10 Dumb things about Mac OS X
Tuesday, April 10th, 2007On the whole I think Mac OS X is superior to Windows XP, but still I find there are some real annoyances. So to balance things out (from my usual bitching about XP) here are my least favorite things about OS X:
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There is no maximize function for application windows; instead only a ridiculous zoom option which seems to vary its functionality depending on the application (screwing up on thumbnail views in folder windows). As a developer I am accustomed to running applications fullscreen and this limitation just feels bloody minded. Also the zoom option has no hotkey assigned by default, so you are forced to click a stupid little button or select it from the Window menu. After screwing around for a bit I have assigned a hotkey now, which is slightly helpful, but I still don’t like the fact that it won’t just maximize the damn window.
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No built in [GUI] FTP client. The Finder lets you connect via regular ftp to a server, but the connection is read-only, so if you want to upload you need to go find a third-party client. I am using Cyberduck for now, because it is one of the few free ones available for OS X.
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Hitting enter on a selected item counts as a rename rather than an open. WTF?!? I can’t believe they’ve kept this after all these years, when in every other context enter means "Open". To open/launch a selected item requires Command-Down (or Command-O). Wow, how intuitive.
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The Home and End keys perform functions which are virtually useless. Home goes to the top of a document and End goes to the bottom. How often do I need this? Maybe once or twice a day. To navigate to the beginning or end of a line I have to press Command-Left and -Right respectively, even for a single line edit box. This functionality I use several hundred times a day, so why should I be messing with modifier keys? Windows gets this right and OS X again demonstrates sheer bloody mindedness by not adopting the obvious.
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Blobby/smudgy fonts. Apple does not use the same kind of font-hinting that Microsoft does, and this means the readability of small fonts can suffer and result in text looking overly heavy or smudgy. Although this allows nice continuous scaling of fonts, I think that the TrueType method is actually more readable on a screen. I’ve seen this problem quite a lot in my own work with fonts, and really think the priority should always be readability.
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The finder is ugly and not nearly as functional as it could be. For some reason it uses the otherwise abandoned brushed-metal look, has borders that are unnecessarily thick, and feels very clumsy to navigate. It makes me miss Windows Explorer and its solid Tree/List view combination.
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The only way to manually adjust a window size is by dragging the bottom right corner— I don’t see why all four borders can’t be independently draggable as they are in WinXP. This means excessive mouse mileage, and sometimes is highly inconvenient because the corner is not actually within the visible screen area.
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I can’t work out how to get TextEdit to let me edit HTML source, since it just opens as rich text. I am really missing a lot right now, so when I get to porting stuff it will be at the top of my list. I want a TEXT editor, not a mystery document editor.
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The backspace key is called Delete, and to further confuse things there is no consistency between apps about what keypress is used to delete an object. On a MacBook this means that to delete an item I might press Delete, Fn+Delete or Command+Delete, depending on whether I’m in Finder, iTunes, Mail etc.
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Document-centric applications that stay running in the dock even after I’ve closed all of their documents. The worst offenders (ie applications that have no reason to stay open): Preview, TextEdit, Safari, Quicktime. I acknowledge that it’s useful for certain applications like Mail and iTunes to stay alive; they actually do useful stuff, even when they have no windows open. But most others are just wasting Dock space, system resources and the user’s attention.
April 10th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
I’m using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on a MacBook and it works great! The hardware is almost all supported (wifi needs to use the Windows driver, but native support is on the works by madwifi developers), and iSight is broken (kernel issues), but will most certainly work on the final release.
Give it a shot when it comes out, you can run it from the CD to try out.
I believe you prefer Windows, nevertheless this shortcomings could be a good indication to try other alternatives, and what’s best than a free one? ;-)
Hope your getting better.
Cheers.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
To be honest I don’t think I could handle a third OS :)
On the whole I prefer OSX, even though I’m more familiar (read: faster) with Windows. WinXP feels broken right out of a fresh install, whereas OSX just has a bunch of weird quirks IMO.
