OS X is sorta crap

My last mac was from the days of System 7.5, so I figured it was about time I gave it another chance. Thus I got a mac, and at first it was cool, then I realized it wasn't. Then I waited 6 months, because sometimes you just have to get used to things before you can really judge them. Here are my post-cooling period thoughts.

Overall, I'd say OS X is a disappointment. It's better than Windows in some ways, but a lot worse in others. Granted, OS X is still pretty new so a lot of bugs and oversights should be forgiven, but even so there's a general UI design attitude that I wholly disagree with. Apple seems to think that preferences are bad. Applications are oversimplified to the max and then some, and preferences are frequently simply removed. Ironically, Windows allows far more tweaking.

First, a few claims that I was eager about that turned out to be myths:

• Mac is stable. No it's not. It's less stable than Windows or Linux. It doesn't really crash much, but you get these really long pauses when OS X starts pondering one of life's great mysteries. Applications like Mail require rather frequent force killing. They should change the beachball to a cute stripper or something so it wouldn't be quite so annoying to stare at all the time.
• Everything just works. That should be revised to "Everything supported just works, everything else just doesn't work and there's nothing you can do about it."
• OS X is unix combined with a modern GUI. No, it isn't. Mac really has virtually nothing to do with unix. Yeah, you have your CLI for example, but unix is a bit more than that. It's about an open, customizable, flexible, internals-available attitude. Among other things. OS X is about as closed as you can get, way more closed than Windows. OS X is unix only as a technical sidenote, the same way a dvd player or mobile phone might be linux.
• OS X comes with everything you need. This is only true if your needs are limited to very basic activities and you're perfectly happy living with the simplified-to-the-extreme Apple design philosophy. The idea that with OS X, you don't need to buy any extra apps but with Windows you do, is false.

One of the main idiocies of Apple is the belief that easy = simple, and easy = good. That just isn't so. Once in a while, people need to do slightly more complicated things, and by not providing a way to do them, things get very far from "easy". Here are a few examples:

• Archived files. OS X has a very simple way of handling them: you double-click them, and they extract themselves into a folder. Nice and simple. At first I thought, fine, why not. But eventually you start running into some problems. What if you have a huge archive, and want to extract only one file from it? What if you want to extract it to some specific place, to avoid having to first extract and then move? What if you need to extract it to your other hard drive since the one with the archive is full? What if you just want to see what's inside the archive? Everyone except your grandma will sooner or later want to do things like this. The code is all there, and not implementing these (for example, behind a right-click menu) is just a question of bad user interface design.
• In iDVD, you have a switch (not a slider) to encode your film at better quality or longer playtime. So you have, say, a 2-hour film you want to burn but Apple iDVD says it only fits 1 hour 50 minutes. You might be willing to compromise just the 5% or so loss in quality to fit those last 10 minutes, but guess what...iDVD won't let you. Nowhere is there a way to set the bitrate manually, or even a button that says "fit this on a disc no matter what the quality loss," or anything of the sort. It's just better quality, or longer playtime, on/off, if you want to do anything else, tough titty. Again, the code is there, it would be trivial to implement some kind of facility to allow this, but it's a "We choose not to" situation.
• After you burn a CD, it starts verifying itself. You can abort this task, but OS X gives you a scary warning that your disc may be ruined. Ok, not a big deal, but I just cannot understand why they chose not to make this optional. More annoying this may be to someone who doesn't know better: they'll just put up with it and always wonder why CDs seemed to burn twice as fast in Windows.

I'm also not so keen on some of Apple's UI design choices:

• Only the bottom-right corner of windows can be used to resize them. Does anyone except Steve Jobs think this is better? What's worse is, they put the same "feature" on the Windows version of Safari. Do they really think some Windows guy is going to "Hey, this is soooo much better! Thank god I can't resize from any corner/edge anymore, that was a real pain in the ass!" This is purely a case of the Apple guys not being able to swallow their pride and admit the Windows way (in fact the rest-of-the-world-way) is simply better. At the very least, it could be an option.
• The single mouse button is an obvious example of the same kind of pride. Apple still won't add that extra button (or three) to the macbook, instead they come up with "hold two fingers on the trackpad and click" for right-click. Or Command-Click. Come on. Grow up, admit you were wrong and stop embarrassing yourself.
• The Apple-Tab cycles through applications, not windows, thing. If you're perv enough to like that, fine, but I don't like the Apple Committee deciding not to let me even have it as an option.
• Can't configure UI look-and-feel almost at all. Like what happens when you double-click the title bar (rollup vs minimize for example). It's that same Apple Committee going "Hey, this is how it is, if you don't like it, you're WRONG!" Nice attitude there.
• Color scheme? Themes? You can add a background image, and that's about it.

