“Brand-new software is rarely perfect, and the latest version of OS X is no exception,” Andrew Cunningham reports for ARs Technica.
“While Mavericks ushers in a number of desirable features and improvements to the operating system, those features don’t always work exactly as advertised,” Cunningham reports. “Now that the software has been out for about a month, we thought we’d round up our most pressing gripes, in part to bring them to your attention and also because complaining can be pretty cathartic.”
“Let’s be clear: multi-monitor support in older versions of OS X was in dire need of improvement,” Cunningham reports. “This was especially true once Lion introduced a full-screen mode for apps that would only let you use one monitor at a time no matter how many you had hooked up. Mavericks made this situation better, but frankly it would have been hard to make it worse. Ars Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson had a litany of complaints to make about the new feature’s teething issues, the most serious of which was about window positioning.”
Much more in the full article here.
does the link work?
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/after-a-month-of-use-we-dish-out-our-biggest-gripes-with-os-x-mavericks/
Try this link:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/after-a-month-of-use-we-dish-out-our-biggest-gripes-with-os-x-mavericks/
Yeah, I’ve got the most advanced computer operating system in the history of the universe, but that second monitor positioning quirk really gets my goat. lol
this is easy
biggest gripe: not being able to click to open a folder in a new window
minor gripe: white dock is ugly and does not provide enough contrast
Dockmod.com $8 any color or picture you want.
For me, 99% of mavericks works great. But that 1% that does not… Very annoying.
Time machine still fails to backup, force restart or disconnect the drive cause finder won’t eject it, and time machine works again.
Random finder crashs that a relaunch doesn’t cure, have to manually restart the mac. (Mavericks hangs on self restart..)
Other than that… 10.9 works great.
I have the dock on the right hand side. Dockmod does nothing to change the appearance of the dock. I’d love to have a darker dock with more prominent markers for the apps that are running.
I get random (but frequent) graphics corruption issues. Windows and icons look like a failed Star Trek teleportation.
Can’t mouse-scroll single-page PDF files in Preview.
Font-size adjustments in Safari and Mail do not translate to print.
After more than four hours of tech support, it’s clear Mavericks broke the iPhoto Books ordering process.
What’s frustrating is to hear, “We have no fix yet.”
It’s time for a 10.9.1 release
It’s on the way. It still have bugs in the beta, today anyway.
Data loss ext. HDD:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475611
Serious.
(I have a WD raid) The moral of that story is:
If you install weird disk drivers (and or formatting) for your drive be very sure the drivers are supported before you upgrade your OS
I have been down this road before, which is why my disks were immediately formatted (using Disk utility) and the ” WD+TURBO” drivers were NOT installed
My drives are fine.
Apple can not, and should not, police thier developers. WD had months (likely 6 or more) to make sure they had no issues, they apparently did nothing.
This is not a Mavericks (or an Apple) problem it is a western digital problem.
This is specifically a WD problem. Point back at them, not Apple.
After reading the specified threads completely I think it’s not only WD’s fault. There were reports of data loss on other drives without WD software being installed.
I haven’t seen even one, that had issues after having been formatted and not using third party drivers.
This falls squarely in the lap of WD (and possibly it’s 3rd party’s if thy also used WD’s formatting or wacky drivers)
Apple cannot lord over their third parties and developers to “make sure” they have done their jobs properly. (particularly not in the case of a vendor the size of WD)
That I did not know. I’ll take you at your word and will watch for information indicating that is the case.
Occam’s razor states that among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
Derek’s Rule: We never know everything about anything. But I do prefer the removal of assumptions from any system model.
Why do some applications refuse to remember window position, but others do?
Why is the app active indicator button on the Dock so miniscule and unreadable?
Why are all GUI elements so flat, dark, gray, and lifeless?
Why did Apple implement an old version of SMB?
Why does Apple in its applications and its OS sometimes insist on “auto correcting” items typed into input fields?
