Apple, OSX, Macs

[Wily Duck]

I've had enough experience with a Macbook Pro now that it's time to give my 2 cents. Two months worth if that's of value to you. I use it on a daily basis as my primary machine ~9 hours a day.

Impressions. First, looks. This laptop is about as sexy as it comes. Silver, sleek, it's hot. What's behind it is OSX, 10.4. For those that don't know, that's the OS version. Apple's OSX is sorta like XP, the .4 is like service pack 4. Gotta keep the peeps out of the loop in the know. I'm going to make a great deal of comparison to Windows XP to ensure a common ground to the Windows users.

The interface. I walked into this having the most vague knowledge of a Mac GUI. Upon first boot, configuring was easy. Everything got rolling pretty quickly. Rather than tell you about the buttons to push, I'll tell you of the experience.

The mac has an equivalent of a Windows control panel. Everything is one touch. What I began to find quickly were limitations set by Apple to keep you on their path. Many things I found easily customizable in Windows XP I no longer could control in OSX. Being an extreme XP power user, there's a great deal of functionality I expect from a mainstream GUI OS. Many nuances began to unravel. On the flipside I found otherwise challenging features that were made to be stupid-friendly.

First, plugging in a LCD monitor to the DVI port gave me the expected result with almost no interaction on my part. I had to find the display settings to adjust where in space the new monitor was to become my second display. It also took some time (weeks) to realize that in order to move the taskbar (dock) I had to drag the tiny representation in the same display settings, but the cursor doesn't change upon mouseover so the feature isn't obvious.

Software included should get anyone going. Safari = Internet Explorer. ICal is a calender program. Textedit is like wordpad but usable like notepad. Finder is the Explorer equivalent. However the likenesses began separating, but not for the better. Let's start with Finder, being the primary way you interact with your files.

Finder handles GUI file management a bit different that Windows. For starters, you have your mounted drives and primary shortcuts on the left, rather than a file tree. The shortcuts are sufficient, but do remove some of the control the user could have. I think you should note every time I say something like this, that's a -1 for the power user, but a +1 for the non-power users. The right side of Finder has 3 views, single directory listing in icon view, single directory listing in list view, and multi-list view. One feature I like here is in multi-list view, you can grab and drag the tiny button at the bottom to the right to reveal the full filenames while resizing the window as you expand the width. Nice. The next cool feature would be easy mounting of network drives. After that though...things become ugly for anyone who can move around a filesystem faster than a new computer user.

Here's where I find Microsoft to be the dominating force behind OS GUIs. In OSX, you can ONLY resize a window using the lower right corner, then grab and move the window elsewhere if that's not enough room. You can not use copy and paste commands in Finder. That means files you want to move, you must open multiple finder windows and put yourself in the appropriate from/to directories. You can not see the file tree in finder even in multi-list view. In single list view, you can not move up a directory in even close to one click. You can not select multiple files in the Windows fashion of control-click, you are limited to shift click for A-Z selections, i.e. pick file A and file Z and all files in between are selected.

So far this adds up to BOGUS. Let me tell you, it is. Dealing with the filesystem via the GUI is a slow, painfully tedious process. There is a saving grace: Mac OSX is built on FreeBSD. Their motto is: it powers the internet. This is true, and I love FreeBSD. You're reading this page served from a FreeBSD server. So when I pull up a console window, I'm in familiar territory. The CLI starts in bash shell, excellent. All commands plus a few are awaiting that I require. Perl is loaded. Aliases for basic stuff are ready. If I've got anything to give a huge thumbs up to, it's the Mac OSX CLI (command line interface, sorry, kinda like DOS if you're still clueless). I can manipulate the filesystem faster in the CLI than the GUI. Bah!

Safari isn't anything special. It browses the web. No plus/minus points here. This is a good thing, as of course there aren't any noteful negatives.

ICal - I toasted it. Once I got MS Office for Mac OSX loaded, no need for it.

MS Office OSX - pretty decent, but lack the user interface power of the Windows version.

Let's break for a moment. Why is it I have to do like 2-3 things on a Mac for most 1 step things I have to do in Windows?? We're talking ~35% efficiency here. That's not encouraging my love towards this otherwise sexy machine.

