell to jump in, in the middle of a line, and provide information -- such as in-place file globbing or variable expansion, or command completion.
The parent comment must not be used to this standard capability.
So you hate learning the "myriad of keyboard shortcuts needed to get stuff done on a Mac," but are praising the intuitiveness of "hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it?"
Well, there are a couple of subtleties that are being addressed, that maybe need to be said better.
1) Mac keyboard shortcuts are confusing and inconsistent compared to other OSes. They're not as discoverable. Maybe this is why it seems like there are more of them or that they're harder to learn.
When I say they're confusing, I mean that they use those funky characters instead of the words Ctrl, Alt or Shift. Those characters are not on the keyboard.
When I say they're not as discoverable, I mean this: The menu system in Gnome/KDE/Win underlines the letter of the accelerator key for a menu item. This is the first type of keyboard shortcut and OS X doesn't have this at all. The other type with the key-combos is also less discoverable due to the confusing characters.
When I say it's inconsistent, I mean that a shortcut does not always exist for what you want. In Gnome/KDE/Win I can always rely on the consistency of the Alt + Menu Acclerator keys.
2) The fact that you can "hold Alt and middle click anywhere...." in Linux, I think was a testament to how Apple only offers a limited feature set; not that keyboard shortcuts are bad in general.
Ah yes, OS X keyboard shortcuts sure do have bad discoverability.
I'm in Safari, I wonder how to see page source. I click the Help menu (or Cmd-?) and type in 'source'. It finds the 'View Source' menu item. I arrow down to it and not only does it open the menu containing it, but there's a big animated blue arrow pointing at the keyboard shortcut.
And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard. Not that I have to look at it much, because the shortcuts I use are mostly consistent between apps.
>And what do you know, those funky symbols are in fact printed on my keyboard.
Some of them are not— at least for my MacBook. The caret symbol is for the control key (think caret -> control), and the slanted-looking T is the option/alt key (if you look at the graphic as though it's a path, you can see the path takes an alternate route).
Control doesn't have the caret, but it isn't used nearly as much as Cmd/Alt/Shift for shortcuts (mostly reserved for further modified versions of other shortcuts, and Unixy stuff). As it happens, I do have a caret of sorts on my Control key as it's remapped on to Caps Lock ;)
I had no trouble learning and coming to like how keyboard shortcuts are done on the Mac, and that's because I didn't consider my previous environment the authoritative way to use a computer just because I used it first. (See also users obsessed with maximising every window because that was the done thing on a 15" CRT)
The US keyboard is weird. The German keyboard also has the bathtub and a symbol on the shift key (also on tab), also symbols on the enter and return keys. No caret for shift, though.
...that's pretty slick but the discoverability on Windows is still better
first..you'd have to know to think about what the feature is named...
...on Windows...you can invoke any menu by pressing ALT and then the first letter of the menu or a designated letter on a menu option (or you can use the arrows)...all windows menus get this behavior by default, in addition to separate keyboard shortcuts that can also be defined in the application
...you can get to the menus on Macs through a rather inconvenient combo CTRL-F2 (CTRL-FN-F2 on Macbooks)...but you can only arrow through commands, there are no letter shortcuts in that case.
...I like OS X, but this is one area that Windows does much better (that and multiple monitors)...
What I understand you're saying is that the keyboard shortcuts may typically be more efficient to perform in Windows. That could be true but it's a different topic from discoverability, where straight up full text search is better than collision hampered and segmented expansion of menus.
Beyond the basics (cut/copy/paste/new/save/quit/...), there's a fair chance we don't know which sub-menu the function we're searching for resides in (and shouldn't have to care).
...good point, the point I was trying to make was not so much the discoverability of the FEATURE (I do agree with your points there)...but of discoverability of the SHORTCUT to the feature, which is what you referred to as efficiency.
the fact that I (and apparently many others) learned about some OS X keyboard shortcuts through reading this thread indicates that there is still a problem with "discoverability"
Yeah, see, Mac keyboard equivalents actually predate most other OSes. So no, they're not going to change to accomodate the newcomers. option- shift- and command- arrows have been there since the 80s. Not going to change because Windows decided to do it differently.
As for discoverability, it is worse today, but historically there were no keyboard equivalents that were not in the menus (by Apple's UI guidelines), so discoverability was better on the Mac.
Um, have you ever actually used a Mac? Like, since 1987 or so?
Mac keyboard shortcuts are:
1) Not confusing at all, the common ones date back decades and are largely similar to other platforms.
2) No, they don't use "funky characters". Command is a word. Do you have difficulty recognizing what "Command-S" means for save, or "Command-P" for print, etc?
3) I beg to differ. Command, control and option are on the keyboard.
4) Just a detail, but: "Ctrl" and "Alt" are not words. Just so you know.
I tend to agree, but working out how to move a cursor around text, with various combinations of either character by character, or word by word, or to the beginning or end of the line, and either selecting or not selecting text, was pretty frustrating.
3) My keyboard has [fn][ctrl][alt][cmd][space][cmd][alt], there's no [option].
I always thought that the text shortcuts are intuitive and easy to remember. Shortcuts you are used to are always going to be easier to remember than new ones – that is always going to distort your view. I wouldn’t put to much weight on that.
You navigate text using the arrow keys on their own (characters and lines) or with one of two modifiers: Alt (words and paragraphs) and Command (lines and text fields). If you use no modifiers you are moving around one character (left, right) or line (up, down) at a time. Alt allows you to move from word to word (left, right) or paragraph to paragraph (up, down). Command navigates to the beginning and end of the line (left, right) or text field (up, down). As you can see there is a clear and straightforward hierarchy.
People are already used to using the arrow keys to navigate text. The modifier keys do nothing more than what they are supposed to do: The arrow keys still do similar stuff than before, it’s only slightly modified. This is an excellent example of picking awesome keyboard shortcuts.
You can add Shift to any of those combinations to select instead of just moving the cursor. Command-Left moves the cursor the the beginning of the line, Command-Shift-Left selects everything between the current position of the cursor and the beginning of the line.
Shift is used for selecting things everywhere, no matter the OS. OS X definitely picks the right modifier for selecting text and everything is still consistent with moving around in text. Anyone who knows how to move around in text can easily be taught how to select text: It’s exactly the same, only with Shift.
If you use Backspace and Delete (which is Fn-Backspace on keyboards without the Delete key) together with Alt or Command you can delete words or lines respectively (as you would expect).
Again, OS X remains consistent. Backspace and Delete work with exactly the same modifiers in exactly the same way as the arrow keys. This behavior is once again easy to teach.
This all seems crystal clear to me and I’m loving it very much. I think all the key combinations make intuitive sense.
I hope I could also explain why I think that OS X is so consistent and intuitive in this regard.
You do a nice job of explaining it, and I am grateful to you. Now that you lay it out it does seem a lot more consistent than I thought.
My only minor gripe (and this is cross OS, with many softwares and keyboards) is that it's harder for touch typists to use. Compare any shortcuts that require you to take your hands from the home keys with, eg, the shortcuts provided by Wordstar.
Should I upload a picture of my Macbook Pro keyboard? Because the funky characters are not on there. Just the words, Fn, Control and Alt/Option. Command is the only one that has a symbol as well as a word.
I don't think the environment is as locked down as you think.
Finder can access windows shares. Apple-shift-G lets you type in any path you want in Finder, and if you are at the command line you can do open <dir> to open a Finder window.
Ctrl-a and Ctrl-e at the prompt move the cursor to the beginning and end of the prompt, respectively. Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.
I come from a similar OS background as you, I've been using a MBP for 6 months and I love it. You just have to take the time to learn the different things with the OS, as you did when using Linux for the first time.
I will say though that I have been too nervous to upgrade to Lion from Snow Leopard.
> Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.
It's alt+leftArrow and alt+rightArrow.
Other useful ones which work in native text boxes:
cmd+leftArrow and cmd+rightArrow to move to the start and end of lines in text boxes
cmd+upArrow and cmd+downArrow to move to the very top and very bottom
ctrl+a and ctrl+e to move to the start and end of paragraphs
shift+ any of the above to move the current selection
alt+backspace and cmd+backspace to delete the previous word or to the start of the line
There are more emacs-like keyboard shortcuts in the native text boxes, like ctrl+t to transpose letters, but I don't really use them that much.
Ctrl+backspace to delete the previous word in Windows always catches me out, since it works some of the time, but other times is just inserts a control character which I then also have to delete...
> Ctrl+backspace to delete the previous word in Windows always catches me out, since it works some of the time, but other times is just inserts a control character which I then also have to delete...
This is the single thing that prevents me from using Windows.
I dual boot with Windows on my iMac and I love the general appearance of Windows 7, much more than OS X. I feel like I can just get stuff done.
But then I try to work, and things just fail... A lack of common UI controls (Cocoa, OS X's killer feature) drives me insane when ctrl+a won't work, or a text field won't spell check for me, or I can't right click a word and get the definition of the word.
I find this is my problem with the iPhone as well. I got the iPhone 4 and 4S when they first came out as they are my best option out there, but I hate them so much. Other platforms are doing much more interesting things, such as Windows Phone 7's fresh interface, or the power of Android. However, all of these platforms lack the high level of polish and vibrant ecosystems the iPhone has.
alt+left or alt+right doesn't work for me in Terminal out of the box (I usually use iTerm2 where it doesn't work either) - do you need to change any settings (such as emulation, terminal type etc) to get at that?
According to this[1] stack overflow post, the vim key bindings for move back and forward work by default (which is news to me), or you can set up the alt left and right behaviour by following the instructions here[2].
> Someone who knows readline better than me can tell you how to move between words.
In nearly every app (MS Office excluded for the most part), and in a terminal of course, Option+f/Option+b will move forward/backward one word at a time respectively.
>In OSX you can only resize a window in the bottom right corner, in Ubuntu I can resize from any corner, or I can hold Alt and middle click anywhere near a corner of a window to start resizing it. No more hunting for the resize sweetspot.
In Lion it's possible to resize from any window border.
I don't know what these other complaints are. Personally, coming from Windows & Ubuntu, I just fell in love with the way everything just works in OSX. I guess I'm not a "power user" though.
Wow, I had no idea that was possible. Many thanks! I could see this being useful for resizing my Finder window without losing the nice rectangular aspect ratio I have.
"everything just works". haha. I like your sarcasm
I hear that so often from Mac fans,... just after they get done telling me about their latest problem.
As an owner/user of 4 macs, 3 windows machines and 3 ubuntu machines my personal mac experience has had no more or less problems than my windows or ubuntu experiences.
That's the mantra we all repeat at work when somebody's Mac crashes or just generally makes life difficult in some way.