April 11th, 2007 at 12:06 am
all these short comings are very easily addressed:
Replace the Finder with Pathfinder (shareware but long trial)
Use Menu Master to on-the-fly customise any shortcuts
(shareware)
Cyberduck is your sftp/ftp program (open source)
fonts? why not use Microsoft ones :) I like verdana.
for HTML, try taco edit, or BBEDit or anyother program but text edit.
use Macupdate to find all of the above.
don’t gripe, just find better solutions, that’s half the fun.
April 11th, 2007 at 12:08 am
damn, i’m missing an ‘e’ !
how come intepid does not remember me anymore. I have to keep typing in my profile everytime i post.
April 11th, 2007 at 1:08 am
xcode edits html rather well… And all text documents, really.
April 11th, 2007 at 1:49 am
DM– I like griping, and I’ve done enough about XP in the past :) I’ll check out Pathfinder…
Tim– XCode is pretty good actually… and recognizes PHP too which is handy. Thanks, good tip!
April 11th, 2007 at 4:05 am
While TextEdit can edit plain text (convert open documents to plain text via cmd-shift-T), it’s basically a light wordprocessor, and kinda inappropriate for coding. If you’re open to paying, TextMate is the editor du jour for OS X geeks — it does some ridiculously clever stuff.
Some of your GUI gripes aren’t just about OS X, but are quirks of the Mac platform in general, and have a lot of historical baggage attached to them from the early ’80s. Xerox PARC aside, Apple actually invented a lot of original stuff about windowing GUIs as we know them, and have stuck a little stubbornly to their original implementation — including the lack of maximisation (which I personally don’t miss), and the single resize corner. Meanwhile, Windows 1.0 actually wasn’t able to display overlapping windows, and could only manage tiling — I think this is why maximisation feels right on that platform.
April 11th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Oh, you can set the minimum point size for font antialiasing in the “Appearance” system preference pane, which might be good for small fixed width fonts, esp for coding.
April 11th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
It’s been a while since I’ve used a mac, but I remember the lack of a maximise button used to bug me. Along with the single resize point. It felt a bit like being back on Workbench 1.3.
Can you manually resize a window to be fullscreen? I seem to have vague memories of never actually being able to make Netscape use the whole screen.
April 12th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Is anyone else having the problem mentioned by dirtymouse? ie you need to enter your details every time you leave a comment
April 12th, 2007 at 5:01 am
it remembered my details :)
April 12th, 2007 at 5:09 am
so this lack of window max is about not hindering the drag/drop process? Except in xp, you can drag over the destination app’s tab in the task bar, where it gets focus and you can continue to drag and then drop to the newly focused app.
April 12th, 2007 at 8:40 am
It’s more about screen real estate… I’d really like a true maximize which covers everything but the menu bar (and optionally the dock depending on autohide settings). On XP I use maximized apps all the time, and it’s nothing to do with an XP shortcoming, it’s about focusing on a single task.
April 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Worth googling OSX maximize window to see the irritation that this causes (and the bizarre rationale some people have for why Apple shouldn’t provide this frikkin obvious feature)
April 12th, 2007 at 12:47 pm
My details are being remembered fine.
Good point Michael. I just took a look at some of the ‘zoom vs maximise’ debates out there, and it seems a lot people believe you simply can’t drag and drop when maximised to fullscreen. Even 98 lets you do it via the task bar.
April 13th, 2007 at 9:06 am
You can drag and drop straight onto the Dock, tho that tends to open a new document, you can drag and then Command-Tab to the app you want and then drop, best is using Expose to drag, show all windows or apps as you please, hover and drop.
I agree on many of the other annoyances, tho I do not miss maximise. I mostly just scp from Terminal but Transmit, while not free is a great sftp app, you can set up droplets. TextMate is not free but it is an amazing editor.
June 7th, 2007 at 4:30 am
Wasn’t a mac user when I first read this post, so all just sort of floated by me. Having been MacBooking for a week now however, re-reading it reveals a list of peeves scarily identical to my own. [as well as the delete key not serving a backspace function, and also not deleting objects by default!]
