Bye Bye Mac
2005-03-21 20:40 - Rants
Long story short, I'm not keeping the Mac Mini that I recently got. I was hoping that it might be the best of both worlds, a nice GUI on top of a stable unix base. But, it's just too weird. Here's a list of the things that irked me as I tried to get used to it.
- No keyboard accelerators for the menu. I.E. in windows, composing a message in Thunderbird, there is a "rewrap" option, which I can get to with a simple Alt-E W. In OS X, I'm forced to use the mouse, or perhaps CTRL-F2 Right Right Down Down Down Down Down Down Down Enter. Perhaps CTRL-F2 E Enter R R Enter? Either way, far too many keypresses. And of course a mouse click costs ~10 keypresses.
- Who chose these cursor-manipulation key defaults? Home and End scroll to the top and bottom of the open document without moving the cursor. When do you ever need that? Then, even worse, they still do that when in Terminal, even SSHed to I.E a linux terminal. Makes things much harder. CMD-Left and CMD-Right work in Mac native programs, but not in Terminal.
- There's no start menu, and nothing equivalent. I can fit a few programs in the dock, but the dock also has to have room for running processes. Any other less frequently accessed program requires opening up the finder, navigating to the Applications directory and running the program. Then switch windows back to the finder to close it. Too many steps!
- No folder-first sort in the finder. There's sort by kind, which doesn't work in column mode, and isn't quite folder-first. So that's just not good enough.
- Highlight a file (desktop or finder). Press enter. You're now in file-rename mode. What the heck? Enter means open! Yet again, the more common action gets a two-key shortcut: CMD-Down . What sort of sense does CMD-Down make for being 'open document'?
- Clicking on an open menu ALWAYS closes it. If you were pointing at the thing you meant to, it will do that action. But if you miss and hit a separator, or a disabled item, the menu still disappears. Can't just quickly fix your position and click again, you have to re-open the whole menu. Which is exceedingly difficult at times.
- There's only one way to resize a window: With the mouse, on the teeny little square at the bottom right corner. No way to horizontal-only or vertical-only resize a window.
- Want to delete a file? Think the delete key might do it? NOPE! It's CMD-Backspace. Yep, two keys where one makes sense again.
- The mac is designed for a single mouse button. Folly, but ok. So, there have to be creative ways to open the contextual menu. The usual one is CMD-Click, but there's also Click-And-Hold-For-A-While. Which activates accidentally all the time, click to drag, pause to think about your destination a moment, start to--Whoops! Contextual menu opened! Start over!
- The only way to change the default browser? Open Safari and go to it's preferences pane. The only way to change the default mail client? Open Mail.app and go to it's preferences pane. Bass ackwards.
- In Firefox, in both the bookmarks toolbar and the menu item, I cannot rightclick nor drag items to manage bookmarks. This appears to be a limitation of the way Mac OS X handles these sorts of menus.
- In addition to what I've mentioned above, and will probably mention below: Window manipulation is clumsy. The close and minimize buttons are reallytiny. There's no real maximize. The fit-to-size feature is nifty, but not always what I want. A minimized/hidden window can be restored by clicking the icon in the dock, but it won't go the other way like windows, a second click does nothing.
- The little enter key on the numpad doesn't (always?) work as an enter key.
- Firefox creates temporary files on my desktop, and there seems to be no way to get around that. Desktop updates draw in an erratic pattern, sometimes requiring me to click on the desktop. And then, on occasion, the jumble of temporary files to real files names shift around unrelated icons on my desktop into other positions. Not only is excess clutter left around longer than it should, sometimes other untouched icons shift around in the jumble. Ick!
- Mac Office has some strange obsession with keeping filenames 31 characters or less. It can open a file with a longer name, but will just mangle the end of the name when saving, to get it to fit.
- In windows (and Linux IIRC, depending) in a control which contains columns, you can double-click on the handle to resize a column to get its size adjusted to fit its contents. No go on the mac.
There's lots of other things, big and small. But at some point, I realized that the annoyances are too great, and the benefits too small. It's perhaps nice for first timers, or casual users, but the Mac just doesn't float my boat. How sad to realize that Windows is the lesser of two evils.
