I recently bought a Mac and today was the first day that I only had only a Mac on my desk (as I took the windows PC to use at home). After a week or so of build-up to today, using it more and more, I think I’m turning the corner and whilst I did manage to be productive at least some of the day I’m still finding it hard going at times.
Whilst I of course appreciate that there is bound to be a learning curve with a new OS here’s the list of ‘wrong’ things that are currently really getting on my nerves.
1) Transferring focus between apps requires an additional click. In Windows if an application has focus one can still move the mouse to another app and place the mouse over an item and click to execute. There’s some sort of soft-focus going on where the item you’re about to click knows that you are so when you do the click the action is executed; imagine that.
With Mac OS X your app has focus or it doesn’t. Moving from one to another you need to give an initial click just to give it focus then another to actually carry out the action that you require.
2) My mouse is too slow. Even with the mouse pointer speed up to the maximum the mouse was like treacle. I had to apply this hack to get it to behave.
3) Home and End key madness. Hmm, there are home and end keys and they are in the right place but they have some magic behaviour which does not to put the cursor at the beginning and end of lines. I had to use this and this hack to get something resembling consistently right behaviour.
A related annoyance is the fact that alt needs to be used instead of ctrl to get the cursor to move over to the next word
4) Only one place to resize windows. ’nuff said.
5) No obvious way of auto-mounting network ‘volumes’. After quite a deal of faffing to even get it to connect to the shares on my Win 2003 server I’m buggered if I can find a way to keep them there in the finder upon login. I tried a ‘load at login’ option from within the Users page within Settings but that didn’t work. For now I’ve just symlinked /Volumes/share to my desktop.
6) Dumbass renaming method. If you want to rename a file you select it then press enter. You’d think it’d come up under the context sensitive menu but no I had to Google for this one as it seemed crazy to have to fire up a terminal just to mv something.
7) My ‘mighty’ mouse is crap. This is in addition to the slowness mentioned above; it just doesn’t seem to be very accurate. Not sure whether it’s because I bought the Bluetooth one but I’m forever clicking on the wrong thing even though it looks as if the pointer is in the right place.
That’s the main ones for now. I’ve a few other niggles but they are probably down to me being so new at this. I also really miss Outlook as I’ve just got used to using the newest version (2007) and I love its main view showing calendar entries, items for follow-up (today, tomorrow, this week), the categories and of course my email (which I freely admit Outlook has always been rubbish at). Now I’ve got the option of Entourage which whilst it does have Exchange support - a pre-requisite - it’s just not the same. To get around this I’ve installed Vista in a VMWare fusion instance so I can still have Outlook. There’s a whole extra dimension of suckiness using it this way mainly related to my mouse being even slower in the VM but I digress.
Maybe some of the good things will start to make themselves noticed soon but other than the Expose F9 command and xScope I’m not feeling a lot of love at the moment.
May 21st, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Try out QuickSilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ ). It’s one of those apps that will make you stick using Mac OS X :).
May 21st, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I just read the 10 minute intro and it looks very interesting. I had missed off the “Too much reliance on the mouse” entry in my list and if it’s as good as it sounds then this’ll answer that.
Ta
May 21st, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Loyal Mac user of 24 years reporting in.
I agree with you completely. You’ve managed to do something that very few people can accomplish. You’ve highlighted shortcomings in the OS without going all “Windows Zealot” on us. I appreciate that.
And as stated, I totally agree with your take…
May 21st, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Auto mount an network volume by dragging the share to your startup pane under System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items.
Concerning the "soft-click" to gain application focus, what you’re reporting is not the case for all applications. I have 6 applications open, none of which exhibit the issue that you are conveying.
May 22nd, 2007 at 1:22 am
Hey, great post. I agree with a lot of things here. but here’s my two cents anyway:
1) I prefer this behaviour, simply because in windows when I wanted to move focus to another window, I’d accidently click an OK button somewhere. This is personal preference so not a valid point
2) I hate that also. and yes it is just the mighty mouse. get a real mouse and it is MUCH MUCH faster. (but who keeps the original mouse even with a dell or HP computer)
3) This bothered me at first, but i got used to using Cmd+right-arrow/left-arrow. (in os x EVERYTHING is Cmd+something)
4) agreed. enough said. so much for human-computer interaction studies. this behaviour SUCKS
5) there is a way to add network volumes to your startup items (i think through a symlink). but this should be more obvious
6) Once i figured this out i preferred it. Simply because Enter to open items makes no sense. Cmd+down to open an item and Cmd+up to go up a level in a directory makes sense. Cmd+down works on both folders and files so it gives a nice consistency. But it should also be in context menu. a slow double-click also gives you easy renaming, like in windows
7) Yup. Just yes.
