holiday Mac issues
I just found the text file I made while visiting home this past holiday season. It was full of the annoying things I encountered on Mom's mac.
Finder:
holding on a back/forward arrow doesn't drop down a list of previous locations
clicking on finder in the dock just shows you the finder that's open, instead of giving you a new finder window
columns mode seems cool, but the columns fight me. I can't resize them to the size I want, they use 'pretty' spacing after words so I've had issues showing all of the columns I want to see. I can't hide columns higher up than I care to see. When I spread open the last to look at images in it fairly large, which was pretty nice, it forgot this and resized all of the columns when I moved around in higher/lefter columns. I spent a lot of time readjusting columns whiles looking through my hierarchically organized image folders.
There's no way to view a classical folder tree stacked up vertically. The columns idea is cute and all, but very space-inefficient for many things.
You can't alt+tab. You have to Apple+tab. In fact, you have to apple+everything: copy, paste, etc. It's fun relearning ctrl for no reason, and far more awkward. It's hard to tell if I'm on z, alt, or shift. I miss my own box, which has a different, whimsical alt+tab method for each tab combo.
There's no right-click->select-all. You have to click in the space, then go up to the edit menu, which of course at the very top of the screen. I really don't like that idea, either. There is SO much movement of the mouse on this system.
When I right click on a group of selected files in a list, the highlighting changes from all of them being blue to all of them appearing unselected with a thin blue box around the extents of the column. Every time so far I've thought I deselected them all by right clicking. Why am I selecting a ton of files and right-clicking on them so often? It's the only way to get Preview to let me look through all the images in the current folder. To select them all I click on one, then go way up to the top of the screen, to Edit, down to Select All, then back to right-click on the files, freak out that deselected them all, realize I'm okay again, and then choose Open, which freaks me out a little, because it makes me think it's going to open, say, 225 Preview windows for all the images currently on my camera.
Really difficult to find a good mode for moving files around into folders. I need to see dates and filenames, as well as zoom in on thumbnails so it's clear where the divisions in the hundreds of pics on my camera come in. It was exceptionally difficult to find a way to organize my pictures quickly in any of Finder's modes. I ended up making several mistakes, too, which is unheard of for me in file browsers on several other OSes. Once again, unsensible defaults.
I moved things around in folders and had other folder views of those same folders not update. I had to go out of the folders and come back in to see the changes. This is ridiculous.
Once again, design over functionality means that all controls in a window gray out when you go to another one, meaning things like figuring out if a nearby, non-focused window was gotten to by clicking are unseeable without clicking over to that window, because the back button looks identical to the forward button. They're both grayed out, and it appears at first glance that you got to the location in the window directly, and that it has no history. Lots of little dumb, incorrect indications like this kept tripping me up while I was trying to organize files.
You can't delete a file without the mouse. It's really hard to drop files onto folders. I kept missing and dropping files in front of folders, and it's even harder to drag them in then, so I'd have to drag the files away, then back over. Folders don't collapse in icon view - no auto-arrange, and no zoom option in other views (and don't forget no heavily customizable time/date info in icon view, as I have in Ubuntu) - so I have to keep dragging folders around in the window, dropping them, dragging the few relevant icons I can see into it (reading their dates from a secondary window I have set to list view to show me the dates, and comparing file names (image numbers) between them), then dragging the folder again to a new patch of icons out of frame. This OS seems designed to make me feel like an idiot.
Preview:
Double-clicking an image in a folder of images doesn't let you look through those images, just what you selected. You have to select all the images in the folder first, them open them all, and then while you can click through them with the arrow keys, the mouse wheel does absolutely nothing. What a waste of a HID.
Terminal:
I can't apple+tab between terminals. There's one terminal process, and you can make multiple individual windows for different uses, but they all register once to the OS, so no tabbing between them. You must always use the mouse. I tried to open a second terminal from Applications->Utilities, but it won't take. It always brings me back to the newest window of the current terminal.
Apparently terminal is outside of Apple's hotkey control, so I get to use Ctrl again, but it's weird to switch between apple+n and ctrl+n.
I entered Vim to do some Python toying-about, and realized I could scroll up with the mouse. This scrolled up to reveal the previous stuff from bash. Weird.
iChat:
Can't seem to add another account. I can add more pieces to mom's account, so I could add me, but then it just signs us both in, and people talking to me see a picture of her with my email address, and if they hover over me, they see information about mom, not me.
Safari:
Where do I even begin? No mouse gestures, no undo of closed tabs...
