“Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. Owen Linzmayer is no exception: His work requires him to use Mac OS X every day, all day long,” Informit reports. “Although Owen is generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about Mac OS X really drive him up the wall. Take a gander at his list of 10 pet peeves; then share your own!”
Linzmayer’s Top Ten List:
1. Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely
2. Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront
3. Trashed Items Cant Be Opened
4. Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties
5. Dashboard Widgets are Modal
6. Painful Pinwheel Pauses
7. Permission Roadblocks
8. Exposing Package Contents is Confusing
9. Dumb Deleting
10. Sidebar Items Cant Be Renamed
Linzmayer explains each of his ten peeves in the full article here.
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…and how about that Finder – the one thing that Winduh does better…
I’m not going to take the time to fisk his list, but some of his peeves seem pretty goofy to me. I do agree with nos. 4, 6, 9 and 10.
permissions roadblocks???? surely they’re there to beef up security? is this guy writing viruses or something?
1. Turn it off.
3. Take it out of the trash
6. Upgrade/ stop being so impatient, they only last a second or two
7. Let’s see: ask for permission every time you mess with a system critical preference or install a piece of software, or be like windows and let things install themselves. I’d rather not have a bunch of spyware/viruses on my system, thank you very much.
8. If you’re an idiot
9. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve hit “delete” on a windows machine, only to yell SHIT! as a piece of critical time consuming data is lost forever. I think having to drag something to the trash ensures that I only delete what I really want to get rid of. It’s like of like the “asking for permission” thing.
When it comes right down to it, I think this guy is just too impatient to realize the benefits of having all of these safeguards in place.
aren’t the permission roadblocks what help make os x so secure?
How about…
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1. Like Mac OS 6 (the first one I used), windows can only be resized from the lower right corner.
2. Font management, even with “professional” 3rd party tools still sucks ass.
3. I get more crashes under Tiger than I have with any OS since OS 9.
4. A network drive that goes offline, like say my laptop going to sleep, can freeze up my machine while it searches for that drive. Grrr…
5. I still can’t load an FTP drive in the Finder like I can any other network drive with read-write privileges appropriate to my user ID. BTW don’t tell me I can load an FTP drive, I know that, I cannot use that drive FULLY.
6. The Force Quit dialog doesn’t have a button to open the Activity Monitor.
7. Renaming songs in iTunes 6.0.1 gives me frequent kernel panics. Arrrrgh…
8. Safari still beachballs on my new G5 Dual. Like when I was typing this message.
9. I don’t want anything setting Preview as it’s default Open With… application. No matter how many times I thought I’ve fixed this issue, a file will show up with a Preview icon. Grrr…
10. If you crash, you lose all updates to your Dock.
11. I can’t run the latest in Viruses, Adware, and Spyware. Oh wait.
For those of you questioning “Permissions Roadblocks”, I guess you’re the types who DON’T open Disk Utility and run “Repair Permissions” before running Software Update.
1. Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely
— Never experienced this
2. Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront
— Never experienced this, this is a horrible Windows issue though
3. Trashed Items Cant Be Opened
— Same as Windows
4. Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties
— This is for a reason
5. Dashboard Widgets are Modal
— I find many useful
6. Painful Pinwheel Pauses
— Rarely experience this
7. Permission Roadblocks
— Never experienced this
8. Exposing Package Contents is Confusing
— Not really, much easier than “Program Files” and “Documents and Settings” and the .NET assembly folder dlls all over the place
9. Dumb Deleting
— ???
10. Sidebar Items Cant Be Renamed
— Who cares
and some other pet peeves of my own.
Like why don’t Dock folders springload open when you hover over them or hit space bar while dragging an icon? Sidebar icons do this! Regular icons do this! Dock icons don’t. (And Finder toolbar icons don’t either–if you ever bothered sticking a folder up there.)
OS X is a great OS, and here’s how to make it better:
1. Discuss what you think should be improved and don’t flame people about it.
2. Don’t skip the most important step: http://apple.com/feedback
The worst, drives-you-nuts, inexcusable problem… for dual-monitor setups or more… having to mouse over to the main monitor to access menus. This sort of menu deal makes sense when you use one monitor, but is an amazingly awful thing to deal with in multi-monitor setups.
