My OSX annoyences list
September 25, 2005After reading this, and the KMac guys asking me what I did not like about Apple, I feel compelled to make my own list of annoyences with Apple and OSX. Warning: rant ahead.
- OS X is slow and heavy. No matter what all the Apple zealots tell you, do not, I repeat, do not believe them when they say that OS X is faster than Windows or Linux/[insert DE]. And it’s not like I have aging hardware or anything– I have an iBook G4 1.07Ghz with 512MBRAM and a Ati Radeon 9200 with 32MBRAM. Still, OSX literally takes *ages* to boot, *ages* to shutdown, and loading apps is sometimes painstakingly slow. And the speed within apps (excluding Safari) isn’t all that superb either.
- OSX is slowly becoming very inconsistent, especially GUI-wise. We now have 7 different themes, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s 6 too many. An operating system should have *one* theme. I *detest* inconsistency. And Apple keeps introducing new themes… Some people say they are experimenting, which is all fine– but they should only seed those experiments to testers and developers, and NOT to the general public. If people are looking for a consistent interface, stick with Linux/GNOME. OSX is not longer the epitome of consistency, GUI-wise that is.
- You cannot get rid of that annoying Google search field anymore since Safari 2.0.
Screen remnants are abundant in Tiger. In the image you see here, you can see one of the more abundant and annoying remnants: the scrollbar blob gets a remnant. The most annoying remnants, however, is the doubling of lines of text in text input fields, all throughout the OS. When you scroll down, for instance, certain lines get copied and you see them twice. Extremely annoying, and it looks crappy.
- Spotlight is too slow.
- Dashboard is useless, a memory hogger, and a big joke.
- The dock, while looking cool, is a UI nightmare. They should make a clear distinction between taskbar and app launcher; now they are intertwined and that’s extremely confusing to some people.
- Sometimes, Expose stops working. Better put: the screencorner function of Expose stops working, resulting in me only being able to use Expose using the keyboard. This happens at random, and is only fixable by a reboot.
- Mail.app has no vertical peview pane, and it uses ugly buttons.
- For a UNIX-based OS, OSX requires a lot of reboots. Install a 0.0.x release of iTunes, and *whop* reboot.
- OSX needs a better un-installer. Contrary to what many people believe, removing an app by dragging it to the trash does *not* uninstall all parts of the app. You can test this by re-instaling the app; you’ll very often see that it remembered your settings. I want to have the ability to *completely* remove an application.
- Since Tiger, Apple changed the way Safari handles .pdf files. Instead of opening them in Preview, with all the handy resizing & browsing functions, it now is loaded in-line in Safari, without decent and easily accesible resizing tools. You cannot jump to a certain page instantly; you can only use the scrollbar. Annoying.
That’s all that I had to say. There are probably more things, but these are the most annoying. Stay tuned for lists on Windows and Linux/GNOME.
1. Agreed
2. Agreed
3. Agreed
4. I don’t have these problems. Maybe you should install ATI’s driver instead of the built-in and retry.
5. I don’t agree with this. It’s as fast as on BeOS. Searching on attributes *is* time consuming.
6. Agreed.
7. Agreed. And also I would like to view there icons of apps that are not minimized at the time too. I don’t really use Expose because my function keys are too small and too far up in the keyboard.
8. I don’t know, I never use Expose.
9. I like the buttons ok, but yeah, Apple should go with the times and add a vertical mode.
10. Sorry, but this is normal. When 10.4.x updates are installed, these are KERNEL and DRIVER upgrades. Any OS should reboot on such updates! And iTunes *does not* ask you to reboot btw. The latest 5.0 and 5.01 versions of it did not ask that on my Powerbook.
11. Fully agreed.
12. Agreed.
And a few of my own:
13. The freaking mouse acceleration. The mouse code on OSX needs scrapping and rewriting. I don’t want to be purchasing USB Overdrive all the time…
14. I like the “maximize” button to be just that instead of a “zoom” as it is hard-coded sometimes (same problem on BeOS, except in the Tracker case where it makes sense to be as “Zoom”).
15. I don’t like the common menu bar. Sometimes some apps have so many menu items that the menu bar overwrites the notification icons on the right side.