I've banished my Macbook to the corner of my office, where it will stay until the next time I go on foreign travel. For SC11, I brought along my Thinkpad X201 tablet with Debian and Stumpwm; it just works.
Lion; It doesn't claim to be a maximise button; View->Go to Folder (Cmd-Sh-g); Cmd+Arrows; The emacs key bindings everyone has used since the dawn of time
You can't be bothered to learn an environment and are angry about it. Cool.
In the default Terminal app, there are no shortcuts (at least none that I could figure out) for moving around the text I'm typing quickly, like going forward and back a whole word, or going Home or End, you have to hold down the left or right arrows for a while.
What Terminal.app has to do with cursor movement???
Anyway, redline's defaults (and Emacs') is option+f / option+b (option is meta) for words and control+a / control+e for lines.
If you asked a friend or searched Google instead of writing your problems here perhaps you would have found the solutions. You took time to learn how to use Linux and the shell, why not take some time to learn how to use OS X as well before complaining that it doesn't do what you want? It does do most of the things you mentioned, and when it doesn't it's by design.
Resizing from any side: Legitimate complaint. Fixed in Lion but this was a big annoyance until summer 2011.
Maximize: It's not a maximize button. Your expectations don't make it broken. Managing expectations of a new OS is dangerous. It's a big reason why people dislike Linux as well, and it's kind of a shame that people expect everything to behave like whatever they are used to.
Finder can access Windows shares, FTP, NTFS, HFS, etc. as well. What are you getting at with this point?
You dislike how Apple distributes their build tools. Ok. Maybe some prefer downloading an installer to running aptitude. (I prefer the package manager way as well, but it's just that: a preference.)
Finder isn't supposed to be a power tool for people who want to know what's in /usr. Hiding that stuff is the right decision. You said you enjoy the keyboard, fire up a terminal and away you go. Or run the defaults command that enables hidden files in Finder if you really need to click on hidden files all day.
Cmd-Shift-G lets you navigate to an arbitrary path in Finder. It has tab completion. You can also run `open /path/to/folder` in terminal. `open .` is often handy.
Cmd-left and Cmd-right are beginning of line and end of line navigation commands. You can also use `Ctrl-a` and `Ctrl-e`, standard Emacs shortcuts just like you're used to in the shell. Home and End are Fn-left and Fn-right if you actually wanted Home and End, which behave strangely on OS X. (They go to the beginning or end of a document without changing the position of the cursor, as Cmd-up and Cmd-down do.)
Terminal navigation shortcuts: Legitimate complaint. Because option and alt are on the same key you have to use `ESC f`, `ESC b`, etc. to navigate by word. Being a Linux geek you should know that `ESC <foo>` is equivalent to `alt-<foo>`. If you want to go to the beginning or end of line again just use `Ctrl-a` and `Ctrl-e`. (Switch caps lock to control in the Keyboard preferences for maximum convenience and comfort.)
It's not locked down or dumbed down, you just didn't take the time or effort to learn it as well as you did Linux. Maybe because you had some preconceived expectation that it was locked down and dumbed down.
Linux seems dumbed down to me after 6 years of OS X because standard keyboard shortcuts for navigation in text fields doesn't work. (Ctrl-[abefnp]) And Xmonad and the like seem primitive compared to just adding tiling goodies (Divvy, SizeUp) to a standard WM to get the best of both worlds.
Honestly it mostly just comes down to managing expectations and what you are already familiar with. Approach things with a fresh and curious child-like mind and you'll be much happier. Never stop learning, never be afraid to ask how to do something even if it seems silly. Like trying to move the damn cursor to the beginning of the line.
Despite my snarky tone I experienced a lot of the frustrations you expressed here. I just dealt with them differently and am happier for it.
And Xmonad and the like seem primitive compared to just adding
tiling goodies (Divvy, SizeUp) to a standard WM to get the best
of both worlds.
I don't use Xmonad and I don't know what you meant by "the like", but Awesome WM is vastly more powerful[1] than the OS X WM with any add-ons that I've encountered.
By "the like" I mean tiling WMs. "Primitive" was the wrong word, I should have said "intrusive".
I used tiling WMs almost exclusively for quite a while. My problem with them is that they tile by default, which is fine for some things but I find it much less intrusive to add tiling actions to a "regular" WM. So I can do things like "move this window there", "make this window occupy the left half of this display", etc. I found that I really only ever wanted a handful of these kinds of commands. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
I'm afraid it would with such a plugin/script on Ubuntu Unity as the menu associated with each of the tiled windows would appear in the top bar of the screen, but I intend to play with this in Unity 2d...
It's not 1990 anymore. All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions. At the very least, one should offer a way for the Windows user to discover what the new conventions are, rather than having to Google and find websites that other people have made when they made the same transition.
What makes this worse is that every windowing system appears to use different terminology for its UI widgets and behaviors. Sticking to a standard terminology (even if it's Windows' terminology) would make things much easier for a convert to figure out how make their machine do what they need it to do.
> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.
That sounds like the worst way to innovate. I'm not saying that Apple's way is innovative but I say we are all better off if OS manufacturers try difference things to come up with better way of presenting UI.
For example, if apple followed the Window's way of displaying every single window in its Dock, then application based taskbar in Windows 7 would have never come about.
Trying different things should never be criticized for just being different. If that different way of doing things is bad, criticize it but don't point finger just because it's different.
> All operating systems manufacturers need to understand that the vast majority of users have used Windows and are used to Windows' UI conventions.
Umm, no. I've always tried to avoid windows and it's unbelievably annoying UI conventions. Well, at least until Win XP the last windows version I have used.
And after using Linux almost exclusively for 14 years OS X feels great. And the best part is: I don't feel like I have to spend days and days trying to figure out which of the myriad of available settings I have to change to feel at home.
And the missing maximize button: Big deal. So I have to pull some windows by hand to the size I want them to have. Most applications save the last window state.
They have of course spurned your counsel about catering to windows users throughout the last decade, all the way from "close the stores and give the money back to the shareholders" to somewhere in the neighborhood of the most successful company ever. All the while thinking it is still 1990 (the significance of which is a little hazy.)
If they didn't follow this advice when they were on life support, what would possess them to follow it now? It's hard to imagine that one could overlook the evidence (here, and everywhere) that if success is the goal, mimicking windows should be closer to a prohibition than a mandate.
It's easier to have more windows on the screen, but it's still no easier to manage them. It's not a problem of pixels, but of cognitive load. For many people simply having more windows visible is distracting, even if those windows are in the background and can be ignored. Its the same reason that people would prefer a clean desk, with only one or a few things on it than one that has lots of things on it. A cluttered desk, no matter how well it's organized, is still harder to manage than a clean desk. A cluttered monitor is the same.
There is probably more work to do out the box to change this perception though. OSX needs to introduce the user to this when they first open an app then make it dead simple to control.
OS X doesn’t have some features you would like it to have or you need. Looking at the features you are missing it doesn’t seem like they are central for most users. If a feature is not there you simply can’t use the OS. That’s fair enough. It just doesn’t seem like that’s really a problem OS X has.
Especially when you are coming from a different background it also can be hard to understand when an OS is doing something differently. This has nothing to do with it being better or worse, it’s just different.
Alt-Arrows will move you from word to word in Terminal (and also in every other text field), Ctrl-A and Ctrl-E will move you to the beginning and end of the line. That second set of shortcuts sucks because it isn’t consistent with the whole rest of the OS where Cmd-Arrows will move you to the beginning and end of lines and texts (depending on the direction of arrow you pick). As I said, those shortcuts work in every text field and you can mix them up with Backspace or Shift to delete or select whole words or lines. Many other vi keybindings work wherever you encounter text in OS X.
Shift-Cmd-G will allow you to type a path in Finder, just like in Terminal Tab autocompletes.
The green zoom button sucks and Apple should remove it. It is not supposed to maximize (so those 99% of all apps were doing it right), it usually tries to remove scrollbars (i.e. it grows or shrinks the window until there is no more space or until there are no more scrollbars). Some apps inconsistently treat it like a maximize button. Lion introduced fullscreen apps and the new fullscreen button should be treated as an equivalent (more or less) to Windows’ maximize button.
Alt-Arrows - is that a Lion thing? Opening up a stock iterm, and hitting...
hrm... well "alt" is above the 'option' label, so I'm not sure how to invoke that. option arrows don't move by word. fn+option (which I'd assume give me 'alt' mode) doesn't work. What's the magic invocation to make that happen? Or is it Lion only? (snow leopard here).
I’m sorry, the German keyboard confused me – there the option key is labeled alt. You can replace every Alt in my comment with Option.
I’m not sure whether that’s new (I think other shortcuts for moving from word to word were also already commented on around here) but when I fire up Terminal in Lion I can move from word to word by pressing Option-Arrow-left or Option-Arrow-right.
Hrm. Doesn't work here (US snow leopard MBP early 2011), and I'm pretty sure it's not worked on earlier versions.
Some other comments indicated "esc/b" and "esc/f", and those seem to work, but are horribly unintuitive and difficult to type. Will need to map them. I've lived X years without that ability, so another few minutes won't hurt :)
iTerm != Terminal. The alt-arrows works in Lion's Terminal; I just checked (although I use iTerm, where it doesn't work). iTerm appears to be the only app that doesn't respond to ctrl/alt-arrows. I use them quite frequently, and it always trips me up that iTerm works differently than essentially every other app.
That's because alt-arrow isn't a ANSI control sequence. What should it map to? You can see what your terminal is sending with this command:
stty -icanon -echo; od -c
Hit your key sequence then hit return a bunch of times until the line comes out. You'll see some sort of ESC sequence.
When done, control-c then type "stty sane" (it will not echo).
For iTerm I get "\e[1;9D". Terminal, interestingly is giving me "\e\eD". When I turn off my "Use option as meta key" preference in Terminal it gives me "\eD". Which is the same as plain left arrow.
Also, neither of those escape sequences does anything in bash for me.
You're right, in that they're not the same - I use the terms interchangeably sometimes and shouldn't. That said, my snow leaopard Terminal doesn't have those keystrokes working either. :/
I typically use iterm2 now, and I mapped option/left and option/right to ESC-b and ESC-f, and all is well for me. Hope that helps someone else.
if in terminal options you select "use option as meta key" [1], then option-b and option-f move forward / backward on words as normal in bash. You can also remap caps-local to control.
This is exactly my experience of trying to use OS X, thanks for putting it into words! The Home and End thing is by far the most annoying one (for me, but only because it's always the first one I run into whenever I find myself having to use a Mac).
It's so ridiculous that there's this mentality (everywhere) that "power users" are bad people whose needs always contradict those good, "average" users. That mythical "average" users are more noble a target audience than "power" users and so software should be made to ignore the needs of "power" users, because that's what's required to satisfy the needs of "average" users. It's nonsense and doesn't help anybody.