Things don't seem to like to update. I've had tabs that show percentages, e.g. for image uploads, and these are mirrored in the tab names. Safari doesn't update the tabs if they're not focused, as Firefox does, so the idea of using the tabs to tell you when something big is done loading in while you work in another tab is right out. Also, if I click over to the tab, all of the updates on the page aren't there, and they rapidly roll in. This also happens with the clock, which I'll list first in the general section.
If you drag a tab out of the tab bar, say to put it in another window, any embedded media (e.g. Flash movies) freezes until you drop the tab. Why? I had music playing from a website, and was shuffling tabs around, and kept having the music freeze dead on me while I did the dragging.
SVGs only have Safari as a viewer, and you can't zoom (again, why use that pesky mouse wheel for anything?), so of the tree of life for species on wikipedia, which is huge, I could only see the tiny, top-left portion.
in general:
Some things don't update well. I'll move the mouse to come back from the screensaver, freak out at the time, and then seconds later it finally updates. It was the afternoon, and this happened to me, showing the time from early that morning, before it went to sleep, and I thought it was that time, PM, and thought I was really late for about 5 seconds, until it finally updated itself.
When I right-click to paste something in a specific location, it always selects a character near me. I can't make it not do this, so I can only ever paste this way by obliterating a character, which is often a newline if I'm on a blank line, so the paste is like an append.
The dock is an utter nightmare for me. It uses up a tremendous amount of real estate just to be pretty. I'm always moving down to the bottom of a window to change its scale or select a file near the bottom of finder and accidentally getting too close and having the dock magnify up into my view. I know I can hide it and all of that, but I see this thing in everyone's way on Macs everywhere - at airports, in movies, in my night terrors...
The dock seems like such a bad remake of the task bar. When you expand a window by clicking on something in it, it removes itself from the dock. If you - as I've done a half dozen times now - think "Oops, wrong one," you can't just click it again to minimize it. You have to go diagonally across to the opposite corner of the screen to click the yellow minimize button again. This whole thing is a usability catastrophe.
Speaking of catastrophes, it's freakin' 2010. Why will Macs still not let me change the scale of a window from any side or corner!? I don't even care if it's an optional setting somewhere. Why would that ever be an optional setting? Of all the bad choices on Macs, this one has long disturbed me the most. It's like a car where the only means of egress is through the rear passenger side door. It works, sure, only retardedly.
Finder:
holding on a back/forward arrow doesn't drop down a list of previous locations
clicking on finder in the dock just shows you the finder that's open, instead of giving you a new finder window
columns mode seems cool, but the columns fight me. I can't resize them to the size I want, they use 'pretty' spacing after words so I've had issues showing all of the columns I want to see. I can't hide columns higher up than I care to see. When I spread open the last to look at images in it fairly large, which was pretty nice, it forgot this and resized all of the columns when I moved around in higher/lefter columns. I spent a lot of time readjusting columns whiles looking through my hierarchically organized image folders.
There's no way to view a classical folder tree stacked up vertically. The columns idea is cute and all, but very space-inefficient for many things.
You can't alt+tab. You have to Apple+tab. In fact, you have to apple+everything: copy, paste, etc. It's fun relearning ctrl for no reason, and far more awkward. It's hard to tell if I'm on z, alt, or shift. I miss my own box, which has a different, whimsical alt+tab method for each tab combo.
There's no right-click->select-all. You have to click in the space, then go up to the edit menu, which of course at the very top of the screen. I really don't like that idea, either. There is SO much movement of the mouse on this system.
When I right click on a group of selected files in a list, the highlighting changes from all of them being blue to all of them appearing unselected with a thin blue box around the extents of the column. Every time so far I've thought I deselected them all by right clicking. Why am I selecting a ton of files and right-clicking on them so often? It's the only way to get Preview to let me look through all the images in the current folder. To select them all I click on one, then go way up to the top of the screen, to Edit, down to Select All, then back to right-click on the files, freak out that deselected them all, realize I'm okay again, and then choose Open, which freaks me out a little, because it makes me think it's going to open, say, 225 Preview windows for all the images currently on my camera.
Really difficult to find a good mode for moving files around into folders. I need to see dates and filenames, as well as zoom in on thumbnails so it's clear where the divisions in the hundreds of pics on my camera come in. It was exceptionally difficult to find a way to organize my pictures quickly in any of Finder's modes. I ended up making several mistakes, too, which is unheard of for me in file browsers on several other OSes. Once again, unsensible defaults.
I moved things around in folders and had other folder views of those same folders not update. I had to go out of the folders and come back in to see the changes. This is ridiculous.