16. To get keyboard navigation on the OS you must turn on the Accessibility stuff, which is NOT what you want to do as a normal user, because it turns ON other things that you don’t need to. Keyboard navigation should have been default on the OS.
17. Apple should support all external burners. Jesus, even Linux does without a problem! Apple is doing it on purpose, so they only sell their own internal ones.
18. Driver and some times app compatibility between major versions of the OS is *pathetic*. Many big companies, including samsung, stopped making OSX drivers because they got pissed off to have to rewrite/fix/re-debug their drivers on each version of the OS. With Windows they have to do that only once every 5 years or so. You see, it is easier for for the Apple engineers to fix things by breaking compatibility, but this adds probelms to their developers and to the consumer.
19. Bluetooth internet sharing does not work. Bluetooth internet support via a BT router does not work now. It used to work on Panther.
20. QuickTime is LAME to be asking you to register just to view a video as full screen. This is a basic need of the default media player on an OS.
21. The multi-user model on OSX is problematic. Printer and scanner drivers have LOTS of problems if you are NOT the admin of the machine! Bugs everywhere, because the driver does not have the right permissions. Yes, this is the bug of the printer/scanner manufacturer, but the thing is, if a KIND of bug is there to be seen in so many apps from different developers THEN it is the bug of the system and its bad API or at the very least, bad documentation.
Comment by Eugenia — September 25, 2005 @ 6:09 pm
Well, I find OS X fast enough, shut down and start up are very fast. I’d say its faster than Windows but then again, I find on portables Mac OS X is slow and I don’t know why it’s that way. My GF has the same iBook as you and it seems very slow compared to my G4 tower.
I agree on the themes; I wouldn’t be unhappy if they were good themes but they are just plain ugly.
I haven’t found a use for Spotlight yet. Maybe I just don’t get it. I’ve tried but I keep asking myself what it is good for.
I like Dashboard, as a toy but as a part of the OS, no way. It’s just too slow.
Mail.app is a UI train wreck, whoever thought it was a good idea?
Safari’s treatment of .pdfs is terrible; the old way was to download them, which was annoying, but this new way, inline, without any resizing options, is even worse.
I will add a few of my own:
1. Not support for themes. Every other OS on the planet allows theme-ing, why not Mac OS X?
2. Multiple desktops. The BSD subbase supports this, but the UI doesn’t. WTF is wrong with giving the user that option?
3. QuickTime. It will say it supports some formats but try to open that format (ala .avi) and it gives an error. Either support it, or don’t.
Comment by Chris — September 25, 2005 @ 9:59 pm
>1. Not support for themes. Every other OS on the planet allows theme-ing, why not Mac OS X?
I don’t personally use themes, I prefer the defaults (except in the case of unix where most defaults suck anyway). However, seeing Apple using many different looks for their apps, it is indeed puzzling why they don’t offer universal themeing. At least that way, the user will take the blame in the case of an ugly desktop and not Apple. :P
>2. Multiple desktops. The BSD subbase supports this, but the UI doesn’t. >WTF is wrong with giving the user that option?
Because they have their own regime to promote: Expose. This is what differentiates their product, so having multiple desktops is not on their best interest of their strategy. Personaly, I use the freeware “Desktop Manager” with 2 virtual desktops.
>3. QuickTime. It will say it supports some formats but try to open that >format (ala .avi) and it gives an error. Either support it, or don’t.
This is a bit complex to explain, but I will try: When a player says it supports .avi or .mov doesn’t mean it can play all movies that their filename end up in .avi or .mov. These are “container” formats, not real formats. Inside these formats the application that encoded the video might have used different codecs, e.g. aac instead of mp3, or mpeg4 instead of mpeg1, or divx2 instead of divx3. I understand that this becomes very confusing for the consumer who expects all .avi or .mov files to play, but the reality underneath is very different and it all depends on HOW the video was encoded. This is true for any player btw, not just QuickTime.
Comment by Eugenia — September 25, 2005 @ 11:14 pm
I agree totally with you complaints, except for #1 and to some extent #11.