Has it occurred to you that being a "power user" on one platform doesn't necessarily translate to another or that another platform may be signifantly different to what you are used to? This isn't a case of OS X being different for the sake of being esoteric or being aimed at the 'average' user; rather these shortcuts have existed in Mac OS since at least the early 1980's.
Holding alt and arrow keys will move the cursor to the next word (something I miss in every other OS). Holding command and the arrow keys is like the home and end keys. Also if you're on the last line anyway just press down arrow to move cursor to after the last character (also something I miss in other environments). Combine these with shift key to do selections.
I'm very happy OS X, though not perfect, is the way it is.
Many switchers expect OS X to behave like their old OS's. It's like they get imprinted on the first OS they used and can't move on.
They just don't "get it". Maybe OSX is too visual for them and they don't understand the trade-offs made to keep it simple and consistent. They don't see the 30+ years of tradition in the UI.
On top of that, Apple stupidly doesn't have a manual for learning the cool tricks - like holding down the command key when you click on a window title in the Finder to see your path history.
Maybe you and O'Reilly need one of the many O'Reilly books on the subject. This one is one of my favorite.
By the way, apt-get is an inteface for APT, and one of many, so you should have stated that Homebrew beats APT. And of course, you wouldn't have needed to substantiate that claim either, because you are, after all, ricardobeat.
I'm not hating on your preferences, but mac laptops
are competitively priced. There's no way you got
equivalent hardware for $1k less.
Lenovo offers sales, coupons, and other deals. Signing up for deal alerts at sites like SlickDeals and FatWallet can result in huge savings. The last ThinkPad I bought was nearly 60% under retail.
Many Mac users seem to be unaware that products can be sold for less than retail price. I can understand not wanting to waste time searching for deals, but signing up for a deal alert for the words "Lenovo", "ThinkPad" or whatever takes mere seconds.
Huh, thanks, I had no idea such large discounts were available for lenovo hardware.
I used to pay attention to fatwallet but I removed all that stuff from my life because I felt like I was buying a ton of crap I didn't really want or need, just because DEAL DEAL DEAL was arriving in my inbox / rss all the time...
Having had a "I really am starting to dislike Mac OS X, but Windows 8 looks pretty good!" revelation, I started to use Windows 7. I came back after about a week and told Mac OS X I'd never leave it again. I reinstalled Windows 7 about 2 or 3 times, lots of weird, inexplicable errors, one of which required a Microsoft FixIt program to run as there were some "corrupt registry keys". Gosh, it was not good.
That said, I agree that Mac OS X is not getting better. It needs to change. Everything since about 10.3 to today has been fairly incremental, and OS X is showing its age (ever wonder why Apple never changed to OS XI? It's because they're all the same...).
It's also showing that it doesn't have any real push at Cupertino to get better. No-one is driving OS X. Hardware is being driven by Johny Ive, software was arguably being pushed by Jobs, but it's clear that he was only interested in iOS for years. I'd note that iOS is going the same way as Mac OS X: stagnating in the face of competition that is doing more interesting things (amazingly, that competition is Microsoft!).
I feel like Apple is a company that rests on its laurels until the market practically forces it to change. The change that's coming for Mac OS X is that it will go away altogether. I think Steve hated it, and was waiting for the time when they could sell you iOS only. The only reason they keep Mac OS X around is for developers, and Apple aren't exactly known for making them happy.
Microsoft's dual-paradigm Windows 8 shows it's not that crazy. I think Mac OS X has an expiry date of about 5 years from now.
I was trying to install Star Wars: The Old Republic, and the Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable flat-out refused to install die to "Error 1365" (if I remember my error codes right). Required a Microsoft FixIt to fix the registry keys.
People like to blame everything on Windows, including "I dropped my laptop down the stairs and now it doesn't work right" type stuff. I think if Microsoft had replaced the blue screen with a message that instead said "Your $PC-MAKER computer is a piece of crap, buy a $OTHER-PC instead." nobody would actually complain about Windows.
[a general comment, not directly related to lewisham's problem.]
In some regards, they did. The crash reports from Windows XP indicated that around 20% of all OS crashes originated in the display driver (1). Vista introduced a new display driver model. One of its features is that the OS will now survive a driver crash. The screen just goes blank for a few seconds.
I've never installed SW:tOR on a Mac, so I can't say for sure, but I've never corrupted my operating system by installing an application before. That kind of bullshit actually is the fault of the OS.
The guy does't sound like an advanced user and may be using a sledgehammer to pound in a nail. He's not complaining of bluescreens, he's complaining of corrupt registry keys, which can do as little as preventing the one app from installing the way he wants.
Reinstalling Windows is a sledgehammer here. Looking up his error code, all he needed to do was reregister the library. If he's not an advanced user and so doesn't feel comfortable using the CLI, then it's not surprising a tool would be used. But reinstalling Windows to resolve this is like rebooting your computer because you want to turn caps lock off.
The technology has existed for decades to install applications without having to make potentially dangerous alterations to systemwide shared state. There's only so much you can blame on app developers. In the year 2011, shipping an OS that allows an application to corrupt the registry is just as stupid, if not stupider, than shipping an OS that allows the application to grab or generate arbitrary pointers into memory allocated to other processes.
No one should have to know what "reregister the library" even means.
The problem here is that you think 'corrupted registry keys' means that the computer is unusable. A corrupted registry key just means that a setting hasn't been saved right - it could be as trivial as whether an app starts fullscreen or windowed.
The GP's statement did not say that the system was faulty, just that he was experiencing errors and he reinstalled. On enquiry, they weren't system errors, but errors around the installation of a program, for which he sledgehammered the result. You don't need the "Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable" to run Windows, or a great many things on windows. It wasn't the operating system blue-screening.
No one should have to know what "reregister the library" even means.
We're in 2011, no-one should have to know what 'engine oil change' means either, but someone still has to know how to do it.
> The problem here is that you think 'corrupted registry keys' means that the computer is unusable.
Well, this guy's computer threw errors when he tried to install an app. "Unusable", no, just shitty. I would call that broken, but as you demonstrate, Windows apologists have always had lower standards.
> We're in 2011, no-one should have to know what 'engine oil change' means either, but someone still has to know how to do it.
That wouldn't be a very good argument if there was only one carmaker that made a car that required oil changes, while every other carmaker in the world had been selling perfectly functional no-oil-change-required cars since the 1990's.
You'll also notice I never said I reinstalled because of the error I was having (I eventually found a FixIt to do it), but the reinstalls were for other things.
The corrupted registry is just indicative of a problem which really should not happen.
a) If a corrupted registry key is stopping something happening, then why doesn't it take any action to try and resolve it?
b) If an error code has a documented fix online, why was I not taken to it, or, even better, the fix placed in the distributable?
c) Why should I have to remember random error codes at all? Why doesn't it give me an error message I can understand and at least try and take some action on?
What I find a bit odd about this whole thread is that you seem to take issue with the idea that one of Microsoft's own libraries not working means the OS is otherwise fine. Why not take the view that it's a library that's not distributed with the main install, but is a part of Windows? The Visual C++ libraries are used all the time. I feel like if we were talking about Ubuntu, where the packages are always separated, we wouldn't be drawing this invisible line between what is and isn't the OS.
At the risk of showing myself to be the inexperienced user that I am, I have had the same problem but have not yet been able to resolve it. Lewisham, please could you tell me how/where you found the fixit? Thanks so much.
You got unlucky. I suspect that on a different occasion with a different machine you'd never encounter anything that required reinstalling or FixIt or anything like that.
There may be a good point hiding there, but I don't think he made it particularly well. He argues that OS X is getting worse.
His specific complaint was that he couldn't find the Library folder to delete his mail. Two things to keep in mind: first off, people who set up Mail extremely rarely will want to delete their email. So on the list of use cases to optimize for, that one lives near the bottom of the ladder. Secondly, the Library folder is, for all intents and purposes, something that should have been hidden to begin with. The kind of stuff that goes into a Library folder goes into hidden directories on other OSes anyway (think Application Settings on Windows, or .config, .gnome2, .kde on Linux). The fact that Apple only just now got around to hiding a folder that did nothing but clutter up the home directory for most users is significantly more surprising than the fact that it's hidden.
There was another complaint, which was that upon putting the relevant files in the Trash, attempting to empty it yielded file in use errors. That is indeed a problem, but he complains that he can't skip all of them, and that this is an old issue. So how this is related to OS X getting worse is unclear. It's definitely extremely annoying, but then I also don't think people find themselves deleting thousands of files of which several are in use very often. That said, one wonders what was using those files (unless he'd forgotten to quit Mail, but I doubt that).
Basically, “the latest frustration”, his leading example of something that is “worse in Lion than in Snow Leopard”, seems to not be a very good example at all. What's missing are the ”so many [other] things”. I want to hear them, because I haven't found too many, and I think it would be interesting to see what others genuinely think is worse. Some disagree with the changes in Spaces, for example, which is understandable. What else?
I was left wondering why didn't he just export his mailbox. Or add his GMail account to Mail.app and just drag and drop his old inbox into his new Google inbox. There is absolutely no 'lock-in' with Apple's Mail client.
The strangest part was the line about how there were 'many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard.' There was hardly anything different about Snow Leopard from a user's perspective, the things that did change were pretty hard to complain about (smaller application file sizes, Microsoft Exchange support, and um... what else was there?). From a developer's perspective, Snow Leopard was a vast improvement. Just about the only 'bad' thing about it was the end of the line for the PPC.
Emotions about Apple run so high, it's hard not to think of this as trashing one product (OS X) because of negative feelings about mostly unrelated products (iOS, the App Store, the Apple brand in general).
Absolutely. I think people disliked the move away from the more “natural” exposé window sizing in SL vs Leopard. SL went with the equal-sized boxes approach. But that was one of the very few changes.
Overally I don't consider 10.7 being worse than 10.6, I'm ignoring Mission Control stuffs as I was ignoring Exposé. But there is one thing I find it maddening above all is the settings and behavior of Terminal.app, I understand _nothing_, this is insane. The behavior of Terminal.app is insane, it's even harder to explain since I fail to understand its logic.
Edit: Wow I just put my shell command /bin/zsh and the default behavior seems to fit my needs without reading all the options. It closes all the tabs when I quit, it doesn't keep a kind of useless history displayed when I start a new session, the theme thing works right away. Thanks, I will be using it from now on.
I'm somewhat of a new mac user, so I can't speak historically, but I will say that lion was quite a downgrade. It broke things that were previously working fine (my network drivers and my dev tools), removed useful features (rosetta), and really didn't add anything new that I care about. I never use the app store; I dislike mission control; really the only thing I actually like is the better window resizing.