Once again, design over functionality means that all controls in a window gray out when you go to another one, meaning things like figuring out if a nearby, non-focused window was gotten to by clicking are unseeable without clicking over to that window, because the back button looks identical to the forward button. They're both grayed out, and it appears at first glance that you got to the location in the window directly, and that it has no history. Lots of little dumb, incorrect indications like this kept tripping me up while I was trying to organize files.
You can't delete a file without the mouse. It's really hard to drop files onto folders. I kept missing and dropping files in front of folders, and it's even harder to drag them in then, so I'd have to drag the files away, then back over. Folders don't collapse in icon view - no auto-arrange, and no zoom option in other views (and don't forget no heavily customizable time/date info in icon view, as I have in Ubuntu) - so I have to keep dragging folders around in the window, dropping them, dragging the few relevant icons I can see into it (reading their dates from a secondary window I have set to list view to show me the dates, and comparing file names (image numbers) between them), then dragging the folder again to a new patch of icons out of frame. This OS seems designed to make me feel like an idiot.
Preview:
Double-clicking an image in a folder of images doesn't let you look through those images, just what you selected. You have to select all the images in the folder first, them open them all, and then while you can click through them with the arrow keys, the mouse wheel does absolutely nothing. What a waste of a HID.
Terminal:
I can't apple+tab between terminals. There's one terminal process, and you can make multiple individual windows for different uses, but they all register once to the OS, so no tabbing between them. You must always use the mouse. I tried to open a second terminal from Applications->Utilities, but it won't take. It always brings me back to the newest window of the current terminal.
Apparently terminal is outside of Apple's hotkey control, so I get to use Ctrl again, but it's weird to switch between apple+n and ctrl+n.
I entered Vim to do some Python toying-about, and realized I could scroll up with the mouse. This scrolled up to reveal the previous stuff from bash. Weird.
iChat:
Can't seem to add another account. I can add more pieces to mom's account, so I could add me, but then it just signs us both in, and people talking to me see a picture of her with my email address, and if they hover over me, they see information about mom, not me.
Safari:
Where do I even begin? No mouse gestures, no undo of closed tabs...
Things don't seem to like to update. I've had tabs that show percentages, e.g. for image uploads, and these are mirrored in the tab names. Safari doesn't update the tabs if they're not focused, as Firefox does, so the idea of using the tabs to tell you when something big is done loading in while you work in another tab is right out. Also, if I click over to the tab, all of the updates on the page aren't there, and they rapidly roll in. This also happens with the clock, which I'll list first in the general section.
If you drag a tab out of the tab bar, say to put it in another window, any embedded media (e.g. Flash movies) freezes until you drop the tab. Why? I had music playing from a website, and was shuffling tabs around, and kept having the music freeze dead on me while I did the dragging.
SVGs only have Safari as a viewer, and you can't zoom (again, why use that pesky mouse wheel for anything?), so of the tree of life for species on wikipedia, which is huge, I could only see the tiny, top-left portion.
in general:
Some things don't update well. I'll move the mouse to come back from the screensaver, freak out at the time, and then seconds later it finally updates. It was the afternoon, and this happened to me, showing the time from early that morning, before it went to sleep, and I thought it was that time, PM, and thought I was really late for about 5 seconds, until it finally updated itself.
When I right-click to paste something in a specific location, it always selects a character near me. I can't make it not do this, so I can only ever paste this way by obliterating a character, which is often a newline if I'm on a blank line, so the paste is like an append.
The dock is an utter nightmare for me. It uses up a tremendous amount of real estate just to be pretty. I'm always moving down to the bottom of a window to change its scale or select a file near the bottom of finder and accidentally getting too close and having the dock magnify up into my view. I know I can hide it and all of that, but I see this thing in everyone's way on Macs everywhere - at airports, in movies, in my night terrors...
The dock seems like such a bad remake of the task bar. When you expand a window by clicking on something in it, it removes itself from the dock. If you - as I've done a half dozen times now - think "Oops, wrong one," you can't just click it again to minimize it. You have to go diagonally across to the opposite corner of the screen to click the yellow minimize button again. This whole thing is a usability catastrophe.
Speaking of catastrophes, it's freakin' 2010. Why will Macs still not let me change the scale of a window from any side or corner!? I don't even care if it's an optional setting somewhere. Why would that ever be an optional setting? Of all the bad choices on Macs, this one has long disturbed me the most. It's like a car where the only means of egress is through the rear passenger side door. It works, sure, only retardedly.