Running Firefox on the Mac. Still, for some Apple reason, I don't have as much functionality on a Mac as I do XP! The same friggin piece of software! Frustrations are beginning to mount.

Next, let's do something about this. I want XP loaded as a virtual instance because I need Visio, a Windows only Microsoft application. Cool, gives me a reason to run Windows. I used Parallels 3 as my virtual machine application. After one week, I had to abandon it. Somehow the software corrupted my XP install (already had major problems with the application in the meantime) and destroyed my XP instance like it was salty I was running Windows on a Mac. It also corrupted my Firefox profile, an important Excel file I had opened in the instance but saved locally on the mac, and a few other important files. I moved to VMware Fusion. This application has treated me solidly. I'm used to running it on Windows, and it's simple to run here too.

Within the XP instance, I find an immediate problem. Within SecureCRT, a fully featured telnet/SSH program, I can no longer use shift-insert to paste stuff to the command line of the device I'm communicating to. Why? THE MAC KEYBOARD HAS NO INSERT KEY. In fact, the sexy mac keyboard you can buy seperately has a Function button in place. This is the same function button you find on a laptop keyboard. Here's where I found the general mentallity of the Mac community. The ignorance I found was astounding. Their answer, OMG THAT KEY IS STUPID WHAT IS IT?

Mac community: we were told this is how it is so this is how it is, everyone else is stupid. So far in this review, I think I've detailed quite a few points about the interface that I will not accept served to me and expected to eat without complaints. If I'm paying for a meal and get cold food or small portions, I'm going to have some issues that require explaining. The explanation I'm getting is eat it and like it. No dice. On the issue of not having an insert key, it's starting to really kill me for practical applications. It'd be like missing your big toe. Eventually you're going to want to run, and excuses are no longer going to get you over the fact you can only limp fast.

To the new user, with a pretty manual next to you you'll be quite fine. To the twitchy fast users such as myself, OSX doesn't cut it. I need more customability. It seems as though Apple has chosen the direction of Hollywood over practicality. I bet doing The Thing looks great in a vid-cap replay, but in reality it sucks to get anything done effectively. For a FreeBSD GUI, I think it's a world better than any Gnome or KDE interface I've tried.

Here's a list of stupid things that get in my way - resizing windows are very choppy and slow. Autoscrolling needs a supercomputer (I do NOT mean computer upgrade) to handle what it wants to be a smooth scrolling experience - there's no workaround. The application integration Expose's features are decent, allowing you to switch between windows from an auto-display of all windows in play, clicking on one app to switch to - useful. Windows usually only maximize to a size that thinks the window needs a sidebar - I said maximize, not kinda maximize! Insert method to get-more-maximize here...

Let's look at hardware for a minute. The mouse I have is bluetooth, but has this bump of a button. A tiny little wheel mouse taking the place of a scroll wheel. It's effective, but sure doesn't feel satisfying at all. Almost annoying to touch. The touted Mac keyboard that's just sooo damn sexy (this time I'm sarcastic but it looks good) is a wrist wresting, hunt-and-peck inspired design. The only other keyboard I've seen like it is Dell's low profile keyboard. See for yourself Apple's creation:



It's a wrist killer because there's no support, it's a rectangular slab of aluminum and plastic. Not adjustable in any way. Directly representative of Apple's Our Way or the Highway design.

They're adamant about using their Apple key, or some key that looks like a ][ with circles. To do most anything that requires a keyboard shortcut, they remind you this is a Apple product by having everything need to use the Apple button. Control is an afterthought. Shift is kinda a buddy. The Option key, yes another command key, is like Alt but not. However if you want Alt, you can hold down the Function key and press Option to get Alt then press the [whatever] key while your hand is cramping over pressing all the other command keys while your brain is wrapping around what the hell it is you're pressing all these buttons for in the first place. Get the picture?

OSX tries to be friendly. But it's friendly like a gay friend who's slack-life ambitions are limited to whatever is mainstream and easy. They're a cool friend to have at the latte shoppe, but brings unnecessary annoyances to the rest of your life. Practicality in power is not the focus, but as long as you remain on the pre-set path, you're gold. The Mac path is thin, the Windows path is wide. The wilderness is far more vicious wandering off the Mac path, whereas the Windows off-path is not so vicious but has hard pitfalls.