I'm very new to Mac I just got a Macbook about two months ago it's my first ever apple computer. I got it to become familiar with it since I like to be familiar it and other operating systems.
My first impression after using Linux as my primary OS for the last ten plus years is OS X is very Linux-like in behaviour.
But I feel like I am in a glossy, trendy prison with a guard constantly next to me. Everything works well because it was all made by Apple or at least with hardware it was hand-picked by Apple to work with their OS. If Linux or Windows made a computer and the hardware was specifically hand-picked for each OS version I'm sure it also would run as smooth and be as glossy as OS X.
Rebooting after software updates was alien to me (use Ksplice on Linux) but I figured OS X was BSD/Unix based and never expected so many reboots for simple things.
I never use the App store either because I don't see why I need to enter my credit card information to update a free app.
Plus the lack of real separate delete and backspace keys is driving me crazy! (yes I know fn+delete is Win/Linux "delete")
On Apple's full size USB keyboards you have a separate delete and backspace key. Both still called delete, but they do the same task as on other machines.
As for rebooting, that is slowly going away, only for major updates that modify libraries that may currently be in use by applications is it still required, mainly to be sure that those apps start using the updated version rather than keeping the old one around. With Lion's support for going back to a previous state upon logging in that has become almost seamless, my windows are back in the same location after a reboot as they were before the reboot.
Broadcom may make Tim Cook happier, but Atheros is more the "Steve" of wifi chips. However, the 2007 MBP uses Atheros - yours is actually a different issue.
I actually made myself a Broadcom airport card, for less than $20 and it's faultless. Atheros cards have always worked great for me too.
The only time I've ever had WiFi problems is under really really old versions of Ubuntu on a ThinkPad.
I suspect a lot of problems are caused by interference, or really densely populated areas. Even out here in the boonies of North Houston, there are 8 - 10 WiFi networks visible, neighbors etc.
As someone else mentioned, it constantly drops the builtin wifi now. I think what makes it somewhat funny is that this is the kind of thing that I'd expect and live with on windows or linux, but on mac with the whole hardware-software integration thing I would expect better. Plus, since they've basically taken driver management out of my hands, there doesn't seem to be much I can do to fix it myself. It's minor, but irritating.
The dev tools thing is that they seemed to have moved the libraries and sdk's around, or outright removed them (I'm not sure). I'm mostly doing python development, and I used to just be able to run "pip install SomePackage" and it would just work. Now I find that almost everything fails to compile, and most of the recommended fixes (installing the official interpreter and older or newer versions of xcode for gcc) haven't really done anything to alleviate the problem. I /could/ go and really track down the exact issues, of course, but that sort of thing is time intensive so I find now that I just reboot into windows when some random package won't work for me.
Re: "maximize" button that is being complained about in this thread. It's not a maximize button, it's a zoom button, and while I don't like its behavior, it's always been this way in OS X. From the current HIG:
Your application determines the initial size and position of a window, which is called the standard state. If the user changes a window’s size or location by at least 7 points, the new size and location is the called the user state. The user can toggle between the standard state and the user state by clicking the zoom button in the title bar. Follow the guidelines in this section so that users can have the zoom experience they expect.
Choose a standard state that is best suited for the tasks your app enables. A document window, for example, should show as much as possible of the document’s content. Don’t assume that the standard state should be as large as the current display permits; instead, determine a size that makes it convenient for users to use your app. If appropriate, you can allow users to take some app windows full screen if they want more space.
Adjust the standard state when appropriate. The user can’t change the standard state that defines a window’s initial position and size, but your app can do so, based on other settings. For example, a word processor might define a standard that accommodates the display of a document whose width is specified in the Page Setup dialog.
Respond appropriately when the user zooms. When the user zooms a window that is in the user state, your app should make sure that size defined by the standard state is appropriate in the current context. Specifically, move the window as little as possible to make it the standard size, while at the same time keeping the entire window on the screen. The zoom button should not cause the window to fill the entire screen unless that was the last state the user set.
If the user zooms a window in a multidisplay system, the standard state should be on the display that contains the largest portion of the window, not necessarily on the display that contains the menu bar. This means that if the user moves a window between displays, the window’s position in the standard state could be on different displays at different times. The standard state for any window must always be fully contained on a single display.
Don’t allow a zoomed window to overlap the Dock. You always want to make sure that users have full use of both your windows and the Dock. For more information about the Dock, see “The Dock.”
Who cares about the justification. The major problem with it is that the behaviour is unpredictable. You have no idea what is going to happen when you push that button for a given app. In some apps, they'll go full screen. A browser might resize to fit the current web page. iTunes actually shrinks down to a mini control window.
So now in order to use this button if a useful manner the user has to remember exactly what it does for any given application.
i tend not to use it for this very reason. i've wished, on more than one occasion, that a user could customize this action to be a "maximize vertically", as one could in gnome2. maybe i'm one of the few who actually used this, as it seems to have been phased out in gnome3. but i found it very useful.
Yeah, over the years Mac OS has increasingly offered functionality that was once a separate utility to install, MacDivvy is one of the few utilities left I install separately.
One of Divvy's coolest features is you can build preset window positions and attach them to keyboard chords. So for me, cmd-shift-space brings up divvy then hitting 1 makes the app fill the window, 2 is upper left 2/3 of the screen, 3 is upper right 2/3 of the screen, etc -- I have 7 or 8 presets. Full keyboard control of window position is awesome. It's the best $13 I've ever spent.
retailmenot also claims a $20% code, so that will knock some money off. But I happily paid retail and I use it 100 times a day. It's also particularly helpful if you use an external monitor at your desk and regularly resize windows as you attach or detach the monitor.
You're not the only one to use vertical maximization. I really liked being able to middle-click the maximize button for vertical, or right-click for horizontal. It seems that's no longer the case in Gnome-3-hacked-to-look-like-Gnome-2-in-Ubuntu-11.10. I suppose it's replaced by Windows 7-style border dragging, but that's less flexible as you can only do maximize, left half, or right half.
Windows 7 actually supports explicit vertical maximization; dragging the top of a window to the top of the screen will maximize the app vertically but leave its width unchanged.
I've got that action keybound to alt-space on my desktop.
Which would be WindowMaker.
Key benefits: virtually no development, Steve Jobs designed it, but for engineers on UNIX (well, NeXT), not idiots, and it's ~20 years old, so it's balazzzzzingly fucking fast on modern HW.
Stays the fuck out of my face, lets me get shit done.
When I first saw a fully customized WindowMaker in 2002, I thought, "Wow, HollywoodOS does exist!" Back when Linux used to come with several functional desktops, AfterStep and WindowMaker (both clones of NeXTStep) were my favorite, followed by Enlightenment (the only place I've ever seen window buttons on the side of the window).
I've played with a lot of desktops. twm, fvwm, fvwm2, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, icewm, various *boxes, GNOME and KDE through the ages, and XFCE4.
The latter is probably the closest to a replacement to WindowMaker that I've found, but it has two serious deficits:
1: No "raise on circulate" (with window contents visible) when you're alt-tab circulating through windows. Makes it really hard to find what you're looking for.
2: No pinnable window list. In WindowMaker, any arbitrary menu (or sub-menu) may be pinned to the root window. F11 (or middle mouse on root) brings up a menu of all open windows (the windowlist), which can be navigated (arrow keys or mouse), and if pinned, stays persistent while you hunt down the particular window you're looking for. Very useful when needed.
I’m using Gnome 3.2 on Debian Sid and vertical/horizontal maximization is still there.
To define shorcuts: Go to Settings, Keyboard, Shortcuts, Windows, and set your shortcuts.
To change the behaviour of middle-clicking or right-clicking on the title bar, install gnome-tweak-took, run gnome-tweak-tool, and go to the Windows section.
Gnome shell on Ubuntu is really misleading. On Fedora the support for it is first class so it works wonderfully, out of the box, including features like this.
(I like Unity too, but it needs work on things like multiple monitor support)
because they've come from Windows where that is the behaviour. Much like using ctrl or cmd as a modifier - when you become accustomed to one, the other takes some getting used to.
I know a lot of people who are more familiar with Mac than Windows and still don't know what that button does and simply ignores it. Along with the other small oval button that's there in pre-Lion.
You would have a point there, except that the zoom button, as I believe it's called, behaves differently in different applications.
An example, in some browsers clicking zoom will zoom to the page width, however in iTunes clicking zoom shrinks you to the miniplayer.
The different behaviours are confusing and difficult to remember, and not only goes against user expectations but isn't user-configurable.
How is this an argument? If users expect a button to do a certain thing then that is what the button should do. Where the behavior was learned is irrelevant.
How is THAT an argument? Different users will obviously expect different things.
The green button in almost every case just resizes the window to the optimal size. Whereas the maximise button simply wastes most of your screen estate (which, bizarrely, many Windows users think is actually taking advantage of their large displays, whereas its really doing the opposite).
6 paragraphs, complete with 7 points, multiple states, and not messing with the almighty Dock. No wonder Apple can't figure out window management, and is resorting to the "Maximize everything!" approach.
I would say a more accurate name would be the "fit window to content" button, as that is what it does.
If you're looking at a document in Pages, clicking that button will fit the window to the document, not wasting any screen space with blank unused area, but also not obscuring any of the document (screen space permitting).
The problem is that some third party applications ignore this and just implement Windows-style "maximise" behaviour. In addition, for some applications the 'content' area is likely to be larger than the screen (see Logic and Final Cut), so maximising actually makes sense.
What I imagine Apple's designers were considering is whether "maximise" behaviour actually makes sense. What are you gaining when you maximise a window? For applications such as Word, you're just filling the screen up with empty grey space on either side of the document. For most web pages, the content will appear within ~1000 pixels of horizontal space, with any additional space being wasted (or worse, the page has liquid resizing text, resulting in hard-to-read loooooooooooong lines when the window is maximised).
One argument may be that maximising a window blocks out distractions, but surely something like a full screen specific mode would be more appropriate for such a situation.
Ultimately I think that the problem is that users already have an expectation of what that button does; it is another casualty of the thoughtless interaction design that Windows has normalised to the general computer-using public.
For those of you who dislike the green button's behavior, I'd highly recommend the tiny app Right Zoom: http://m.lifehacker.com/5240827/rightzoom-makes-the-os-x-max.... It makes the green button maximize windows to the full screen size. More importantly for me, it gives a keyboard shortcut (CMD-ALT-E) for maximising a window. It's one of the few modifications I'd hate to be without.
I like to refer to the zoom button as the optimize button. I find that it helps people understand its function more than zoom (which makes me think enlarge, full screen).
It's interesting to juxtapose your excerpt from the HIG with megamark16's comment below ("When I click the Maximize button on OSX, it doesn't actually maximize the window 99% of the time, it just picks a seemingly random size.")