#1) On my machine, a 1.33 GHz 12″ Pbook, startup and shut-down times are definitely reasonable, and frankly, it doesn’t really matter anyway since the only time I restart is when required to do so by a system update, or when I want to recover some disk space from FileVault. I love Mac OS X’s instant wake-up capability, and the machine uses almost no power when sleeping.
#11) Dragging an app to the trash does, for most apps, delete the application. Any remaining files (preferences, etc, residing in ~/Library) do not belong to the application; they belong to you. It would therefore be inappropriate for the system to delete these files when deleting the app. For example, if someone were to delete Mail.app, I think that person would have every right to be very upset if his or her email was deleted too. That said, it does seem that it should be simple for Apple to pop up a dialog box whenever an app is trashed, asking something like “Would you like to delete the following preferences and supporting files for this app?” and showing a list of the files under consideration for deletion. In any case, it is very easy to go into your library and clean up the supporting files manually, so there is at least an easy (though inelegant) workaround.
Oh, and here’s a fix for #12, Safari’s inline loading of PDFs (this drove me CRAZY until I found a fix). In the terminal, type:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
Then quit Safari and reopen it. Beats me why there is not a checkbox in the preferences for changing this behavior. Credit for this tip is due to http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050422040229515&query=safari+pdf
Comment by Mark H — September 26, 2005 @ 12:38 am
It is ANNOYANCE, not annoyence. Dilutes your message to spell it wrong from the get-go. It would be singular, not plural. An “annoyance” list would imply that you have more than one because you have used the word “list,” meaning a multitude of facts.
Comment by Lewis — September 26, 2005 @ 1:08 am
Expose is hardly a substitute for multiple workspace. It annoys me.
Comment by Chris — September 26, 2005 @ 1:43 am
OS X has a built-in system-wide dictionary, activated by selecting the word you want to check and pressing control + command + d - for dictionary … You may wish to try this on the words in your title for this article.
Cheers.
Comment by Pete West — September 26, 2005 @ 2:35 am
> Screen remnants are abundant in Tiger.
I don’t see this this bug on any of several systems. Are you sure this isn’t a problem with your video card?
Comment by Chris Not Chris — September 26, 2005 @ 3:09 am
My impression of Tiger is that it is still a beta. I’m hoping the much anticipated 10.4.3 update will cure most of the ills with the Tiger. The same sorry state of affairs happened with the 10.3 (Panther) update cycle. Apple’s desire to keep everything under such a tight lid is obviously making late beta testers out of the early adopters.
Apple has promised the developers that the endless changes under the hood of each previous version of the OS is coming to a halt, so maybe we can hope for more stability through the rest of the 10.4-10.5 OS cycles. I don’t want to sound like an apologist for Apple, but I think the software team has been pushed so hard and fast on OS development that a lot of sloppy stuff has gotten out the door. Mr Jobs, hire some software developers.
My hope for the next major revision 10.5 is not ‘200 Features’ of eye candy– but a concentration on interface responsiveness, fixing the Windowing system, interoperability with LINUX and Windows, sync with external devices, a unified GUI layout theme and a multi-threaded finder. Mature what you have and spare us more flash at the expense of the fundamentals.
Comment by DAG — September 26, 2005 @ 3:43 am
OS X maybe slow on portables, because of one factor… Disk Swapping, OS X seems to love RAM… but it loves Virtual Memory Paging even more, Apple iBooks are fitted with 4,800RPM drives which may be why it runs a bit slower.
Comment by Andrew Youll — September 26, 2005 @ 6:03 am
“Oh, and here’s a fix for #12, Safari’s inline loading of PDFs (this drove me CRAZY until I found a fix). In the terminal, type:”
Hey, great, thanks! I’ll try that out when I get back from university today.
“It is ANNOYANCE, not annoyence.”
My native language isn’t English, so I might make mistakes.
“Mature what you have and spare us more flash at the expense of the fundamentals.”
AMEN.
Comment by Administrator — September 26, 2005 @ 6:48 am
Right, you’ve caught me in a very bad mood.
