Wearing Macintosh
I am getting really
pissed
off with my Mac. It isn't that I have anything
against any one big thing but that there are so many little niggling things that
are really really wearing - they're significantly spoiling my user experience.
It's worse that they're little thing too - stuff that wouldn't have taken a
moment to implement just a slightly different way and make all the difference.
What am I talking about? Here
goes...
1. iTunes. EVERY SINGLE
TIME iTunes does a CDDB query it puts up a
requester giving the user some feedback about what it's doing. Why is this a bad
thing? Because the requester GRABS THE
FOCUS. I now can't count the number of times
that I've inserted a CD to play and switched to start writing an email, only to
type loads of text and find that half of it went into a dialog which doesn't
understand text. All my typing was thrown away (in
facARGH IT JUST DID
IT ahem, in fact I was going to say "I expect
it to do it any moment because I just put a CD in to listen
to").
2.
Mail. This is another dumb focus one. It
really really is abysmal. You open Mail, and you're looking at your mailbox. You
are in a program which primarily takes keyboard input. You don't want to use a
mouse - that would mean you had to move one of your hands away from the keyboard
to move a cursor around a bit. I want to tab between contexts - remember that?
On OSX there are two basically standard elements of this type of navigation -
Option-tilde gets you to another window within this application
(shift-Option-tilde goes backwards - well done Apple) and TAB gets you from
context to context within the window. Anyway, Mail is open because I just opened
it. I opened it quick to send a quick email to a friend. I hit compose (or
rather press option-N) and start typing. How cool is that? (ARGH iTunes just
grabbed focus for a CDDB lookup again and my typing went to the other place) But
it isn't like that. After a few seconds after startup, Mail starts a mail
retrieval session. It puts up - yes you guessed it - a progress box which
GRABS
FOCUS. But this is no ordinary box which GRABS
FOCUS. It's special - in fact it retains focus and is not part of the window
group you can traverse by keystroke! So no amount of tab of Option-tilde will
save you. I have to actually use the MOUSE to reactivate the application!!!!
Amazing.
3. And this brings me
onto the mouse. Now, how hard is this? I
bought a Microsoft Mouse because they're good mice. I plugged it in. It worked.
Happy me. Uh oh - not happy me. The mouse WORKS AT TWO SPEEDS! It's true - the
mouse has two gears. In slow gear the pointer trickles slowly across the screen
so I have to pick up the mouse about four times to get the pointer right the way
across. In fast gear, the mouse is useable. Fast mode is the norm, and sometimes
when it "just goes into" slow mode it can be fixed by moving the mouse VERY fast
across the mouse mat repeatedly. It's actually quite pleasant angrily shaking
the mouse and having it relent and fix itself. But this doesn't alter the fact
that Apple cannot even make a mouse work properly. I suspect there is a similar
type of issue with the Apple mouse but it is nowhere near as obvious, maybe due
to resolution differences.
4.
Mouse 2. You aren't going to believe it but
this is possibly not Apple's fault. So I reverted back to the official Apple
mouse because I'd had enough of the two-speed Microsoft Mouse (yes I had
installed the appropriate drivers etc), but it's just a pain reaching for the
keyboard all the time for the right button (I just am never pleased am I?). Oh -
this is Ctrl click for the non-mac-aware people out there. Anyway, I saw a
Logitech Cordless Trackball in PCWorld without a ball ten quid. I bought it and
sent Logitech an email which they responded to very pleasantly and they sent me
a new ball for free. It arrived today and I plugged in the trackball (I
installed the newest drivers a few days ago in preparation). Well, how
disappointing. It didn't seem to work so I unplugged it and plugged it in again.
I then unplugged the Apple mouse in case it was "conflicting" or something
bizarre was happening. Kernel Panic. Now how can that be? I rebooted with the
Logitech plugged in only and it worked for about ten seconds before the window
server hung. This is when the pointer moves around but the clock stops updating
and nothing "sees" your clicks and actions. Your computer is effectively dead,
but alive. Nope, you can't restart the window server - yes I know this is Unix
but but but.
5. My second CD
drive. It just happens to be a DVD+RW drive.
It worked fine yesterday. Seems like on odd reboots it is "seen" by OSX and on
even reboots it goes unnoticed. Kind of annoying when I want to encode some more
CDs. The last reboot came after an OS update - I assumed Apple had added support
for the drive because I was amazed to see another utility icon in the menu bar -
which resembled the icon o the Eject Key on the keyboard. Rather cool actually -
clicking on it opens a tiny "Which drive do you want to eject?" menu. They even
did it right and provided a keyboard shortcut - alt eject opens the second drive
whereas just eject works the primary drive.......... if the machine spots them
both in the first place. Sigh.
These
reasons, along with tens of others I don't remember now, are marring my
enjoyment of my computing experience. I can't believe that I am the only one who
wants something to behave as expected? Just to be daring I might try to plug in
the trackball again later to see if I can cause a meltdown. Wouldn't that be
fun?
And in case any of you are
wondering - like a good user I have submitted passive and informational feedback
on each of these issues. Maybe Apple will address them in OS
11.
I feel better after my rant though.
At least I would if iTunes hadn't just stolen all my keystrokes. But then ah -
maybe I should just expect it now.
Posted: Mon - June 9, 2003 at 08:33 PM