What this should tell us is that a UI strategy can be "optimal" -- in the sense that the HIG passage you quoted likely emerged from a lot of intense debate between some very bright, motivated people at Apple -- yet still unintuitive and confusing to users who weren't sitting on the committee that came up with it.
If we accept Einstein's dictum that things should be as simple as possible but no simpler, then it's very hard to defend the byzantine "Zoom" button in OS X. A sufficiently-complex model may indeed appear to be a random process to someone who sees only the model's behavior.
Adherence to convention is important, but so is quality documentation. I'd argue each of those virtues are on the downswing right now. Lots of new devs, faster platform feature additions, Apple failing to lead by example...pick three and add three of your own.
TL;DR: Put thorough doc under the Help menu. Every time.
Someone mentioned Photobooth hotkey weirdness below. There's definitely a (low, low) threshold at which the presence of mystery-hotkey functionality moves from "easter eggs yay!" to "your doc sucks." Dogcow moof was all the easter egg I needed, really.
The "apps should be obvious from first launch" maxim has had awful consequences here. Are people thinking "if it needs doc I did it wrong"? Because hey kids, it needs doc whether you think it's obvious or not.
Curious whether you'd consider this to be evidence of platform doc erosion:
I develop a pretty simple Mac application and market it through the MAS. It ships with thorough instructions that are available through the standard Help menu.
Aside from the odd feature request, the only question I ever hear from users (maybe 1% of them?) is: "I launched your app and it doesn't seem to be working at all. I went to your website and there's no PDF user manual to be found. Is it broken?"
My responses to that have morphed over time into a very polite text wrapper around a screenshot of the Help menu.
Are these isolated cases of people just not thinking to look for help under the Help menu, or has the overall quality of content under the Help menu declined to the point where a subset of users just never expect useful information to be there?
That's one of the things I hate in OS X: many features are there, but hidden until you press some modifier key. Hold shift to maximize. Hold option while pasting to move a file instead of copying. Hold Cmd+Shift+. to see hidden files, and so on. That's the opposite of user-friendly.
The worst example of this tendency? Photobooth. You can press shift and alt to disable the flash and the delay (resp.), but there's no hint of this feature anywhere. I think it's not even in the help or in any documentation.
This type of thing is my biggest complaint with OSX.
I've been using OSX as my main desktop OS for about a year now, and it's unbelievable how many simple customizations require third party products. To make it worse, a lot of them cost money.
Coming from Debian and Fluxbox I'm used to almost any possible configuration or customization being possible via /etc, the files in ~/.fluxbox/, or utilities installed using synaptic.
Thanks for the tip! I didn't know about RightZoom.
Here are some little known Mac utilities I like:
* MutableCode's Breakaway let's you configure separate audio volumes (including silence) for with and without headphones.
* Stereopsis' Flux adjusts your display's color temperature to match the type of lighting in your room (e.g. daylight, halogen, fluorescent) to avoid the blindly blue glare in a dark room.
Don't really see why this is big news. First I don't agree that the progressive versions of OS X are getting worse, but this is entirely subjective (for you they might be getting worse, I can't say). Second, based on the fact that this is largely a subjective opinion, given your workflow is not my workflow, does it really matter what Tim thinks about OS X? This is nothing but a rant. A very sparse rant at that.
FWIW, if he wants to back up his mail before deleting it, the supported way to do it would be to select the mailbox in Mail.app itself and select Export Mailbox…
By hiding the Library folder, Apple isn't trying to be hostile: most users never need to access anything in this folder. Users who are advanced enough to be grubbing around inside the Library should also be advanced enough to know that you can easily get to it via command-shift-g "~/Library". Obviously it also shows up in the Terminal. Apple's merely hidden it from view inside the Finder.
I'm using OS X right now but I really hate all OSs at this point.
OS X is a usability nightmare for me, slowing me down even after many years of using it and trying to adapt to its ways. Lion is buggy on top of that (never ending wifi troubles).
Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.
And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.
But ranting about this is probably pointless. There will not be a new OS any time soon. It's just too difficult even for the largest corporations to start from scratch.
Got to agree ... every OS these days seems to annoy me in huge ways. I was surprised after I moved to a Mac that it had huge usability issues and even a lot of basic bugs. For some reason I always just accepted that Apple nailed usability but OSX (Snow Leopard) was annoying as hell. I miss so much the standard ability to navigate menus with hotkeys in Windows. I'm forced to use the mouse for a huge number of things that I never had to in Windows.
But then in Windows there are an almost equally number of annoying things, the primary being the lack of a Unix-like environment by default. I end up going with Cygwin but that has all its own issues.
Then Linux is just a neverending pita with driver issues, crappy versions of things like Skype, no possibility of MS Office, etc.
In the end I don't particularly care what OS I use because I know each and every one is just going to require me to customise the crap out of it before I'm happy (I will say for Windows and Linux that I nearly always end up getting there, so far with OSX I'm not and I'm not optimistic about the future with the direction Apple is moving).
Two things have made the Mac a little more comfortable for me recently. One is an OS extension/plugin called Witch. It allows you to switch between all open windows in MRU order the same way Alt+Tab does on Linux and Windows.
The other one is to enable "All Controls" on the keyboard shortcut preferences panel. That allows you to use the tab key to move between active buttons in confirmation dialogs like "do you want to save changes?".
> Linux has huge driver issues and the package managers make me think like a data center sysadmin rather than the sole user of a dev workstation that I am.
Ubuntu was actually like the first desktop OS with an "app store," and Linux in general has taken all the hardware I've thrown at it with gusto. For instance, I have a USB Wi-Fi dongle. Windows 7 x64 couldn't use it, but all recent version of Linux have done just fine.
> And Windows is horrible as a development platform unless you stay slavishly within Microsoft's overpriced ecosystem.
Windows is fine for development. It may not have all the Unix-y tools, but it does have most of them. Just this week it even got a great Node.js port, in fact. Not to mention it probably has more IDEs and development environments than any other OS... I don't understand your complaints of it.
I'm always running Linux on some systems and it works very well on servers. But on all the laptops I owned in recent years (MacBook, Acer, Dell, Toshiba) Linux was a hot, noisy battery hog. I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about powertop, CPU states, generations of power management daemons and kernel modules, USB drivers and whatnot. I got a lot of things to work but it has never worked nearly as well as Windows on the same machine. Sleep/resume is also extremely spotty.
Recently I made a half hearted attempt to install Ubuntu on my iMac. I got nothing but a blank screen after booting up the installation CD.
If you don't have any issues with Windows as a dev platform I can only assume that you don't work in C/C++ much or your code targets only Windows. And if Windows really got a great node.js port only this week you're making my point for me.
Tim has issues with one application, but blames the entire operating system. Is this fair? Further, the trash bin problem of not having an "Ignore All" button has always been around. That does not mean the operating system is becoming worse, just that an age old frustration (albeit a very obscure one) is still around.
I have some issues with Lion, but they are grounded primarily in my complete satisfaction with Snow Leopard and lack of desire to change (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).
When Tim says "there were many things worse in Snow Leopard than in Leopard," I cannot recall a single one. In fact, the Snow Leopard release was undoubtedly a very well received one.
Reading his rant, I just couldn't understand why he wouldn't simply fire up the terminal and issue a quick 'sudo rm -rf /path/to/mail/*' command. Deleting huge numbers of recently used files with the trash has always been hit-or-miss. This is Tim O'Reilly we're talking about here; he should know better.
The problem is not only the absence of "Ignore All", but the fact that Lion's applications have some strange bug with opening files and not closing them. Snow Leopard had it too with built-in screenshot tool (or Preview, I don't remember exactly).
These threads follow a common pattern. Someone makes a list of things they dislike about an OS. That's not interesting, so they'll include a bit of a rant. Other people will agree, and add their own annoyances.
Then a bunch of people will pop up and explain how to achieve most of the things that are complained about; or explain that they're not problems but features. (The green pseudo-maximise being my most frustrating example.)
What people seem to miss is that discoverability is lousy in OSs. HN isn't read by stupid people who are un-used to tech. So why are what should be simple features either hard to find, or not present? Why do HN readers struggle with simple aspects of modern OSs? Apple (rightly, IMO) gets a lot of praise for usability. MS spent a lot of money on usability testing. Both of them have some awful awful things going on.
My example of a hard to find feature: In windows XP when you copy many files from one directory into another directory you'll get a dialog saying "The folder already contains" etc, with 4 options, [YES][YES TO ALL][NO][CANCEL]. There was a secret option of [NO TO ALL] if you held shift and clicked no.
Makes sense. They should totally start over because he can't figure out the way to delete mail. Or how to use Terminal to fix if after he messed it up.
I use Windows as my primary UI, but also use ubuntu and OSX daily in virtual machines. I switch between visual studio, eclipse, and XCode constantly.
I still prefer the windows UI to the others. Ubuntu, especially Unity feels always like a step behind the windows UI. In the latest release the taskbar won't stick, they took away the start menu, and menus are stuck at the top of the screen like osx.
I like in windows how I can drag the window to the side or the screen and it expands to fill just the half. Of if I drag the border to the top it will auto-expand the window vertically.
In OSX the max/minimize buttons are too small. And the task bar seems more visually appealing than practical (in windows it fills the whole bottom.) Also the download/install software process, it feels weird. Download a file, have it come up in some jump list, then mount it to the desktop where's there's usually 2 icons one saying to drag the other somewhere. Package management seems more straight forward in windows vs osx/linux. I do like XCode 4 though, I think how it works with tabs is much better.
Package management in Windows ... surely you must be joking.
Having an all encompassing .app folder is simpler, and makes it easier for the user to delete stuff they no longer need/want without it spewing files all over the hard drive. DMG is just a disk image, just like Zip it allows you to contain multiple files and compress them. Not only that, but it keeps everything in tact such as symlinks, permissions and fun stuff so that when the user drags the .app to their Applications folder they have a self-contained functioning application.
Not all apps are self-contained. There are plugins, drivers, extensions to the OS etc... That's why having an install script/uninstall script that the OS can reference from one place is useful. Lots of install scripts also have repair functions, as well as options to modify the installation. Which is why having a my software control panel is useful.
An odd rant. I will say that lion has been the buggiest version of macos x ever, but I suspect it's because they futzed with the file save APIs which touch everything. If it's still this flaky at the dot 4 release I might start whining.
I've managed to get used to most of the new stuff in Lion, but the screwing with the File save stuff is just mind-bendingly awful, and has broken things as simple as trying to re-save a text-file or image from a read-only folder to a read/write folder.
Example: Choose a locked file and try saving a copy anywhere. Can you do it?
I've resorted to using the Finder to copy things into accessible places to work on them.
I haven't upgraded to Lion, and likely never will, because they removed the single best feature of OS X, "all-windows" Expose with no stacking into app bundles.