Another design direction I hate is the absolute disregard of the keyboard. If you love the mouse and think keyboards are too old-school then OS X is for you. The rest of us are not part of Apple's "Vision":

• Dialog boxes do not accept any kind of standardized hotkey answer. For example enter for yes, esc for no, or "y" and "n", or left/right to cycle the options and enter to select, etc. Mouse is the only way. This applies to practically all dialogs, "are you sure", "do you want to..", etc.
• Pressing enter on a highlighted item assumes you want to rename it, not open it. You need to apple-o to open it. This implies Apple thinks people want to rename files more often than open them. Hmm...
• Selecting multiple files with the keyboard is frankly broken. Pressing up with shift held down selects the next unselected file upwards of your selections, pressing down selects the next downward. In other words there is no way to unselect at all, except by using, yup, the mouse. Basically this renders keyboard list selection undoable. This is most annoying in Mail, when you're trying to select 50 spams to delete.
  
• Selecting multiple files by holding Apple key while clicking (ie when you plan to move them): it should select or deselect on click release, like copy does. This is a question of broken UI uniformity. In other words, if you select a number of files, and want to copy them someplace, you just click and drag any of the selected files. If you want to move them (ie hold apple key down and try the same) you have to first click one of the selected files (so that it is unselected) and then re-click it again this time holding the mouse down, then drag to the new folders.
• If you pgup/pgdn in TextEdit for example, it does not move the cursor, only the view. In other words as soon as you get to where you want to be, and start typing, the view jumps back to where you were earlier. Some pervert may really think this is great, but I assure you most people do not. Anytime you want to jump to a new spot in your document, you need the mouse.
• Likewise the home/end, jump one word back/forward, select entire line, select one word at a time, just don't work. In Windows these are totally standardized and every app behaves the same. Not so in OSX.
• In Mail, how do you think you send a mail? Ctrl-Enter? Command-S? Apple-S? No. Command-Shift-D! And what's save as draft? Command-S! Ok, I could almost swallow "D" as in deliver, and "S" as in "save", though this is, imho, totally unintuitive, but I cannot forgive that one uses Command-Shift and the other only Command.

Simply, keyboard users and shortcuts have not been thought about at all.

For Apple, design is more important that usability. This has always been the case. Getting rid of the floppy was a bit premature, the horrid, horrid "puck" mouse, not having an eject button for CDs or floppies, etc. One current, clear example of this is the Mighty Mouse. At first I thought it was okay, but upon consideration it's a pretty lousy mouse.

• For example, you cant hold one button down and click the other, as is needed in some programs/games. You just can't, because Steve Jobs or whoever figured it was more important to have the mouse look smooth and solid than to have two "real" buttons.
• Also, you can't easily hold a mouse button down and scroll over a large area, because if you pick the mouse up, the button gets released. To avoid this you have to practice some acrobatics and grasp the mouse by the side buttons (but not press too hard or they get triggered). Another ridiculous compromise just to avoid having "seams" on the side of the mouse. Or is it maybe just some kind of warped "haha we still think one mouse button is enough" pride issue?
• Another fine detail: because the middle mouse button is a mini-trackball, about 1/3 of the time when you mean to middle-click, the window scrolls around chaotically. Nice touch, Steve.

The hardware, however, has some nice ideas, even if it is a bit technically outdated (not a dual-layer drive, no memory card readers). The trayless DVD drive is great and should be standard on all laptops. The magnetic power cable connector is wonderful. And I like that Apple isn't afraid to change the keyboard. God knows the standard layout could use revamping. But:

• I do kind of mind that home, end, pgup, and pgdn are mapped behind Fn.
• I definitely mind that delete is, and that there is no insert key at all!
• I especially mind these compromises because while the Apple Committee for Keyboard Design decided to hide these "unimportant" keys, they still figured caps lock deserved to stay! Caps lock, that most useless of keys, taking up one of the best spots on the keyboard and even enlarged, got the OK over home, end, pgup, pgdn, delete, and insert.
• Also there is a totally bizarre key to the right of the right apple key that simply acts like a second enter, but not always. What the hell is that key? If it's enter, why does it have a different logo? If it's not, what is it? Not even my mac-fanatic friends know.
  

I knew Apple had this "keep it simple" fanaticism, and so I wasn't entirely surprised at these kinds of shortcomings, but you know, this just isn't 1985 anymore, and most people do know a little something about computers by now. Furthermore, these days we have a lot of different kinds of users: unixey people who like keyboards, windows people who like the mouse, grandmas who need all advanced options hidden, power users who want access to everything, admins who need certain more complicated features, etc. Windows does a pretty good job at pleasing everyone, so why can't OS X?

I think Apple should realize that UI's evolve and giving up on old Mac ways does not have to mean "oh dear, we lost", but rather that users have realized a certain way is better. But, Apple has always had a problem with pride, and that's not likely to change.