June 7th, 2007 at 4:31 am
btw, I do happen to think everything else is totally bitchin’ however
June 9th, 2007 at 7:05 am
TextWrangler is free and is awesome. I really agree with your point - I am a long time mac, win, linux, solaris professional, so I can sympathize
August 30th, 2007 at 6:25 am
2. Transmit, from Panic, is worth your money if you FTP a lot. It is a delightful piece of software.
3. And I think enter to rename is infuriating when I use Windows!
4. The really annoying thing is that MS Word uses the Microsoft text selection/navigation keys rather than the OS local ones. That sucks. Of course Apple is doing some things like that in its Windows apps (Safari, iTunes). They both should know better. WTF?
5. Fonts: The MS style produces screen results with different heights/widths/weights than the printed output. That’s pretty much a nonstarter typographically. Windows screen legibility is superior, probably (the nasty sparkle from its higher contrast notwithstanding), but it just shows a totally different idea of what a font is. You can adjust the anti-aliasing in the Appearance System Pref pane to suit your screen.
6. Finder sucks. We Mac users understand this. It will get better, incrementally. I’m not a Pathfinder fan, but heavy use of Quicksilver allows one to spend less time there.
8. I believe TextEdit has a system preference to that effect, but you don’t really want to use TextEdit. BBEdit (TextWrangler is the free version), TextMate, SubEthaEdit. Pick one.
August 30th, 2007 at 6:34 am
JEdit for coding and Transmit for sftp is my ultimate osx fantasy. Had the same problem with TextEdit last year. Also Vi is built into the machine via terminal.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:05 am
This is a windows user’s list. I’m a mac lifer and I take exception to almost every point there.
Just because something is done differently to windows, doesn’t make it worse.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:27 am
1. Maximise makes a window AS BIG AS IT NEEDS TO BE. If you maximise a window, and it doesn’t take up the whole screen, that’s because the window is already showing all the content and making the window any bigger would be pointless
2. Yeah, I’m with you on this.
3. I’m used to this, and I often get annoyed at windows for doing it the other way round. It’s just preference really
4. Useless to you. I’m a programmer and I find them very useful.
5. MS ClearType actually gave me a headache, so I disabled it. Health comes before readability ;)
6. The finder is livable. I personally find it alright, but leopard does improve greatly. You can always get pathfinder.
7. Since content generally resizes to the bottom right, the current method does make more sense. Also, to add drag areas to other parts of the window would either reduce content space, or provide too small a target (MS Windows only manages this by adding massive borders to ALL windows, something which you are criticizing the finder for ;)
8. Yep I agree, textedit should edit source by default.
9. That’s because the backspace key is commonly called the “delete key”, and nobody really uses the forward delete key anyway.
On the inconstancies, normally backspace is default. It’s command backspace for the finder since moving something to the trash is potentially dangerous if done by accident, so a modifier is used to reduce this risk
August 30th, 2007 at 8:39 am
To edit HTML in textedit just go to prefs and the “Open and Save” tab, then check the box “Ignore rich text commands in HTML files”. Easy fix.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Yeah, Mac>Win. Some of these seem very technical, but others seem rather obvious, and I thought that “wow, he’s right, that is annoying” more than once while reading this. I hope some people at Apple see it.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:50 am
As far as (3) a shortcut for opening/launching selected items goes, you are aware of double-clicking, I hope. (At least by now, 4 months later…) If you’re using the keyboard to select instead of the mouse, you’ve also got command-Down, or command-O for Open, as you mentioned. Here’s a feature and also a warning: If multiple items are selected, double-clicking one will open them all.
August 30th, 2007 at 8:57 am
(Sorry if I stated the obvious, by the way, but we long-time Mac users have had to learn to do a lot with clicking and double-clicking, what with being limited to a one-button mouse for so many years.)
August 30th, 2007 at 9:00 am
(…not to mention shift-clicking, command-clicking, option-clicking , and control-clicking. Ok, I’ll stop now.)
August 30th, 2007 at 9:22 am
#4. I didn’t know you could use command-left/right. THX!! I hate not having full Pageup/down keys and home/end.
#9. I remap the right Enter key (by the spacebar) to Delete and now can’t imagine not having it. ESPECIALLY if you work in Windows (virtual) as well. I also have expose as the right command key.
August 30th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Your story would be better titled “Things in Mac OS X that a Window user can’t get used to”. As a longtime Mac OS/X user, I find most of the stuff you listed about Windows to be the “wrong way”, and OS X the right way.