I completely agree. I can't believe that Lion does not have an "all-windows" Expose. It's annoying trying to find a hidden window by minimizing everything.
If someone knows how to toggle between an applications windows, please let me know.
Yeah, macs have some annoying properties that don't do exactly what you want. But, all that 'gloss' that O'Reilly refers to is the reason he purchased the Mac. Furthermore, OS X is still leaps and bounds better than other OS's for most users. The conveniences that most people would fail to notice is part of the beauty of the OS.
I think the issue with Lion and also with Ubuntu 11.1 is that the GUIs are experimenting with various tablet concepts which significantly alter some of the behavior. It's pretty confusing at first but I adapted to Lion after about 4 or 5 days. I still don't quite understand Unity but expect to soon.
I think most anyone who is willing to accept that the world is undergoing a transition into a world where tablets coexist with laptops, etc., will embrace this time as a period of experimentation, rapid change, and creativity.
I find it hard to take these sorts of rants seriously. It's a user who wants to do things their own way, but not bother learning how exactly that is done. I call this mixed-level behaviour - e.g. users who won't use the built-in functionality, but not understand or correctly use the alternative more technical methods.
Take the mail example, Mail.app already lets him export his mail box, delete his mail etc. He never needed to rifle through ~/Library to get at it. However if he's tech savvy enough to want to do it the manual way, then he should know how to fire up the terminal to access ~/Library, or more simply by holding the option key and choosing "Library" from the go menu. I don't this is breaking osx.
While I can't vouch for why he has a magnitude of locked files, given the mail example I have a fair idea of how he's gotten in that situation. While os x does give him the option to gloss past certain locked files. He's likely seeing the error because he's removed files which are "spoken for" (i.e in use), these are often located in ~/Library and it's kind of the point of why ~/Library is hidden. Again, if he wants to be tech-savvy, he should just rm the files, or rm the contents of the trash folder. (Or if it was mail.app responsible, just originally remove the mail from inside Mail.app)
OSX certainly has some way to go in addressing this kind of mixed level behaviour, but it's not going to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot.
About the other features: while I don't appreciate the iOS-ificiation of mac os, it's trivial to turn these learning-curve reducing features off, and on laptops I find they make more sense than they do when using a mouse + keyboard.
I think Tim is on crack. Snow Leopard was specifically about refactoring and bug fixes—huge under the hood improvements. It's true that Lion has some annoying bugs, but so did previous versions, I wouldn't say it's buggier on the whole (I certainly see far fewer kernel panics than I used to see circa 10.3/10.4). Lion is ambitious, so there are definitely some annoying UI changes, but there are a lot of meaty changes that offer huge improvements.
Some of my favorites are: mission control is much better than exposé + spaces which I could never really put to great use. Fullscreen mode is very cool (although it sucks with multi-monitors, hopefully they'll fix that). Finally the ability to resize windows from every corner. Autosave. Remembering open windows. New gestures are great once you internalize them. What Apple is doing with sandboxing is really a revolution in PC security even if the costs are high to user and developer freedom.
I'm pretty concerned about the App Store model and the future implications, but so far Apple is still doing amazing UX work. I imagine at some point I will have to go Linux if Apple keeps tightening their grip, but that day is not yet here.
I just got a new Air, and began using Lion, I have to say I've been very, very pleased. Especially on this machine it seems like it was naturally made for this type of computer. I use Alfred, but confession, I sometimes find myself using Launchpad... Though this seems to be true of most new OS X features they've introduced over the years, I plan not to use them, decide to give them a try, and end up really liking it.
The only thing I can't do is the natural scrolling, because I switch between too many computers at work.
I share the App Store concern, but I think they're going to find the right solution, developers have always been a key part of their plans, they get things wrong of course, but they tend to make it right, just not always as fast as people want - understandable gripe.
1. They have lost their Zen design philosophy - it has come to the point of ridiculousness with the new features in Lion; features for the sake of features. Since Steve is gone, there is probably no way back.
2. They have lost their perceived moral superiority - system closedness, App Store censorship, sueing people left and right, don't seem to care one bit about chinese labour conditions; they are worse than Microsoft or IBM ever were.
3. They have lost their coolness - the cool kids dig free, independent software; they are not the "Think different." company anymore, they attract people who desperately seek to belong to the masses. They attract sheeple who buy an iPad to tell their friends that they, too, have an iPad.
Summary: The Apple of today is a heartless consumer electronics giant, just like and worse than any other out there. It still sucks the last drops of blood out of the spirit it used to have in the past.
What a waste of time it is to complain about the way someone else configured your system. You're the one who chose to use a window manager that doesn't offer custom keybindings. If you can't live with it, then either write your own window manager or switch to a OS that doesn't impose its dogma on you.
OSX is a non-contender in my book because of its complete disregard for the standard Unix directory structure, its use of registry files, its ancient BSD utilities last updated in the '90s, and its lack of a package manager that actually integrates with the rest of the system. Of course the window manager sucks too, but that's only if you judge according to functionality. To be a Mac aficionado, you've got to judge only according to how slick the UI looks. Right?
SizeUp, which lets me position and resize the activate window with customizable keyboard shortcuts. One common use case is to make one window take up the left half of the screen, and another the right half, if I'm working on something that needs information from both. http://irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/
As a developer, my decade long honeymoon with OSX may be waning. On the other hand there is still nothing that comes close to OSX for my nontechnical friends. And no... they cannot use Ubuntu. (I have scientifically-worthless empirical evidence)
Sign me up. Ubuntu has been a decent attempt at a desktop Linux, but there is no "great" laptop hardware for it. Commercial Linux so far seems to be about two things: server, and cheap crap. There does not seem to be any interest in the power user or developer who needs a workstation, despite the fact that this is the one thing desktop Linux truly shines at. And when I say workstation I mean for work, i.e. not a web/email appliance.
Now maybe the power user market just isn't big enough to cater to, or the economics around copyleft makes it impossible. I don't know. But I sure would like a portable Linux workstation that's actually good. And I'm not talking about a heavy, fat System76 laptop with 1-2 hours battery life. Mac hardware has a real edge in this area.
Unless you pick your PC carefully with the purpose of breaking Linux, it mostly works out of the box. That said, installing Linux on a Mac seems offensive, like replacing the dashboard of a Maybach with the one of a race car. Macs are a beautifully designed combination of hardware and software that may work for you. Or not.
I like Lion better than Snow Leopard, but neither works for me for work. Casual browsing and presentations are fine, but, for serious web application development, I want Linux.
Like a teenager before a date Mac seems to be entirely about looks, oh everything works well both OS and hardware but sometimes it seems looks come before function.
No separate delete or backspace keys, no multiple desktops, breathtakingly expensive hardware and software, awkward layout of files in the GUI, closing apps frustrating X doesn't close the app it minimizes it but you also have a minimize button (??), am I copying/pasting/cutting?, old text documents open behind new text documents are opened (a bug maybe or my fault).
Apple OS X Lion is nice to look at and fairly easy to use if not entirely intuitive but it;s not as perfect as some people make it out to be.
Maybe not on Apple's laptops, but Apple's full size keyboards have it. Also, fn + "delete" will have the effect of deleting a character in front of the current cursor.
> no multiple desktops,
Mission control has multiple desktops, or are you conveniently forgetting that. Also, Windows and multiple desktops?
> breathtakingly expensive hardware and software,
Mac OS X at $30, then iWork at $79, iLife at $79. Should we compare to Windows? (comparing to Linux and free everything is always going to be expensive).
> awkward layout of files in the GUI,
Eh, what?
> closing apps frustrating X doesn't close the app it minimizes it but you also have a minimize button (??),
No, one closes the current context. Lets say you have 10 Word documents open, you can close the single instance using the red button, if you use the yellow button it minimizes it down to the dock. The two buttons have very different behaviors.
When you have Microsoft Word open on Windows, you can have multiple documents open as well, when you close one you don't want to close all of them, well on Mac OS X when you close the last one it won't quit the full application, whereas in Windows it will. Mac OS X Lion has solved this by allowing applications to specify that they are no longer in use and when required they will be quit.
> am I copying/pasting/cutting?,
Cmd + C == Copy
Cmd + V == Paste
Cmd + X == Cut
Clearly you are using it in a different context ...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834230... is such a thing, and at $1099 USD, it's nearly half of your quoted price. Unfortunately, it has a widescreen which has more pixels than you asked for, but somehow I don't think that's a bad thing.
It comes with Windows, but if you want a real operating system, you can install any Linux you like on there. Or a BSD. Go for it.
Also, I was going to just answer "mu" to your question, and be done with it. Macbooks don't have quality construction; that's why their hinges keep falling apart after a year or two of actual use. It's been a problem since the Powerbook days.
So, uh, yeah. Apple products are too fuckin' expensive.
(Oh, and there were a handful of VAIOs that also fit this criteria, but let's be honest, VAIOs are not real computers.)
> Macbooks don't have quality construction; that's why their hinges keep falling apart after a year or two of actual use. It's been a problem since the Powerbook days.
Uh, what? I've had two MacBooks that have seen continuous use since 2006 and 2008, respectively, and this never happened to me. In fact, the aluminum MacBook (not even unibody) is in pretty fantastic shape, which is quite unlike every single non-Apple product I have ever owned and used for such a long period of time.
The price you're quoting is for the US. I suspect his price has UK VAT or something added in because a similarly spec'd MacBook Air is only $1299 in the US. So it is not "double", we're talking about $200 - an 18% price difference.
Furthermore, the Air starts at $999. It's hardly gratuitously expensive. In fact, it is extremely hard to beat in terms of value-per-dollar.
Unfortunately Asus has the worst support ever. If anything breaks on that laptop, you're SOL. I would also question Asus's build quality as well. I don't know about that netbook in particular, but their EeePCs aren't very well built.
I am an Asus owner (my third laptop in a row), and am actually considering getting a ZenBook, BUT it has no dockstation, while the MBA has THUNDERBOLT, which combined with a Thunderbolt display gives you an amazing configuration. Don't trust me, go look it up:
When's the last time you used one? There've been multiple desktops ("Spaces") since 2006.
And I've never had any confusion between copying, pasting, and cutting. Ever. Unless you're talking about expecting that weird-ass Windows behavior where you "cut" files to copy them around? Why's "open two windows and drag stuff to move, maybe with alt held down to copy" so hard?
OSX makes a big distinction between "quitting an app" and "closing all document windows" I really LIKE that I can have a big app like Illustrator loaded but dormant with no open windows to bother me.
Last time I used a Mac? As I said this is my first one ever.
My comparisons are the different behaviour between Mac, Linux and Windows or specifically how Windows and Linux are similar but Apple OS X is just slightly (annoyingly) different.