—
There are some aspects of the XP “finder” I’d like to see in the Mac Finder.
—
OSX looks a bit cartoonish. How about some skins or more themes?
to Chris: this list isn’t to tear down OS X or say it’s inferior to windows. These are things that bug him and he has the right to rant about them.
3. I constantly want to open things to make sure they are what I think they are before trashing them, and I can’t do it.
6. Yea, why not upgrade? It’s also a useful solution to that pile of money under your mattress that has been disturbing your sleep! rich asshole.
7. He’s not saying permissions are a bad idea, but they cause headache’s sometimes.
9. Having to hit cmd + delete drives me crazy too, I wish simply delete sent something to the trash. Your point about windows makes no sense. If you accidently hit delete on windows it sends it the recycle bin, not lost forever bin.
10. being able to rename CD/DVD’s in the sidebar before burning them would be a lot more convenient than going back to the desktop and double clicking on the name.
I don’t agree with any of these things. Go ahead Apple.
The Finder locking up for a few minutes when a network drive is no longer available sometimes drives me crazy.
Chris,
3 – why shouldn’t you be able to open something in the trash, just stupid not beeing able to do it, it’s just a folder like any other.
macman
4 – This is for a reason. And what good reason is that? why not let programs try to connect to an url they set when beeing installed and check for updates when the system does.
i agree with the deleting procedure, very annoying not beeing able to delete things right away like shift-delete on win.
something i’d like to see is screen area restriction. so a program can only use a part of the screen and not spawn windows outside of this area, xcode for example does a great job of hogging the entire screen. this restriction could be done by say holding down ctrl and draging from a border of the screen to restrict the apps area. this could quite easily be implemented.
the offline network drive stalls my computer for minutes while os x searches for it, very very annoying.
not beeing able to mount SFTP as folders sucks majorly.
i want to be able to sync to my cellphone (nokia 6230i) with iSync, now i have to resort to phonedirector and it doesn’t do a very good job.
a localized dictionary and spelling would be appreciated.
free remote desktop, vnc works but apple really should provide this service for free.
folder view, sometimes when i drag a file to a folder and it opens to reveal its’ contents, it’s displayed in big icons instead of a listview. this happens even though it has been set to listview when you open it normally. this can be very annoying if there are a couple of hundred files and folders and i have to scroll around to find the subfolder i want.
frontrow for all macs, cellphones with bluetooth works very well as a remote.
All in all though, OS X Tiger is the best OS I’ve EVER used, loving it!
9. Dumb Deleting
Maybe he’s comparing Mac OS to Windows in that in Windows, if you move something to to the Trash (er, I mean “Recycle”), Windows remembers where it came from and can put it back there should you change your mind. On the Mac, once it’s in the Trash it’s up to you to determine where to put it if you take it out of the Trash.
Most of my peeves with the Mac are with Finder. I prefer user interface of Windows Explorer, circa Win95/98 (in 2000 and later MS ruined a good thing) because it gives all the information I need in a minimum amount of screen space. The biggest problem with Windows Explorer is that the rest of Windows (malware, registry problems, etc.) come with it.
10. Sidebar Items Cant Be Renamed
False: Use the contextual Menu “Rename Item…”
3 – why shouldn’t you be able to open something in the trash,
False: drag it to an application that is sitting in the Dock. Dbl-clicking does not work but drag and drop works well.
3. Trashed Items Cant Be Opened
a) See “drag and drop Tip” from Number 3 (above)
b) The Finder slide show does work normally from the Trash. Veeeeery useful.
2. Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront
True (sometimes): Backup 3.0 does it. It is the only one tgat does it on my machine, but it really drives me crazy.
1. Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely
Never seen that. The app is calling for your attention… Do you ignore it indefinetely?
How about no trash can in the finder windows!
With some serious power usage, a lot of the above issues and others show up and should be improved.
The Finder freezing up the entire system, including the dock and all menus, needs to be fixed — FTFF!
Permission roadblocks are not an issue unless you have a little network going. Then items that you created and have the password for can be still off limits to you, no matter what! This is solved though various backbending approaches, like copying and pasting the contents of a file, but is often obtuse.