Why do some apps have a nice border, on which it is handy to have controls, to grab & drag, etc, while other windows are borderless? Windows should lose the border only in full-screen mode.
Overall, I don’t think the new features have overwhelmed anyone. Certainly some nice steps forward here and there, but certainly not ground-breaking. Tabs and tagging are overrated. Mavericks has not returned OS X to the svelte performance of Snow Leopard. The first thing we did is turn off the iOS-like crap, which provides partial relief from the new design aesthetic.
Assigning Apps to certain desktops is an exercise in frustration. I don’t care how many times you do it, they will open in different desktops. I then rearrange them to exactly how I want them. Again. And again.
1. Mail + Things + Safari
2. Photoshop
3. Adobe Bridge
4. Dreamweaver
5. Notes + Reminders + Contacts
I’ve set them up so many times it’s maddening. But I can tell you their locations in my sleep. But when you continually open and close Apps it moves the desktops around.
I know that there’s a lot of Adobe hate on this forum and around the net (mostly deserved) but I earn a great living using their products and I have no desire to replace them.
Do you have
“Automatically rearrange spaces based on recent use”
enabled in Mission Control Preferences?
I’m upset that Apple has abandoned iDVD. I’m not asking for new features, but at least keep it compatible. It is not always practical to haul a laptop somewhere, buy additional connectors, etc. when simply burning a DVD is convenient and simple.
This also makes it much easier to distribute longer movies. I put together a year-end video of our high school football team. It was about 2 minutes too long to be shared in iCloud, and I can’t burn it to DVD. I really don’t want to buy $40 software just for that purpose.
Agree in full – nothing out there has simplicity and ease of use that iDVD had
iDVD still works fine. Copy it over from a different machine if you don’t have it.
Not a simple task of just copying over, install from ilfe.
Tried to reply to @Mike above, but Name & email fields missing, but they appear if I log out – WTF? Anyway –
@ Mike, how do you turn off the iOS-like crap?
One of the first things that needed to be done was to go through the control panel and reduce the automation “features” that impair productivity.
Notifications off.
Spaces off.
auto-update off.
background processes off.
proper scrolling set
assignment of Function keys (to applescript macros).
Onyx installed
attempted (and failed) setting of window/dock/desktop fonts and styles to be legible. Several icons manually customized so they can be distinguished.
and so forth.
Control Panel? Me thinks you spend all day at work suffering with Winblows.
QuickLook no longer supporting non mp4/mpg video files.
Memory management is still a work in progress. No noticeable difference from Mountain Lion. I have 24 GB of RAM on my iMac, 16 GB on my MBP. Yet, “inactive RAM” still clogs up the swap. Aperture remains a huge memory hog, especially using RAM, but not giving it back when unneeded. I use “Memory Clean” to free up the RAM, but the OS ought to do this chore without user interaction.
Actually, I beg to differ regarding memory management. No way would I say Apple have perfected it yet. But they added memory compression AND (thank-the-lord) stopped the nasty RAM devouring crap in Safari 7.0. It’s still a major RAM hog, but it’s no longer the cause of bringing your Mac to a frickin’ standstill when you run out of free RAM.
I don’t use Aperture, so no comment.
Absolutely, OS X MUST perfect its ‘garbage collection.’ With OS X Lion the RAM hog problem became intolerable! Mavericks is supposed to get it right again.
Meanwhile, the incentive to fill up available RAM with cache is not going away. The goal is to use ALL your RAM ALL the time, minimizing the use of virtual (hard drive, and gawd-help-us SSD) memory which is deadly slow. But never, ever must cache get in the way of CPU activities. There has to be a constant process of keeping ready RAM for applications at all times, to hell with the cache RAM.
I don’t think you really understand “retention”, the VMM is attempting to hold application resources until it absolutely has to purge (to minimize reloading from disk)
This is beneficial and what you have to keep in mind is “free” RAM is wasted- it is doing nothing until it is being used. It is far faster to purge blocks than it is to reload a previously used resource from disk.