I right-click on a file there isn't any visible/intuitive option to move not copy that file to another location other than just copy it. Don't you find that weird? Forget keyboard shortcuts there are probably hundreds for each OS that nobody ever uses or knows about, in fact most people I know at work are shocked when shown CTRL+X, CTRL+V, CTRL+C. Yes Command+C copies, Command+V pastes but Command+X does nothing except play a mellow jazzy error sound.
I can't even delete a file using Delete key now you have to admit that's screwy! Pick a file, click to select press Delete - nothing happens.
Who knows maybe I'll get used it to that's my point for getting a Mac I'm just amazed at OS X's awkward differences between Windows and Linux. Different isn't bad it's just different.
You complain OSX is different from your previous experience. That's unreasonable. Macs have always been about simplicity and consistency building a predictable user experience.
My experience with Macs is, like I said before, as a casual user with occasional work done in terminal sessions and Emacs (which is consistent on every computer I have), but you can trust me on that - the differences between the environments will get burned into your brain soon enough and you'll be able to easily switch between contexts.
You can't blame Lion for not having a delete key! It's a hardware choice. Add a wired USB keyboard (I use the long Apple one) and there's a perfectly functional delete key, right there!
What you can blame Lion for, is the fact that Xcode4 can't even scroll a sodding code window at repeat rate. Quad-core and discrete graphics, utterly ridiculous.
Yes true it's a hardware issue not OS and yes that's one option to use an external keyboard but I don't want to drag an external keyboard around with me otherwise I wouldn't have bought a laptop.
The lack of a delete key actually labeled "delete" (not backspace labeled "delete") just seems to be a glaring error along with no separate number keypad. More thought went into making it look pretty than to make it useful.
I'd sell this Macbook but I'm getting to like the swipe trackpad.
> The lack of a delete key actually labeled "delete" (not backspace labeled "delete")
It's not a "glaring error" that it isn't labeled exactly like a PC. Apple keyboards have labeled the keys "delete" and "return" instead of "backspace" and "enter" since probably before the days that IBM labeled them "backspace" and "enter".
The speakers (on a 17" Macbook Pro) could be relocated, they're not much use where they are when I type since my hands block the sound partially anyway why not move then and expand the keyboard?
No, pressing the Delete key makes the cursor go back a space. On Linux and Windows Delete pulls the text in from the right towards the cursor deleting it.
I know Apple Macs are different but it seems odd why they wouldn't keep similar methods of using the keyboard, they made Darwin based on BSD (yes?) they obviously didn't keep the Delete and Backspace or does BSD not have Backspace only Delete?
As I said I'm new to Mac but triple booting would be nicer if 1 of the 3 OS versions didn't have a keyboard that was so weird.
A numeric keyboard could, in theory, fit on a 17" MBP, but that would make the computer ugly. If you are fine with that, you can get something from HP or Sony for substantially less than a MPB.
> That said, installing Linux on a Mac seems offensive, like replacing the dashboard of a Maybach with the one of a race car.
It also works less well than just installing it on PC hardware. Apple hardware isn't meant to work well with any other OS, and oftentimes, it doesn't. Even if the drivers for other vendors' hardware aren't perfect, in my experience, they usually work work better than the Linux drivers for Apple's hardware.
This is so true. I have a work-issued laptop running Linux on mainstream hardware. Sleeping or hibernating my laptop fails to sleep about 10% of the time. Waking my laptop has a 90% chance of failing to detect my external monitor, yet the window manager happily continues to display my login screen and application windows off screen where the external monitor should be.
Your time and stress are not unlimited resources (and therefore not "free"). Being able to buy a Linux system that's guaranteed to work (and continue to) out of the box on certain hardware (or better yet, come pre-installed on that certain hardware) would be worth a fair amount of money to many people.
Yes they can. They can focus on a specific model, even work directly with the OEM (or be the OEM), put a $60 price tag on the box, and have a warranty that says "We guarantee that this Linux distro will work out of the box on model X; we'll keep all the software updated for a year; you can call us if it breaks; and we'll refund you if we can't help." If no one can make that sort of guarantee for money; why should I even bother trying to do it myself?
I mean sure, I can take your money. I can promise you things. So what?
What do you mean so what? People can always go back on their contracts, does that mean nobody should do anything ever?
If you're promising to support, say, Ubuntu 11.10 on a Blah Blah GX23921r3i laptop, then the 'so what' means that if I can't get wireless working, I'll contact your support and you will, because you've promised that hardware and that OS can work and that you know how to make it do so. It means I can trust X hardware and software to make a usable combination without having to gamble that I hit a compatible X driver or Y setting on my own, or put up with a laptop which can't wake from sleep, or whatever.
And why the hell was I downmodded for asking a legit question? Is this place falling into reddit land?
No whinging about downvotes - it could be someone on a mobile device misclicking for all we know.
I first admired OSX because of its simplicity and the way it kind of just knew what I wanted to do and started me on the journey that way. Lion was a step backward. defaults were no longer what I would find convenient. Constantly asking me if I want to open windows upon logon even though I always uncheck the box so it should know by now. The reverse scrolling which makes it a pain to use any other system after getting used to reverse direction. I'm starting to like Linux Mint more and more.
There has already been a vastly simpler system that predates OS X: Linux or BSD combined with X11 and an arbitrary window manager. Just stay away from anything that calls itself a "desktop environment" and you should be fine.
I have to be honest, I really just don't agree. I use Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I'd upgrade to Lion, but it's not a priority right now). I can see why things like the windows not maximizing, etc. would be annoying. Here's a perspective, though:
1. That issue of windows not resizing is generally a complaint made by native Windows users who are already used to that property. I'm not saying this makes it an invalid complaint, just putting it in context.
2. Compared with Linux, Mac OS X has more support (this doesn't mean it's superior). Compared with Windows, Mac OS X (at least in my experience) is more sensitive to power users and coders, and people who know what they're doing more. Now, I've used different distributions of Linux, and ideally, I love Linux most. But it just doesn't have as much support as Mac OS X because proprietary backing breeds rapid progress (in the sense of universal or near universal support at least). Sometimes you have to fork your own solution when you're confronted with a problem in Linux. This also happens in OS X, but often times, there's more trouble shooting advice or solutions freely available and accessible. Just a perspective.
When Apple release System 7 in 1991 people everywhere started complaining about the new changes and how it was worse than System 6. For instance it required a hard drive and couldn't boot off a floppy.
Meanwhile the end users adopted it imediately and never looked back. Most of the complaints in the article are about features that we as developers love but that end users could care less about.
As a developer I love getting in to my Library folder and changing stuff around. I love backing my computer up manually and not using Time Machine. I love having complete control of my windows and applications.
But most users don't care. Most users never touch their Library folder and don't need to. Thats why its hidden. Most users don't need to back up their mail because its all on Gmail. Most users love the app store where they don't have to search all over the internet for a simple app.
Mac OS is an end user centric operating system and it always has been. Developers and hackers will have to make some tweaks to the basic OS to make it work the way they want. Honestly looking up a few keyboard shortcuts, enabling hidden folders and installing homebrew isn't that hard.
System 7 was definitely slower on the most common hardware of the day (1MB toaster macs). My college had entire labs of machines stuck on 6.0.8 for a long time afterwards.
I think Tim O'Reilly's argument is pretty silly actually. Here's my response: http://bit.ly/v6Adhu (re-printed below).
---
I understand what Tim is saying, but I disagree that it's time to start over.
With Mac OS X, Apple definitely seems to have begun heavily focusing on feature development over refining existing UX. But the claim that successive releases of OS X become more user-hostile and encourages more lock-in is a bit of a stretch.
Apple has never developed for the power user, and they never should -- this is part of what makes their products so great; their unrelenting focus on the common case. In fact, complaining about a hidden library file for Mail.app misses this point entirely. It's actually a wonderful feature, since the common user is more likely to mess up their own mail library than to have a need to move it between disks.
+Tim O'Reilly's second point is valid, though, the UX for emptying the trash can definitely be improved. But again, is the common case deleting 400,000 files? Is the "delete whatever you can checkbox" too odd for a normal user to understand? Let's take the mom example; if your mom emptied the trash after deleting a file, would she want to know if it couldn't be emptied, or would she be OK with it being emptied without her recently deleted file actually being removed?
People can yell for a OS do-over all they want. The fact remains though: Apple focuses on UX more than any other company I know. If that UX doesn't cater to your particular needs and you'd rather have power-user flexibility and features, even if it means less polish and more annoyances when dealing with common tasks, use Linux or Windows. Or, better yet, just learn to use the Terminal and you can have the best of both worlds.
For an old (but still largely relevant) laundry list of things on Mac that drive Linux fans nuts (and generally, back to Linux), there's a 2006 ORA DevCenter article by Chromatic, "Switching Back". Both the column and comments are still highly germane.
Apple should at least give people the option to put an older operating system on a newer system. Similar to how PC vendors offer XP or W7. I tried to install my Leopard family pack on a computer that shipped with snow leopard - no dice. With the way things are, I'll never buy a new Mac, as I refuse to "upgrade" to Lion.
Just to add, holding down the Option key while pressing it alters it behavior to be a maximize button in most apps. Some apps (like Chrome) use the Shift key to get this behavior instead.
I would like things to be more consistent. In fact, if I were in charge, I would want this button to be a maximize button by default, while using the Option (i.e. Alt) key should alter the behavior to the second option which is to resize to the best fit for window content.
But this may need debate since now we have fullscreen mode for apps in Lion.
Deleting files and the GUI complaining that it's still in use has always been a frustrating thing. Why hasn't anyone at least taken the next step of showing what the user can do to delete the files? I've always resorted to opening Terminal and using some sudo's and some -f's.
In regards to his question about future OSes, anyone think about a browser/cloud based OS like ChromeOS or JoliCloud being able to save him? These are the future of OSes so it would seem natural to look to them to create that simpleness he's complaining about.
Is it really called the maximise button? I was expecting the same as Windows the first week, but I learnt it wasn't (meant to be) called maximise, I stopped using it. A fill-screen button would be nice, but you just do it once manually and it remembers.
Tim says the Library folder is hidden (power users would quickly change this, and several other things), and that the trashing system (or any copying/moving) is not as good as Windows. I do like W7's copy dialog, but it's very wordy, nothing in OSX would be that wordy.
i realise that people who are unhappy with osx are encouraged to move to ubuntu, while those who are happy with ubuntu seem to be moving to mint. but i just wanted to add that opensuse is still as solid as it ever was, and a new release (12) is due out in 3 more days. it supports kde and gnome (you choose on install via a single checkbox) and i have never understood why it's not more popular in the states - it seems (to me) to hit the sweet spot of minimal maintenance and maximum flexibility.