The ability to do a lot with a lot in Windows beats out a Mac who can do a lot with a little. Windows is far more bloated...dammit I have to admit I can see the value of the OS bloatness when I just need something done, now. There's a lot I require of the system, so when I need that something, I don't want to have to learn how to hack a method worthy of a 4th-year computer science student's homework assignment. Yes I can do it given enough time, but I'm trying to Do The Thing, not figure out how to make the thing then figure out how to make it work.

I don't hate the Mac, OSX. I like it in some ways, it makes certain difficult things easy. It however makes a great deal of easy things quite difficult. It's a shame Vista tries to be like OSX. Maybe this will make sense of a lot of Vista's heresay's downfalls?

Overall, a Mac running OSX is not a bad machine whatsoever. If you want a machine to kick ass around in, stick to Windows XP. If you want a machine that's patient and housebroken, get a mac.

[Wily Duck]

A recent slashdot thread posting reveals the truth behind Apple's monopoly:

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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=496460&cid=22830926
>but the reason Apple won't face any lawsuits for this is because they are breaking into the Windows browser market, not dominating it

That makes no sense. If a copy of Office 2008 for OSX installed Windows Media Player to fight off iTunes then slashdot would melt from the outrage. When Apple does it, slashdotters bend over bankwards to rationalize it.

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

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This couldn't be truer. It has become obvious to myself and others, Apple is utilizing the same monopoly techniques that Microsoft has gotten themselves in trouble for. There was a thread (I'll find the link later) on macrumors or something asking people what they hated about macs... a note I made clear was the fanboys. They refuse to 'think different' accepting only Steve Jobs as their God. If it's not Apple, it's crap! Funny how even the fanboys that surround me are eventually corrupted out of their streamlined linear Apple world to realize the end-all solution doesn't reside in one OS (huh winxp can do that too..? show me! ohhh...) But damn, they're plenty loud and arrogant to make sure others sing their Mac-tune.

Let me take this moment to again publicly dispense my HATE to Finder, the Mac "explorer". Microsoft nailed GUI file management with explorer. Finder is a pretty PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT. KDE doesn't do so well in this category either. EVERYONE! Take notes! Windows and Microsoft dominates because Explorer ROCKS when it comes to file management!!!!!! If you have any doubts try to use another OS and it's file management core application. No one can match the speed, flexibility, ease of doing multiple tasks, and application compatibility that Explorer has. I may not like Microsoft as a marketing muscling company (I really don't) but explorer is what keeps me using their OS. Until any other GUI OS can match explorer, it's doubtful I'll make a dedicate primary switch of my OS's. Apple make note! (they won't, Steve Jobs is the arrogance dominator of Mac usage, expect no changes).

I love 4 operations to every one I can do in windows. Not like my time matters or anything.

[Wily Duck]

This guy summed it all up quite nicely.

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1325867&cid=28953307

[Wily Duck]

Another lovely apple "feature" that I'd like to bring to any of the potentially curious. Every time you connect a new USB flash drive, or any USB device that has storage capabilities, into OSX, it pisses a 3.5" floppy disks' worth of files all over your drive, whether you like it or not. That means if a friend loans you a stick for a minute to copy some stuff off, you will rudely throw a bunch of files on their storage device without consent or option to not do this.

Here's a Garmin GPS device. Simply by connecting it to OSX, 84 files and a number of directories are written. The size may increase as well, because not only is OSX crapping all over your USB drive, but it's indexing everything too. Until it's done with this procedure, I/O is limited so you won't get the expected read/write performance until it's done.



There is a partial safeguard if you have a drive that needs at least some protection from this nuisance behavior. Splat your own turd marker: drop a file in the root/main folder called ".meta_never_index". This will prevent the general thrashing of the USB drive, but still you'll get a little OSX residue, like it's really trying to spite you for not accepting the apple way.

This is a major irritation for anyone that uses a mac with any windows product. No, I didn't say PC, because a mac is just a PC with OSX as the operating system.