Blabbered on a bit there — my bad. good post
June 25th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
You are all like so narrowed minds. MacosX uses a lot of keyboard shortcuts. At first to me it seemed harsh to work 30 hour straight with my mac without going beserk about fast interaction. I learned about using shortcuts….which is the main difference between windows: Mac loves shortcuts. The key idea is mouse on one hand, the other hand on keyboard. You will work a lot faster than on a windows pc.
The same happens with all apple exclusive professional software like apperture: once again shortcuts rule.
The only point you are right about is number 6—about might mouse…
go to http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459
and chek it out.
Remember that requires pratice to use mac when you are a demanding workflow profissional, because we have the windows’ habbits. When you get practice, you will see what i mean.
July 11th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Why don’t you go call your mother narrow-minded you smart ass?? Apple have tried too hard to be different from Microsoft and in doing so they have refused to embrace some of the useful features of the Windows XP user interface.
The mouse acceleration curve is so badly implemented that it puts a lot of strain in your wrist. Cmd+Down to open a file is stupid because you need two hands, or you need to move your hand all the way to the arrow keys. Certainly the Mac was not designed for people who’ve lost limbs! Or maybe you just wanna play an mp3 while you are holding a cup of coffee in your left hand, I don’t know.
In Mac OS there is no task bar and to switch between apps takes additional clicks.
The Mac OS graphical user interface has been designed for useless people who care more about a pretty interface than being productive. How the hell do pretty graphics help me be more productive when they take longer to load?
The Dock is utterly useless, seriously, why do you think other OSs such as Linux use a taskbar like the Windows taskbar? Well, because it friggin’ makes more sense than the Dock.
The maximize button does not work in any useful way in Mac OS.
The Maximize, Minimize and Close buttons are too small in Mac OS, hence harder to hit. The problem gets worse owing to the poor implementation of the mouse acceleration curve.
The Mac OS shared toolbar is totally counter-productive, especially in multiple monitor set-ups. If you are working in the secondary monitor, every time you need to access a menu you need to go to the other screen, then come back.
In addition, in order to be able to access the menu of an application that is not currently in focus, you first need to give focus to the app and THEN you gain access to its menu bar, an action that in Windows is accomplished with a single click.
In Mac OS there is no way to create a new document from a template, for example, Right-click > New > Text document. The ability to create a text document wherever you are via context menu is invaluable.
Mac OS X provides no Start Menu for accessing all my applications quickly. Remember the Start Menu is just a directory and therefore it can be fully configured to make apps easily accessible.
The Caps Lock key in the Apple aluminium keyboard does not work as it should. Following the latest firmware upgrade for said keyboard, users are required to hold down the Caps Lock key for a certain amount of time before the green LED lights up. Supposed to help unskilled typists who hit this key accidentally. I have this key remapped to function as Backspace and it messess up my workflow. Basically, everything on the Mac is designed for average users, not for power users. I guess that’s cos they are in for the money, since most computer users are average users anyway.
Mac OS boots and shuts down more quickly than Windows.
Mac OS feels robust and responsive but the interface needs to learn from Windows. Microsoft should also incorporate some of the Mac OS features into their OS.
I run Windows on a MacPro and it works for me.
Please guys do a search on Google for the following strings (include the speech marks):
“windows xp sucks” - 576 hits
“mac os x sucks” - 4,910 hits
“windows vista sucks” - 56,400 hits (I agree!)
“windows xp annoyances” - 54,400 (more people using XP than OS X though)
“mac os x annoyances” - 1,300
“windows vista annoyances” - 40,400 hits (I also agree!)
There are more people using Windows XP than OS X, and a lot of computer users will complain that things cannot be done when in fact they can be done. This is true for both Mac OS X and Windows XP. However we need to ask power users. I think power users will agree that both OSs have brilliant features, but the Windows user interface allows you to work more quickly than the Mac OS X interface.
Vista sucks outright. Dear Microsoft, we didn’t need Vista, we needed you to finish off XP which was already pretty damn good.