Ramblings of a Switcher
Having moved my music and my primary laptop over to Apple machines in the past six months, there’s a lot to like, but also a lot of hate.
There are certain pieces of software that are Mac-only that I really prefer to anything available on Windows. TextMate stands out for development – while it’s not perfect, I can’t imagine doing rails coding without it anymore. Delicious Library has proven to be immensely useful for keeping track of what storage boxes I put things in when they’re rotated out to the storage space, a function I didn’t even really realize was missing until I had it. Dashboard works FAR better than anything equivalent on Windows.
On the interface side, while there are some improvements, many things are different for no apparent reason, without actually being better. This doesn’t really bother me, but it did take a little getting used to.
But what really gets me is that there are a bunch of things that are just wrong, for no apparent reason. They’d be easy to fix, but someone made an active decision that the platform was going to behave this way, and yes, I think they’re outright wrong. Some of these are problems with Apple software, some of them just problems with the general paradigm encouraged by Apple, and some problems with the specific pieces of software I’ve chosen (but which seem to be very popular in the Mac community).
- There are number of general interface oddities that make no sense. Why must windows only be resized from the bottom right corner? Why can’t I universally maximize windows? There’s that little green button on the interface. Who knows what it will do? Sometimes, it will maximize the current window to be full screen-ish, but just as often it does something completely useless. A particular failure of this function for which I blame Apple directly is what happens when you press this button when viewing PDF files in Preview. When reading a PDF file, I almost always want to, you know, be able to read the text on the page. The only way to do that is often to have the file fill the whole width of the screen, so the letters are large enough to be legible. There’s manual zoom in Preview, but no way to make the page fill the width of the screen. This makes reading documents in Preview unnecessarily frustrating. Hearing Apple apologists try to rationalize this away is amusing. “Oh, the Mac OS is based around the concept of having multiple windows open at once, so there’s no reason to maximize a window.” Uh, sure. Oh, I forgot, if Apple decides that it wasn’t important, I’m missing the point if I want it.
- There’s far too much clicking and insufficient use of keyboard shortcuts. Just about every piece of Mac software I’ve used suffers from this, but some are worse than others. For example, Omnigraffle – generally not a bad interface (although I have a list of other things that are specifically wrong with it), but there’s no way to edit the text of an item without double clicking on it. To add insult to injury, this function is even listed under the Keyboard Shortcuts section of the help.
- Don’t even get me started on the Finder.
- There’s plenty wrong with iTunes. Why is there no “currently playing” playlist? When you select an album and play it, then go look at another album, then jump to the next track, iTunes stops instead of playing the next song in the album you were listening to. There does not appear to be any way to play an entire album in the background without first making a playlist out of it. Which brings me to….
- iTunes management of external music folders is completely broken. There’s no way to synchronize the iTunes library with an external music source folder. If the folder is on a network drive and the network goes away for some reason, iTunes “loses” all of those tracks – they’re still listed, but they can’t be found until they’re individually played, one by one. Adding the external folder again causes all of these “missing” tracks to be doubled, and they only way to clear that out is to dump the entire library and re-add it, which also throws away all of the static playlists. iTunes, inexplicably, gives me the option to display duplicate tracks, but mysteriously no way to remove them automatically. That really helps when you’re dealing with thousands of tracks. Yes, I tried the Remove Duplicates Applescript. No, it didn’t work.
I complain, because I’d really like it to be better, and I’m surprised that it’s not. Don’t get me wrong – using the Mac is generally pretty pleasant. But these glaring flaws stick out like a sore thumb, and cast an avoidable and visceral pall over an otherwise happy experience.
October 22nd, 2006 at 7:01 pm
#2 really bothers me, too, and I’ve been told by Apple people that it’s just “more efficient” with liberal links to an “Ask Tog” article about tests of situations in which the mouse is pretty fast. But I know how to type, and more than that, I have a tremor, so anything that forces me to mouse in the middle of work (especially when my tremor might cause me to move the cursor a bit away from a menu, thus CLOSING IT – ARRRGH) makes me crazy with irritation.
I see #2 as a terrible place for Apple (and mouse enthusiasts) to stake a claim about what ought to be. To me, it’s an accessiblity disaster.
October 23rd, 2006 at 8:15 pm
I don’t see how that could possibly be justified as “more efficient”. In the particular case I mentioned, there’s a text key to select the object, and once I have activated the text edit box, I need both hands to type the label. So if my hands were already on the keyboard, you’ve made me move over to the mouse to activate it and then back to the keyboard to type.
Another thing about iTunes just came to mind – there’s no way to list the filesystem path of the files without individually selecting “Get Info” for each one! That’s another general gripe – thinking I don’t care where my files actually are. I can understand how it might be confusing to beginners to have to care and why it might be useful to abstract that away, but don’t stand in my way if this is actually important to me. There is zero justifiable reason why real file path isn’t an option for one of the columns. After all, the file does live somewhere.
Apple has been very good at the “Make it easy for beginners…” part, but fallen down horribly on the “but also make it easy for the experts” part.