This isn't news, its just a random rant. I agree that as OS X adds complex features we lose flexibility in other areas. Many of these are are not frequently visited but its still annoying and unacceptable. Fortunately, if Tim knows where to find these files and really wants to delete them, an "rm -rf" from the offending directory would do the trick - I'd like to think that 99% of the people reading this forum know this. Ditching mail.app for GMail? Seriously??
For me, the only problem I've encountered since installing Lion has been that Tweetdeck is no longer usable. I experience some strange window-focus issue where while that app is running, doing something entirely unrelated like typing a URL in Chrome's address bar will cause a random application to jump to the foreground. I've tried re-installing AIR, Tweetdeck ... though not Lion. I have no idea how to solve this. It worked fine prior to the Lion install.
Your first problem is that you started deleting stuff from a folder that Apple now deems wise to hide. With all due respect, why on earth would you start from the ~/Library folder? Why not delete these from the Mail client?
You can even "backup" from inside Mail.app. (Right click a folder > Export)
Also, if you really want the Library folder, you can just go to Finder > Go > (Hold option) Library
There are real criticisms to be aired, this is not one of them.
I started using OSX every day last year, after 12 years of Linux mixed with 5% Windows. Verdict: it's nice, but I'm not blown away and I miss Linux for some things.
MacPorts, brew and fink add up to a more complex, less reliable system than a typical Linux vendors' repository. Currently my brew is broken and I can't upgrade anything until I figure out why some obscure Gnome lib isn't compiling... I have not had any sort of issue like that with Linux in the past 8 years when it comes to upgrading routiney used software.
OSX's command line utils are BSD style... so going between OSX and Linux shells, I often end up with messages such as 'ls: -l: No such file or directory' because I expected to be able to put flags anywhere in the arguments.
Even between the vaunted Mac editors such as TextMate and Coda, I haven't found a text editor I like as much as Kate.
There are various other issues I've struggled with, mainly relating to installing and upgrading open source software. Projects simply expect that you will be using Linux, and using this proprietary BSD offshoot is simply inconvenient due to it's usual *nix differences.
Also, my own preferences and habits come into play. I like KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker... being able to press ctrl-alt-Fkey and get a fullscreen terminal... Gimp integrating with the window manager properly (to the extent it does at all, sure)... knowing where my Flash LSOs are saved... and so on.
To me, Lion really cemented the fact that the end goal of Mac OS is to make an invisible OS that requires zero tinkering just like iOS. Everyone should be able to use it and no one should have to access the file system.
This transitional period poses a huge problem for Apple and looks to be the cause of most complaints I've seen. What are they going to do about the power users who were their early adopters? Is an 'admin' or 'power user' mode appropriate?
I don't really know why people are so upset. I was a hardcore windows user and I've been a Mac user now for 11 months and I love it! I don't think I will ever go back to windows and to say that Mac is going off track and turning into windows because of something this small is just crazy.. Short of something like the iPad, OS X more than Windows is A step in the right direction of how personal computing should be, it "just works"..
I think I'm going to go back to Snow Leopard tomorrow. I've been running Lion for many months now, and I still can't stand it. The only reason I'm sticking with OS X (rather than using Linux exclusively) is that I've purchased tons of pricey software over the years (e.g. Logic Studio and Adobe CS4). I hope 10.8 ditches most of the retarded "features" Lion introduced, and reverts back to the wicked HCI that Snow Leopard has.
I'm quite happy with Mac OS X, but there's one thing that really annoys me: keyboard shortcuts. There's (almost) always one for what I want to do, but it's often to complicated for the frequency of the task.
For instance, checking emails in mail.app is shift+command+N. Or changing the presentation mode in iTunes or Preview is alt+command+[3-6]. Because of my Azerty keyboard, it's actually shift+alt+command+[3-6].
Actually OS X is pretty consistent with keyboard shortcuts compared to other OSes. It's even one of my favorite things about it.
That said, the checking mails example is a bad one, and moreover it used to be the usual cmd-shift-R and they only introduced the odd new one in Lion.
Edit: sorry, misread your comment. But mine is still valid. Because of the many keyboard shortcuts for the OS UI, it's only natural that you need more modifier keys in the apps sometimes.
Funny, one of my complaints about OSX compared to Windows is the (IMO) lackluster implementation of keyboard shortcuts. Perhaps I just don't see it, if so please enlighten me, but OSX's key bindings feel random and inconsistent to me. To elaborate:
On Windows the Windows-key is the modifier key for global operating system functions, things like lock screen (win-l), explorer (win-e) and projector mode (win-p). Save for legacy bindings like CTRL-ESC, no global functions tie to the other modifier keys. The CTRL and ALT modifiers are therefore free to bind to functions of the currently active application. Some of these follow standard conventions, like ALT-F4, CTRL-S. Aside from these, any application is free to implement a keyboard scheme (and e.g. exploit symmetry) without clashing with the operating system.
Contrast this to OSX where there appears to be no designated key for global functions. A "naked" F11 triggers Expose, Ctrl-F2 puts focus in the menu bar, Cmd-space pops up Spotlight, leaving just Opt as unbound. Like in Windows, there are some conventions like CTRL-comma. There is no global key to open a Finder window, although Spotlight alleviates much of the pain.
With no standard key for global functions, the potential for key clashes is always there. Software that targets just OSX can avoid these, but cross-platform applications that originated elsewhere are quite often prohibited from using the same set of key bindings in every platform.
Finally, OSX lacks a key binding for the context menu (i.e. the equivalent of SHIFT-F10 or the dedicated key on Windows systems) and mnemonic keys (the underlined characters in menu items; OSX wants you to type the caption of the desired menu item). The lack of mnemonic keys invalidates all my muscle memory in Eclipse, I really miss them.
For any 'non-geek' friends (or just non-geek hacker news readers like me) try JoliOS from www.jolicloud.com - it's Ubunto with a friendly HTML5 skin.
Easy install of apps, auto update of the OS, really easy to use, sync across loads of computers, runs on any laptop or pc that can run XP, and is FAST.
I have it on a netbook and also as a dual boot on y pc, and I now rarely boot to Windows.
At first I thought the same. But I'm slowly coming around. I'd still prefer Snow Leopard with Lion's full-screen and mission control, but I trust Lion will improve with age.
That said, I have my most productive dev environment now on Lion. The speed with which I can move between apps write code, compile, test, etc, is actually starting to push my laptop.
If you want something fixed, changed, or added, simply file a bug radar.
Apple does certain things for a reason. If you disagree with Apple's reasoning behind something specific and want to change it, then change it yourself. Most commenters complaining about OS X can count the number of grievances they have with their fingers.
I just wish you could speed up the animation for switching between workspaces. Being used to Gnome some of the whizzier OS X animations just seem like a waste of time.
Alternately, lots of people hurried to "*nix with a nice GUI" and are now realising that it was just a stepping stone along the way to what Apple really wanted to produce: "Apps with no OS you need to care about, or can get to".
Perhaps in 3 years Tim O'Reilly's post and commentary will be seen as early cracks in a dissapointed technical community leaving OS X in larger and larger numbers.
$14 USD for something which is standard in most Linux desktop environments? (And is probably standard in Windows, but I can't remember.)
This is exactly what people complain about. Yes, this stuff can be done, but you need to set a bunch of options via the command line (no problem, but annoying if you have lots of stuff you want tweaked); then set a bunch of program options; then install a bunch of apps (some of which need to be paid for).
It is baffling to me why I need to install 3rd party software just to stop my MacBookPro making the startup sound every time I turn it on. (The alternative is to remember to mute the sound every time I turn it off.)
Why do you turn your Mac on and off all the time? Sleep works fine. Just close the lid and stuff it in your bag, then open it up again. Yes I know it never worked on Windows. It works on a Mac.* The only reason I reboot is for an OS update or for the occasional installer that's too stupid to just launch the services it just threw into the "start this at launch" system.
* well eeeevery now and then shit gets in the way and breaks it, upgrading in place to Lion introduced some heisenbugs with regards to using my Air closed with an external monitor, but they vanished after a reinstall. And this was the first time I'd had sleep problems in the entire decade I've been using Macs.
Sleep has trouble with USB drives; sleep will just disconnect them uncleanly. Data loss and corrupt discs is not a feature of something that I would call "works fine".
There are other problems with sleep, but that's the most obvious.
I find it amusing that instead of addressing the problem and agreeing that OSX has a small usability wart you blame the user for using a feature built into the product, and instead suggest they do something quite different, which may or may not be appropriate for their situation.
Well, this is what Linux users complain about. Windows users tend to complain about the lack of games or long-term support.
The problem is, Apple is able to do what it does specifically by not providing these things. If they were off in the weeds trying to make everyone happy, they wouldn't be able to create the streamlined experiences that have made them so successful.
This thread is full of people saying that Macs can be frustrating because they don't do certain things.
It's also full of people saying that those things are possible, and showing how.
And there are also people saying that not being able to do those things is why the Mac experience is so clean and simple.
It would be really refreshing if people just accepted that all OSs suck, and that some (not all!) of the stuff mentioned in this thread is sucky. (It'd also be great if people would stop ranting quite so hard about OS suckage, unless they're right. Yelling about some missing feature, only to be told that it's in the obvious preference pane, is just daft.)
To all of y'all complainging about zoom button behavior, I agree it is pretty terrible, but! --there's an app for that. It's called "RightZoom". Works well.
Well, I am really starting to hate Tim O' Reilly, too.
I remember a time when O'Reilly books were the golden standard for things like Perl, Python et al. Nowadays it seems like they are producing crap, half-written books by the ton.
Oreillynet was also, one time, one of the best places to go for nice, informative articles and tutorials. Nowadays it's just an assortment of lame blog entries and book promotions.
And don't let me get started on "Safari books online", a sub par reading experience if I ever saw one.
I find myself appreciating the more controversial changes, like reversed scrolling and hidden scrollers. I followed Gruber's advice and suppressed the impulse to switch the defaults back to Snowpard behaviors and find that I'm less happy when I have to use Snowpard now.
Meanwhile:
* Mail.app under Lion is the best mail UX they've ever shipped. It's not a small improvement over Snowpard; it has a more reasonable layout now that makes Smart Folders make more sense, and search seems to have been completely rebuilt and actually works now.
* I find myself liking Mission Control enough not to mind not having vertical virtual desktop arrangements.
* Preview can sign documents now!
* The Filevault fix is huge for me (Filevault is now a bona fide block level FDE), since it means I don't have to use PGP WDE, which was a debacle.
My sense of it is, there is zero opportunity for someone to compete with Apple and Microsoft on conventional desktop operating systems, and the problems O'Reilly has with OS X are not generally going to be shared by people like my dad, who are (a) the only people Apple really cares about because (b) they're where all the money is.