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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 JujuEdit 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.

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.

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.