A few of your points are valid, like the home/end keys (really, what do you expect them to do?), and TextEdit. But if you’ve ever had to rename a lot of files, you will appreciate the ability to click return, change the name, click return and your done. On Windows, you have to right click on each file, navigate to change name, type the changes, and click return. It takes longer.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:48 am
I must agree with Ted: these are complains about OS X behaving differently from Windows.
Native FTP client wouldn’t hurt.
Finder will finaly be replaced in Leopard.
@Ted: you can rename easily in Windows too, use F2.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Windows (and Microsoft Word) Home/End behaviour is insane. If you want that behaviour, please stick to Windows rather than calling for the Mac UI to be broken. Same goes for Maximise/Zoom.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Attention Mac Zealots,
Not only is the OSX Home/End behaviour totally retarded, so is its PageUp/Down behavour. I use both Windows and Mac daily and am simply making observations which I am confident 90% of sane people would agree with if they compared this functionality across the two platforms. A great way to spot if you are doing something the stupid way is to compare it with someone else who does it differently, and it is with a broader vision than you that I make these utterly valid criticisms.
discuss :)
August 30th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
Enter does not always have the same function as return. I hit it dozens of times a day. You may never need it but we don’t all use Macs for the same tasks.
August 30th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Maximize is not an obvious feature, nor is it a “good” feature, but the difference between Zoom and Maximize is one of the differences in philosophy between Apple and Microsoft. The way I deal with focusing on a single task is I just drag the damned corner all the way to the bottom right and leave the application like that 100% of the time (I only do this with one application actually, and it always opens in “full screen”). Any other time I want to see what’s behind my current window which is far better when I’m multi tasking. In other words, Apple can’t please everybody and dammit I refuse to use a Maximize button instead of Zoom (which is really a bad name for it.. but I don’t have anything better).
Sebastian
August 30th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
I should also point out that Home/End is not an OS feature. It’s an _application_ feature. Obviously all Mac developers outside of the MS Mac BU consider that the correct behaviour of Home/ End is to scroll to top/bottom. That probably does date back to classic Mac OS HIG, but is now a cultural thing that no-one can change at the flick of a switch.
Maybe all Windows users frequently want to move the text carat to the beginning of a line or paragraph or screen or whatever it is that most Windows programs do (and infrequently want to scroll to the top or bottom of a document). But really the only reason they expect that from Home/End and have come to find it useful is because MS Word does it, so they have come to consider it “normal”. It’s not normal to a Mac user, and hasn’t been at any time in the last 20 years since Mac keyboards got Home and End keys.
Page Up/Down changing the insertion point really smacks of a holdover from DOS, and is quite user-hostile. It basically moves the insertion point to an essentially random and meaningless location. On most Mac software you can safely scroll up and look at something a few pages back for reference, then begin typing in the knowledge that the insertion point is where you left it and you’ll automatically scroll back to where you were.
August 30th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I’ve been a MAC user of late. This is such a right-on list of my complaints!
I do appreciate the million other thoughtful things that OS X does, compared to Windows. But, sometimes, they just seem mad - in their effort to do things differently from Windows.
August 31st, 2007 at 4:20 am
#4: You move to the beginning and end of a single line text fields by using the up arrow (for beginning) and down arrow for end of the line. Works in all single line text fields.
#5: There is whole debate on this subject and it turns out it is highly subjective and the argument can go either way. Although you have more control over it in OS X than you do in Windows.
August 31st, 2007 at 5:37 am
As for FTP, I can also recommend MacFusion. It adds ftp and ssh integration to the finder, pretty cool and free.
August 31st, 2007 at 11:23 am
Actually on windows all you have to do is press F2 to rename a file. No mouse clicking necessary.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Home/End work really well for browsing in Safari. Given the target audience for this stuff, it makes more sense to me to leave it as is, and have the hardcore folks use a modifier key.
September 1st, 2007 at 12:44 am
1. I also find it annoying that there is no maximize. But it is not limiting as I can just drag it to the size I want.
2. The built in GUI ftp client in Win XP also sucks. Third party is the way to go for GUI ftp clients on both OSs.
[I use FireFTP on both OSs as it integrates nicely with Firefox.]
