Pokye

My Fourth Apple Mac Anniversary

I am in the middle of moving, collating and collecting together all the little bits of personal and important data that I keep on my computer - an early spring clean so as to speak - when I stumbled across the invoice for my first Apple Mac and realised that today is my fourth anniversary as a Mac user. And, as I have been from time to time, writing up my thoughts and experiences moving from a long time relationship with Microsoft to the glossy Apple, it seemed like a good time to take stock and look at the small handful of things that still annoy even after all this time. And the best reason for that, of course, is that in the past when I have voiced a gripe I have more often than not been helped out with some advice on how to curb the errant behaviour I dislike.

On the whole of course, I am fully integrated into the ‘Mac Way’. Nowadays, when occasionally faced with a Windows machine, I feel lost and find it hard to dredge up the memory of where things are but being fully immersed in the ‘Mac Way’ is not the same thing as being happy with the way that OSX struts its stuff. There are still some major annoyances.

Take, for example, the menu bar. I have got used to the single menu bar at the top of the screen but it’s ’stickiness’ often causes me to curse loudly. As I don’t like to have too many windows open at a time - I just don’t like clutter - I tend to close a window when done. So the one thing that happens at least once a day is I try and perform a shortcut keystroke against the application that is on ‘top’ only to find the menu belongs to an application I just closed the window of. Typical of this is Mail. I’m browsing using Firefox and I open Mail. When finished with Mail I close the window and Firefox is back on top. And I press the Apple/T combination to open a new Firefox tab and get the ‘Choose Font’ dialogue instead. Press Apple/Q on that and bloody Mail quits. The only way, as far as I am aware, of closing the font dialogue is to click on that extra small little button top left. Some serious finger accuracy on the trackpad. What I want, what I really, really want, is for the menu to reflect the application window that is open on top of all the others. When I close the Mail window I want the menu bar to change to Firefox. And yes, I know in this example the Mail application is still open - but the window that the font dialog is aimed at isn’t.

Next up - the save dialog. Most seem OK but every now and then in some app or other I get a save dialogue that has decided for me where I am going to save this file and it is going to damn well put it there if it’s the last thing it does! In all fairness it will let me save the file deeper into the folder structure but it ain’t going to let me navigate to a folder earlier in the path than where it opened. What the hell is that all about?

And why is it that some applications - or more likely most applications - will not let me - the God of this machine - decide where I want the data stored? I just installed a copy of Barebones Yojimbo (for the aforesaid spring clean) and nowhere do I get this choice. I want to make a copy of this so I am forced to hunt it down. This seems to me a strange paradox. I am constantly being told that the Apple Mac and OSX offer a more sophisticated experience for the more sophisticated user, yet when it comes time to choose where I want things stored I am not allowed to make those decisions.

Which leads nicely into the total lack of good uninstall routines for applications. Sure, just send the app to the trash and it’s gone - poof! The ‘package’ structure makes it so much easier to get rid of something no longer wanted. But if I want to eradicate Yojimbo - for example - removing the app is only half the problem. The data is still there lurking in the bowels. So are the preference settings and Steve Jobs knows what else? Sometimes large quantities of little files get left orphaned with absolutely no way of getting rid of them except by trawling the file system and making educated guesses.

And finally how could I not mention the Finder. What a total and unmitigated heap of crap that is!