With scores of Apple faithful ready to descend on the Moscone Center this week, there’s no doubt that a bevy of new products and hardware will all vie for their attention. Front and center of course will be Leopard (10.5), the latest and greatest OS for the Mac.
Leopard’s predecessor OSX Tiger 10.4, is one of the most advanced operating systems around, period. Its sleek, well thought out, and rock solid stable. But everything cooked up by Cupertino is not as clean as you would think.
My top 10 may not be your top 10. But this is my article, and I’m allowed to be a bit self centered. My only hope is that Leopard puts to rest at least some of the following:
1. Application uninstall garbage - Uninstalling applications in OSX is as easy as dragging the .app file to the trash. But not unlike Windows, the process is not always clean, and orphan files are quite often left around.
This seems to be a no-brainer to me. Deleted applications should delete every trace of its existance. Sure, some of the left-over files might be considered user data not specific to the application itself. Some of it might also be internal data for the application itself. Either way, there should be a way to remove these files via a configuration setting, or at least drop them into a quarantine so you can make the call for yourself.
2. Auto unmounting of external devices - Ok Apple, if my Linux distro can handle this tidy little chore, then surely the most “powerful” OS on the planet can do it too. Even XP has had this capability for quite some time now.
if I’m not explaining myself well, in OSX, if you want to remove an external device like a camera or a USB stick, you have to drag it over to the trash to remove (unmount) it. So 1999.
3. Mounting external servers in Finder - Ok, I have to come clean first; I do not like Finder. Finder is not as efficient as Explorer or KDM in my humble opinion in a lot of ways. But most glaring, Finder does not give you the ability to mount external servers as a local folder. Yes, you can mount/connect to a server using read-only FTP, or Webdav, but both are insecure (so no SFTP), and neither give you the option of doing this every time you login.
While this may seem innocuous, this is actually my biggest beef about Finder. Using KDE in Linux, I am able to easily mount my development and storage server from my desktop, and am even able to chose to auto-mount them every time I log in. While XP cannot do this by default, there are apps that will let you do this (Webdrive) as well.
I suppose my biggest beef here is that this may not be a “defect”, it may be by design. Users have been complaining about this for years and years. So why hasn’t this been fixed? Well, if you tell Apple you need the ability to mount an external server to backup or move files around, they will happily try to sell you a subscription to .mac. Coincidence?
4. Video in iPhoto - There really isn’t an iLife application called ivideo, but there should be. iPhoto is hands down a great way to organize pictures, and yes it can manage videos too. However, its not really clean. When you hook up your camera and auto-import everything on the device, it will dump the photos and the videos into the same view. I don’t know about you, but I love the idea of a single interface for my videos and photos, but I hate the idea of them being dumped together.
I could also rant on about the fact that iphoto has loads of links to .mac and iweb. But thankfully I was able to find a nice plugin to export my pictures to Flickr.
5. Single Mouse Button - Sometimes you get a feeling that form wins over function in Cupertino every time. There’s no other reason to explain the lack of a right mouse button on Mac laptops. OSX has functions and features that require a right mouse button/click, but the only way to do that natively in the Macbook line is to press the control button while pressing down the mouse button. Guys, seriously, the single mouse button has to go.
6. Airport Express + itunes - Ok, so this is not really a problem with the core OS. AE, once you get it working with your existing network, is a great little piece of kit. The only major downside is it only plays audio, and only from inside itunes. How great would it be if you could play anything inside itunes, like movies? That way, you could hook up your system to the TV and listen in Stereo glory!
7. Videoconferencing in full screen - Ok, so this isn’t really a problem with OSX either. If you want to do a videochat with another OSX user, your money. ichatAV has the best quality and overall experience than any other app that I’ve ever tried. It simply is incredible. The trouble in paradise comes when you try and chat with a Windows machine. First off, the only IM protocol supported natively on OSX (i.e. not via jabber) is AOL. Which is great, because AOL users on Windows can then chat with AOL users on the Mac. Great? Well no. AOL’s latest version, codenamed Triton (6.0+), supports full screen video. However, it is not compatible with ichat. Version 5.9 is ichat compatible, but only supports a miserly 120×120 screen on their end.
MSN (Windows Live) messenger currently does not support video chat in full screen with their OSX client. There are a few alternate MSN clients for OSX (amsn and Mercury) that support some video capabilities, but not full screen.
So how do you have a full screen web conference between a OSX user, and a Windows user? Hello Skype (the audio quality however is not as good as ichat).
8. Safari Customization - Safari is just so close to being my default browser, but there are just way too many minor annoyances to get me to uninstall Flock. For one, they have a feature that allows you to auto-open “safe” files after downloading. This is fairly standard across platforms/browsers now. The only problem is that Apple has decided what a safe file is for you, and its not really easy to change! So if you want to make bittorrent files be considered “safe”, you have to crawl Finder and start creating config files. Same applies if you want to change the default search engine (because of where I’m located, I prefer google.co.uk).
Changing a config file is not that tricky. However, its important to note that you always are advised to back up said config files as an errant carriage return or whatnot will crash Safari. How nice.
9. Dashboard - Ok, so I’m probably not going with the consensus here but I simply do not get/like/embrace dashboard. It’s utterly useless. If you have widgets for the weather, currency exchange, world time, and the calendar, but just want to know the time in New York, you still have to load all of your widgets. But even worse, there’s no way to take the experience/widgets back to the normal desktop view and keep them there as you need it. Click away, then the dashboard disappears with all your widgets in tow.
What if your doing an expense report that requires you to check values against a variety of currencies? It means having to hop back and forth between dashboard and your desktop. What if you’ve loaded a must-have widget that causes a bit of a performance hit? Not much you can do unless you un-initialize other widgets. Regardless if you use Dashboard frequently, the widgets are active in memory from boot up.
Sure, there are tricks you can use to keep a particular widget active at all times, but the widgets still are shown above all other applications and views with no way of minimizing, or at least allowing other applications to have the focus.
In my view, I would much prefer to select my widgets manually, then have them float as standalone applications that can be minimized or whisked away by Exposé. And when I’m done, poof they should go away. There’s far too much tinkering involved here.
10. Random Gripes -
Mighty Mouse - Once again, form drives function. Maybe I got a bad one, but this mouse simply does not right click 100% of the time (not even 50% of the time). Can someone please tell Steve that everything Mac does not have to be elegant, but it has to work. Give me an ugly Microsoft mouse that just does the job any day.
User Permissions - Why oh why can you not define permissions based on a user? If you wanted to share your photo folder with another user on your machine/network, the only way to do so is from the group level. This is just silly.
Enough with the dotmac/iweb already! - Do I need to say more? I’ve already shelled out a fantastic amount of money to buy your HW, can you spare me the constant hooks into .mac please? I wish there was a way of defining a service/server to do things .mac did, because I love the idea of my mac syncing various things up with a backup server…just not one that costs $150+ a year!