If the VM pages out, while retaining (idle) resources that would be considered a fault, but merely retaining resources until rRAM is exhausted would not be. Your purging of unused resources (with a utility)is doing little except giving you the mental satisfaction of having a large chunk of unallocated RAM (which is as I said, basically wasted)
iBooks. I can’t believe no one has mentioned it. Check the Apple discussion threads about it. I’m back on ML because of it.
Because of a Mavericks only app, you’ve gone back to Mountsin Lion which doesn’t support said app? Huh?
😀
Exactly.
“I notice the problem most often in Chrome, Outlook 2011 …” How much credibility does this person deserve when he uses Chrome and Outlook?
iBooks isn’t a deal-breaker in and of itself, but it is a bad piece of software. It has 10% of the functionality iTunes cave you and only adds reading functionality. No adding meta-data, I’ve had all my user-added content disappear, fixing the app is a pain. And did I mention that you can’t relocate the library? No external drive for you Mr. Multi-Gigabyte Virtual Paper Hoarder. There is so much wrong that the one thing it does well does not make up for it.
Worst type of bug is something that looks ugly and glitchy.
This I have found on more than 1 install upgrade from 10.6.8 and this shows up in attachments column count flag in Apple mail, no message count but shows a zoomed pixelated paperclip. Cannot be fixed by just dumping mail folder and reimporting.
As I’ve been advising folks: Hang on for 10.9.1.
Those of us testing 10.9 beta knew GM1 (Golden Master) still had significant bugs. Then GM2 inexplicably added MORE bugs! I’m not going to chatter about 10.9.1 but I will say that SOME of the complaints in the article are directly addressed.
THE CORRECT ARTICLE LINK:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/11/after-a-month-of-use-we-dish-out-our-biggest-gripes-with-os-x-mavericks/
“Reopening windows when logging back in”
Maybe or maybe not, often just get a white screend, and have to do a hard restart.
But that problem (details often differ) has been an issue in different forms (coming back from Sleep) has been there since the beginning of OSX and over 4 different machines.
Much more common in every version since Lion.
I normally just either don’t click on the “reopening windows’ button except as an experiment to see if it works, or just do a Restart.
Have just adjusted to it. Costs me more time and irritation, but “change is good” Yeah right, whoever wrote that phrase is an idiot.
Regarding this one (of a few) networking bugs: The nasty workaround is to Force Quit the Finder. (Yes, it’s yet-another confounded Finder bug!)
Like its father and its father’s father before it, Mavericks totally loses its mind if a network file share vanishes without being properly unmounted. Some versions of OS X have done better than others, but Mavericks still exhibits the same archaic, system-wide craziness that’s plagued OS X for more than a decade: mount an SMB or AFP or NFS share, then remove the share without unmounting it (say, by rebooting or unplugging the server hosting the share, or by pulling your Mac’s network cable). Then try to access the share, even to click its ‘unmount’ button and boom: indefinite forever-beachball.
Been there, hated that, many times.
Personally I hate the new power button behavior. I liked having the choice of what to do after pushing the power button. I like notifications but sometimes I wish I could chose which corner they pop up in. Like growler allowed back in the day.
I have typically been an early adopter for new OS releases. However, with the upgrade to iOS 7, I have been reluctant to upgrade to the free OS Mavericks. In this post-Steve Jobs Apple, it seems that things just aren’t right the first time around. The features that seem to be common place for Apple are either being changed or go missing. I am not sure if I will update to Mavericks and articles like this help to convince me I may be right to stick with Mountain Lion.
the “iChat Theatre” feature is no longer available in Messages since 10.9. Hopefully people are not just complaining about things, but are also trying to do something about it, like sending your feedback to http://www.apple.com/feedback/
My iMac i7 2009 is so much slower. It’s a pain. Tried alle the tips. But still iPhoto, start and shut down are slower than 10.8…..