One cool thing is that SSH and SFTP are totally absent in Win XP but are supported by OS X command line out-of-the-box.
Which is nice for people that do remote development on heterogenous systems. [Like me]
3. Yeah this annoys me too but it is cosmetic.
4. I don’t see this as an issue anymore. However it did take me about six months before I stopped doing the wrong thing in each OS. [Ctrl-left in windows and home in OS X]
5, I actually find it quite the reverse. I find the font’s on OS X smoother and easier to read. I guess this is personal preference.
Or perhaps my screen is better, or something.
6. Both Explorer and Finder have features I love and ones that I loath. Perhaps some kind of hybrid would be good. Finlorer anyone? no? sigh.
7. This does not bother me.
8. You can set it in the prefences. But use something superior like TextMate. [Which I personally find superior to the mac-popular BBEdit]
Hell, you don’t use notepad on Win XP for HTML editing do you? Then why use the default text editor in OS X?
9. I NEVER understood WHY it was called backspace in the first place. It does not insert spaces infront of the system caret. It deletes charaters preceding the system caret.
The keys SHOULD be called backdelete and foredelete. Or something. Anyway, I hardly ever use the foredelete key so why should the backdelete key not just be called delete.
10. The inconsistency between which applications quit and which stay live bugs the hell out of me too. I wish they would make it a system preference in the OS. That would solve this issue.
All in all though, I still find OS X way less annoying than Win XP.
September 1st, 2007 at 6:21 am
For text editing, if you’re not using TextMate you don’t know what you’re missing. It is astoundingly good.
(in the mean time, there’s a Plain Text option in the Format menu of Text Edit.)
September 1st, 2007 at 1:33 pm
I’ve been using OS X for a few months now. My biggest irritations are the lack of a Single Click to open option, and the lack of any window focus options such as Focus Under Mouse, as is typical of most UNIX systems.
Your second comment about FTP is valid also, thats extremely irritating.
December 24th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Smultron is good for OSX. I like gedit w/ Gnome on linux. For Windows TextPad is tops because of the regex find/replace.
April 5th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Ben above is the closest to nail the truth: the strength of the Mac platform is the thought and consistency of the interface, and that is a direct legacy of the academic (PARC) roots. By thoughtfully designing and publishing their landmark Human Interface Guidelines (which is still a relevant book today), they set the standard and tone for the Apple Mac GUI. The consistent graphical interface naturally attracted and lent itself to more creative endeavors (publishing, graphic art, music, etc).
On the other hand, IBM PC’s were squarely targeted at large business from day one, with their armies of secretiares typing and retyping reams and reams of documents every day. (You don’t think the corporate fat cats of the ’70s would take a break from their martini lunches, smoking in the office, and acceptable sexual hassassment to be actually seen doing something as menial as typing, do you? LOL) With the great focus on keyboard data entry, the PC–and thus Microsoft, and thus Windows–has their own human interface standard… abeit a defacto one, and limited to the keyboard.
So, lacking standards in complimentary but opposite areas, both companies have made a royal mess of things. Microsoft would be hard pressed to demonstrate even two dialogs from the same software suite the were merely reminiscent of each other. On the other hand, good friggin’ luck putting together that thesis on a Mac, because the moment you have to switch apps (say, to embed an equation, or do layout), you’re virtually guaranteed that a good percentage of basic text manipulation keys will be different. Heck, nearly 100% of the text boxes in Windows behave identically with respect to basic text manipulation (ignoring outliers like Lotus products). I’m talking about the basic left arrow goes back, shift-left arrow highlights, ctrl-x cuts kind of stuff, not esoteric stuff like a shortcut for character kerning. On a Mac, I’ve seen cases where simple text fields on the same dialog didn’t behave the same — and that was an Apple product!
The solution, of course, is for the users in each camp to get over themselves, and embrace what’s good about the other platform, them demand better from their platform… but I might as well say: “why can’t we all just get along?”
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:50 pm
If you want to use TextEdit to make HTML pages, you have to go to Format>Make Plain Text, then Save As with the extension .html.