This rant is fucking nonsense. Go back to your Windows Explorer and find out what the keyboard shortcut is for “New Folder” (hint it’s not Ctrl+N, or even Shift+Ctrl+N). You haven’t a fucking clue what you’re talking about. Bloody schoolkids…
Comment by J — September 26, 2005 @ 10:02 am
Cool, a genuine Mac troll on my blog! I feel honored!
“You haven’t a fucking clue what you’re talking about.”
Yeah, I made it to Managing Editor of one of the biggest computernews sites in the world because I “haven’t a fucking clue what [I’m] talking about”.
LOL.
“I don’t see this this bug on any of several systems. Are you sure this isn’t a problem with your video card?”
Actually, I mentioned this in the interview the KMac guys (deffo Mac-fans) had with me, and they acknowledged this problem, they had it too. Since these remnants starting popping up *after* the upgrade to Tiger, it must be a software problem, since Panther had no such remnants.
Comment by Administrator — September 26, 2005 @ 12:56 pm
Fair complaints but hardly the only ones or the most crucials …
1. The worse problem is that it is not only slow but it *feels* slow. Of course, that alone wouldn’t make me use Window$ as my main OS.
2. Couldn’t agree more. I hated metal when it came out to replace aqua and I hated aluminium PowerMacs (for some reason I liked Titanium/Aluminium PowerBooks). I am using Iridium skin because I can’t stand the new Mail and iTunes look.
3. I am not using Safari. There are better browsers around but none is perfect so I have to use more than one. Opera would be fine for me if it was a Cocoa app.
5. It depends. It’s certainly not worse than the competition. It’s interface and functionality is what needs work. Right now it feels like alpha version - too many inconsistencies and rough edges.
6. Micro$oft would make millions for years if it had a feature as polished as that. You can easily turn it off and on - search Macupdate.
7. The Dock needs an overhaul ASAP.
8. Never experienced that as I’ve always used a multi-button mouse and Expose is too frequently used not to have it assigned on one. I find it unintuitive to move the pointer to a corner open a program or trigger a function on a constant basis. And there is really only one hot corner easily used if you have a dual-monitor system: bottom left. All the others are too hard/easy to trigger.
9. I agree. I hate Mail’s new look too. It’s too Windowish and looks cheap.
11. I hate installers/uninstallers. It’s what makes Winblow$ so lame after all. It’s a common cause for problems. Window$ has to keep up with everything making it so slow (if you don’t think it is slow you either work for Micro$oft, you are too young/old or you ‘ve never really used more than 2 OSes). The uninstall process gets easily corrupted on Windoze and you have to deal with registry sooner or later. I just love applications that are as self-contained as possible with just entries on Preferences and Application Support directories (perhaps these two could be unified someday ?).
12. See above (#3). I believe there are many ways to change this misbehaviour. RCDefaultApp is one of these.
Finder has never been remarkable but that’s because I was using a superior OS when others only knew about MacOS, MSDOS and Unix. What really bothers me is annoyances that I am not able to fix with a 3rd party program, either because I haven’t found one or because there is none:
- GUI inconsistencies
Inability to align icons properly in the Desktop (grid spacing is too wide).
Inability to change default windows-focus behaviour (I hate clicking twice on an inactive window just to activate a widget/button. Maybe there is a tool around ?).
Drag’n'drop does not work ok universally (Why is it so unintuitive to select a folder or a group of images in Preview ? Why you can drag’n'drop text to another window’s textbox/textarea only if the latter has been previously activated ?)
Is there any reason that someone would want to open 100 “Get Info” windows when he really wanted to change the attributes of his 100 photos instead ?
- System performance
Crucial system features and performance of applications like MySQL is too slow and the CPU or the app programmer is not always the one to blame.
Help viewer is too slow (not the program but the local indexing and the retrieval from the online resources).
Quicktime 7.x is terribly slow.
Comment by george — September 26, 2005 @ 1:45 pm
“Inability to change default windows-focus behaviour (I hate clicking twice on an inactive window just to activate a widget/button. Maybe there is a tool around ?).”
That must be the one thing that I absoultely *like* about OSX! I detest the fact that in other operating systems or DEs lowered windows are actually active too; because it forces you to find an empty, widget-less space to click. That is for instance why I’ve already accidentally banned two people on OSNews: I was using GNOME, but thought I was in OSX, so I clicked the Firefox window blindly, only to find I was clicking the “ban user” button :/.
