Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X

• By Owen Linzmayer
• Mar 24, 2006

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When I wrote "Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X," I hoped that by pointing out rough edges in the user interface, readers would say, "I never noticed that before, but you know, that really is very annoying and should be fixed." Boy was I naive.

The article touched a nerve with many Apple apologists and set off a firestorm of controversy. A few of the comments the article generated were just plain nasty, questioning my technical prowess, if not my very manhood. Fortunately, there were brave readers who came to my defense, pointing out that all of my gripes were technically accurate, even if they didn’t share my frustration at the "flaw" I was discussing.

In the spirit of helping make Apple’s operating system the best it can be, here are 10 more things I hate about Mac OS X, presented in no particular order. For the most part, these are admittedly small annoyances, but it was Apple’s dedication to sweating the details that drew many users to its fine products in the first place. I hope that engineers in Cupertino will address these issues in a Mac OS X update soon, so that I can go back to loving everything that’s great about my computer, rather than griping about the few things I hate.

1. Small Open/Save Dialog Boxes

When the original 128K Mac was released in 1984, it featured a 9-inch monochrome display. Even if you don’t have a monster 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display, today’s Macs offer so much more screen real estate. Why is it then that the default Open and Save dialog boxes (see Figure 1) remain extremely small, forcing users to scroll to find the file or location they want?

Figure 1 Small dialog boxes force users to scroll excessively and guess at precise filenames.

Fortunately, in most applications you can resize these dialog boxes by dragging the bottom right corner. Stretch vertically to see more locations and files and horizontally to see longer filenames. The resized dialog boxes are used in the future, but you must repeat the process for every application you use. Too bad there’s no way to set a larger default dialog box for all applications. I paid for a big screen and I want all of my programs to make the most of it without fiddling with each individually.