Some of the deeper interface issues are still clunky. For instance, save or locate dialogs are only half implemented, where columns sometimes can’t be fully adjusted to see the files.
Those finder copy sounds are atrocious. Sounds like a system failure when a copy is finished.
Try getting someone to switch to a mac, and then explain the whole DMG package mounting and installation process. Not a biggie, until they also have to know what to do with .sit files and .zip files as well. Odd.
Mac is all about drag and drop, but the dock and spotlight are not. Why?
Burnable folders don’t inform you how big you’re getting, until you hit burn and then are informed that you can’t do it.
Smart folders are not smart enough — no way to create one by “size”. Want to create a smart folder of all files above 500MB to delete any unnecessary ones? You can’t!
Sometimes closing a window quits the application, other times it doesn’t — such as the calculator, or font book, the dictionary, or system preferences. Any real pattern here?
But don’t get me wrong, for heavy lifting Mac X is SOOOOO much more robust than OS 9 — graybeards take THAT!!
Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront — While I agree this is tacky behavior, it is the fault of the application developers. I don’t agree that there is no time that an application shouldn’t be able to force it’s way to the front, but it is important to remind application developers that no matter how wonderful they think their application is, it may not be the most important thing in the user’s life at that moment.
My favorite example? iChat. It has a big ego problem and loves to force it’s windows on me.
Trashed Items Can’t Be Opened — This is actually a good thing–the item may disappear if the user chooses Empty Trash. I agree with his solution, though, and think it would be nice if Apple did this.
Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties — Hear hear! But I think it would be better if Apple just made the specifications public and allowed companies to host this on their own servers. When I installed software, I would add something to the “Software Update” list saying that to update this package, ask this server.
Dashboard Widgets are Modal — Well, the entertaining thing about Dashboard is that it’s great for information that you want to know but don’t need sitting around all the time.
For example, I removed the day-of-the-week from my menu bar and now I use the Calendar widget when I need to know the date. It works very well. CPU Temperature is another great example. I don’t need this cluttering up my desktop all the time, but it’s nice to see and when I hear the fans come on, I usually take a look.
Anything that requires a high degree of interactivity, though, remains on my desktop. For example, the calculator is still in my dock.
So it’s “modality” doesn’t bother me because that’s the thing I like about it, based upon how I use it. I’m in “Oh, let’s look at trivia” mode or I’m getting my work done.
Painful Pinwheel Pauses — Okay, I’ll solve a little problem for you. The pinwheel comes up when the application is busy and the user has an event waiting. Don’t want to see the pinwheel? Stop clicking on applications that are busy doing stuff. You won’t make them go any faster.
That said, there are some areas where OS X could be faster. Sometimes this problem comes up because the application is waiting for something from the operating system. For example, if I say “Read 100MB from this file” that might take awhile, as appropriate system resources are shifted around so that can happen. This delay can be made worse when other processes are running and they’re also doing disk activity. Various hunks of the kernel (Networking, file system) are not thread-safe and that can make matters worse because your process has to wait behind other processes.
Dumb Deleting — Some very good points. I don’t have as much of a problem. But if Apple were to fix anything, here’s what I would like them to fix.
Mac OS 9 had a great dialog box that came up when you went to empty the trash. It gave you some idea of what was in the trash. You would see something like, “The trash contains 178 items using 315MB of disk space. Are you sure you want to delete these items?” There were more than a few times that dialog box saved me (“315MB?! Shouldn’t be that much…”). The Mac OS X dialog box gives no information other than “you can’t undo this.”
Sidebar Items Can’t be Renamed — I’d like this, too. I actually hit this when setting up a sidebar item which pointed to a folder on a Windows volume. I really wanted to name it “Submit to Printer” rather than “printjobs”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t. The solution was pretty easy, though: create an alias to the Windows folder named “Submit to Printer” and add that to the Sidebar.
“On the Mac, once it’s in the Trash it’s up to you to determine where to put it if you take it out of the Trash.”
With OSX you can Undo, if it’s your last action. On older Mac OS systems (Classic), you could select the file and do Command + Y, or Put Away, from the menu.
I dont like drop down menus