“6. Microsoft would make millions for years if it had a feature as polished as that. You can easily turn it off and on - search Macupdate.”
I know, I use DisableTigerFeatures to disable Dashboard.
Btw, thanks for the responses, everyone!
Comment by Administrator — September 26, 2005 @ 2:07 pm
Not sure what to make of all this as in my experience I seem to disagree with 99% of it. Picking one item at random, PDF handling, I would say the following: The default PDF handler IS Preview; it is not Safari as stated above. Second, when a PDF opens n Safari you can’t resize it? Of course you can, do the obvious and Ctl click or right clik and you have the option to zoom in and out. Perhaps as an expert in SO much, someone has become a jack of all and master of none…
Comment by JT — September 26, 2005 @ 5:45 pm
“Lets see now, what stinking opinions will get the most attention and pay my salary (and overweight kids)? I know, lets start the paparazzi-like slamming of a good OS! And now that other ‘evil’ companies are (trying) not to be (seem) so evil, let us help them too…”
PCs are fast.
Macs are fast.
AMDs are fast, (IBM) PPCs are fast and Intel are fast CPUs.
Other computers are probably fast too.
This and that software are fairly good, OS X is very good and Windows is too tightly clogged with technology and methods to keep developers — and thus most owners — blind to any other possible choice.
I programmed PCs for ~10 years (NOT VB!), worked for the ‘evil’ company for 1 1/2 years and have now (mid ‘02) left and gone back to Apples, open-source and hardware that _just_works_!
I am interested in what a person, or I, do with computers and information, NOT playing games, chasing arbitrary commercial goodies or wasting my time by reading, blogging or being a (company) champion for IT promises or future rumours — to stifle free thinking or some innovation.
MY annoyances list contains all you commercial money grabbing media types and or CEOs, who try and continue to manipulate the average ‘joe’.
Comment by David Green — September 26, 2005 @ 9:19 pm
Am I thinking about the same OS as you are? I’m not entirely sure…
#1. OS X 10.3.9 is certainly much quicker on my upgraded Sawtooth PowerMac G4 with 1.2 GHz G4 and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro than my office computer is with Windows 2000 Pro on a P4 2.4 GHz. It starts in less than half the time and it shuts down immediately - compared to Windows where a shutdown command can take several minutes. The only app that I feel is slower on my Mac is Word 2004 where the scrolling speed sucks compared to the Windows Word 2000 version.
#2. Agreed that OS X is lacking in consistency compared to OS 9, but compared to Linux? Gimme a break - the most inconsistent system I have GUI-wise is my Linux laptop (Mandrake 10.1). I still like using Linux more than I like using Windows.
#3. I don’t use 10.4, but I use the Google search field all the time. I wouldn’t want to get rid of it.
#7. It may be confusing to some people, but not in any way to me. It is definitely more consistent than the confusing behavior of the task bar on my Windows computer at work or on my Windows XP laptop at home (1.3 GHz AMD and slow as molasses, definitely slower than my 600 MHz Celeron Linux laptop and less than half the speed of my 1.2 GHz PowerMac in most tasks).
#8. I only use F9 to get to Exposé, so I don’t know about any hot spot corners.
#9. I use Entourage 2004 as my PIM. There are as few reasons to use Mail.app in OS X as there are reasons to use Outlook Express in Windows.
# 10. I hardly ever have to reboot my Mac. The only times seems to be when security updates are released, and I don’t find that especially surprising. My Linux computer needs fewer restarts due to upgrades, but do not sleep gracefully, and thus needs to be shut down, a flaw that takes a lot of time. I only use deep sleep on my Mac, which make it sleep and wake in an instant. Even if I restart it, the total cycle is very short compared to either my Linux, Windows XP or Windows 2000 Pro experience.
# 11. A centralized *working* uninstallation function should be nice on any system, but seems to be less than optimal everywhere. In Windows you often get confusing questions about if you want to remove dll files you never heard about while uninstalling. If this works for you, fine, but it does not work for most users.
Comment by Bo — September 27, 2005 @ 10:49 pm