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5 Things I Hate About My Mac

I did it, I really did. I switched to a MacBook Pro from my old DELL Latitude D600 two months ago. And, boy, do I love my shiny new MacBook Pro.

Although my Mac experience has overall been excellent, there are a few things I just don't get in Mac-world. Every now and then I stumble across a tiny "glitch" that makes me either ask myself "Now, what does Steve want to tell me with that?!" or go "Duh?!?" or, in very rare occasions, even freak out.

So, here it goes, my personal fab-five of the most stupid things on my Mac.

1. Creating PDFs: I love the fact that on a Mac, PDF export support comes right out of the box. I can create PDFs from anything anywhere. Eh, almost. For instance, if I create a PDF from a Word document that has sections, something quite frequent in the world of professional writing, the export ends up as separate PDF files. That's right: send a file with 5 sections from Word to PDF and you get, guess what, 5 PDF files! Listen, folks, if I put sections in my Word document, then because I want to have it separated logically, not physically. If I wanted to have 5 files, I would have used multiple files in the first place.

2. The Finder: People told me before: you're gonna hate the Finder. Yes, I do. In fact I hate it so much I end up pulling my hair eveything now and then. Particularly also because of that nasty bug that crashes OS X (yes, you heard right, OS X can crash!) so effectively that nothing goes and you have to press the power button: connect a network drive and perform a longer read-write operation on it. Now, if you lose your connection, the Finder will send your MacBook straight to hell. This is reproducible 100% of the time.

But what I particularly dislike about the finder is that you can really get totally lost even when on your desktop. Windows Explorer is a so much better solution because the desktop consistently looks the same: the start button gives you access to everything everywhere while on the Mac, your desktop is constantly changing and programmes are notoriously difficult to access without a Start menu equivalent.

3. The Dock: I will neverfully appreciate the system behind the Dock. Some windows appear, others don't, while apps generally do. Why, for example, do my open mail windows in mail.app never appear in the Dock when they are minimized?

4. In Front Row Music: I love the Mac screen savers but I am generally not using them, particularly because they activate automatically when I use Front Row in music mode. Does this really have to be this way?

5. The bloody ENTER-key: What, for havens sake, is the logic behind the ENTER key not having the function of ���activate��� or ���open���, but ���rename���? This is really the most unintuitive thing I've ever heard of in the Mac world. Why does hitting the ENTER key while highlighting a file not open/launch the file but rename it?

That's it for me, basically. Not much, isn't it? Or do you have something to add?

Posted by Bijan at 28.03.07 8:18

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Comments

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By Erinc on 29.03.07 14:46

While agreeing most of them, I also have one or two of my own points of annoying-beyond-limits about Macs and they are mostly concerned with the so-called i life, specifically,
IPhoto: I can understand it being a simple image editor but what is the point of an image editor that has color level adjustments, effects, filters and so on but does not have a simple command as RESIZE!!! There is crop, but if you try to export that cropped image, it is again beyond the level of simplicity as an operation. It seems, the IPhoto is designed only to create posh slideshows and nothing else.
Also, why-o-why can't I choose exactly which photos I want to download from my camera and not all of them? How complex is it?!!
I haven't used the other components yet but if their functionality are also crippled to the tasks that Apple thinks these apps. are for, ilife is a life of imprisonment.


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By Bijan Kafi on 30.03.07 7:53

Erinc, that's certainly true. iPhote has been the target of much ridicule in particularly those regards you are mentioning.

I myself had comparable problems, although I have to say that I do like iPhoto a lot, particularly because it makes browsing thousands of images blazing fast. Lots of people have also complained that you can't organize pictures by folders but only by "film rolls", although I do not find that to be much of a hassle here.

To solve your problem of resizing, by the way, look inside the "save" dialogue when saving a picture. Bloody intuitive Mac, isn't it? ;-)


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By Erinc on 30.03.07 12:34

I finally have my PC back and rejoiced with my good-old Picasa! But I'll try that as well, thanks. ;) Also, pretending to export photos into mail and then saving the resized attachment to your desktop also works!! And I think that is the most ridiculous technique ever to resize a photo.

Also,
They say, OSX is much more easy to use and user-friendly but for everything that the cute interface does not provide, you have to open up the console and enter into the dreadful unix-command-line world. Just try to make visible the invisible files for instance and you'll see...

But apart from those minor glitches, it really works better and for the stuff I mentioned, there is always somebody that has written a script or something. Just remember the number of 3rd party stuff that you used to make Windows run as you like it. It is a moajor improvement indeed.


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By Bijan Kafi on 30.03.07 15:55

Correct, yes. Mac usability is great in certain regards and far below that of Windows in others. Those invisble files were driving me mad, too. And you can only either turn them on or off entirely, not selectively.




  
 
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