Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X
Date: Jan 6, 2006
For more information on the Macintosh, visit our Macintosh Reference Guide or sign up for our Macintosh Newsletter.
By Owen Linzmayer
Familiarity breeds contempt, right? So it stands to reason that anyone who uses a product extensively can find fault with it. I’m no exception—my work requires me to use Mac OS X every day, all day long, and although I am generally thrilled with its capabilities and reliability, some things about it really drive me up the wall. Take a gander at my list of pet peeves; then share your own by posting to the Macintosh Weblog.
1. Dock Items Bounce Indefinitely
Items bounce up and down in the Dock to alert you to situations that supposedly require your attention. My gripe is that the "problem" is usually not urgent. The icon bounces indefinitely, like a needy child demanding your attention, endlessly screaming, "Look at me, Mom, look at me!" This is so annoying and unnecessary it makes me want to scream back, "Listen up ya little punk. I hear ya, but I just don’t care, so shut yer trap!"
Here’s the deal. First of all, there’s nothing that can go wrong in software that requires the immediate intervention of a human, so programs are never justified in distracting you from the task at hand. If a program has a problem and needs your attention, it’s OK for its icon to bounce a few times to visually draw your attention to it. Furthermore, it’s fine for it to beep or use some other innocuous sound effect to audibly alert you to something out of the ordinary. But if you haven’t responded after that, you either chose to ignore the situation or are not around. It would suffice to have some other static visual change (interpretation: subtle and nonannoying) to the application’s icon in the Dock, indicating that it wants your attention when you get around to it.
2. Programs Force Themselves to the Forefront
A user’s interaction with one program should never be interrupted by another program. Unfortunately, however, Mac OS X appears to allow programs to force themselves to the forefront. Now, I can’t say for sure if this is the fault of the operating system or poor programming, but I don’t ever recall this happening in Mac OS 9.
Here’s an example that happens to me on a daily basis. I copy a mailing address from an Entourage email, paste that address into Endicia, and click Print Label. While Endicia is generating a large laser printed label with postage, I switch to DYMO Label to print a small label for the international customs form. But after Endicia is done printing the postage, it generates an email notification for the package recipient, and this appears in the forefront as a new window in Entourage, regardless of the fact that I want to continue working in DYMO Label. So whatever I was doing in DYMO Label is now interrupted by the unrequested switch to Entourage. This switch can result in keystrokes and mouse clicks intended for one application being intercepted and interpreted by another.
3. Trashed Items Can’t Be Opened
Suppose that you are doing some hard drive house cleaning and you drag a lot of items to the Trash. Before emptying the Trash, you have second thoughts about an item and want to open it—just to be sure that it’s nothing you want to keep. So you double-click the document in an attempt to open it one last time, only to be confronted by a dialog box (see Figure 1), telling you the document "could not be opened because it is in the Trash. To use this item, drag it out of the Trash first."
Figure 1 Opening a document that’s in the Trash isn’t a destructive action, so why does Mac OS X refuse to help?
This dialog box is doubly infuriating because first it tells you something you probably already knew (that the item is in the Trash); then it refuses to help overcome the problem, instead telling you how to manually get around the roadblock. This problem would be more elegantly handled if the dialog box explained, "Click OK to open this item after it is moved to the Desktop. Click Cancel to leave it unopened in the Trash."
4. Software Update Off-Limits to Third-Parties
As I proposed in the Macintosh Weblog, Apple should open its Software Update feature to third-party developers. Currently, if you choose Apple > Software Update, your Mac connects to Apple’s servers and tells you whether your operating system and Apple-branded programs are up-to-date (see Figure 2). If not, you can easily choose what to download if you want to have the latest versions installed your computer. The system works great for Apple’s own software, but each third-party developer has been forced to come up with different methods of distributing and installing updates.
Figure 2 If Apple would allow third-party developers to distribute updates using Mac OS X’s built-in tools, life would be easier for all concerned.
Everyone would benefit tremendously if Apple gave developers access to Mac OS X’s built-in mechanism for updating software. First, users would enjoy the convenience of having a centralized Software Update feature that worked with all the software on their Macs. Developers would be able to focus their efforts on building cool, new products instead of re-creating the wheel with their home-grown update capabilities. And Apple would profit from a revenue stream by charging developers for this service.
5. Dashboard Widgets are Modal
At present, there are more than 1,500 Dashboard widgets available for download from Apple’s web site, but despite this plethora of programs, I despise the Dashboard (see Figure 3). Don’t get me wrong; I think it’s neat that mere mortals can now create useful little programs, but for the most part, widgets are just glorified desk accessories, and I haven’t seen any widget compelling enough to make me want to switch into Dashboard mode on a regular basis.
Figure 3 Forcing users to switch to the Dashboard to access widgets is confusing.
Ever since the Mac’s introduction back in 1984, Apple has been preaching the evils of modality. But 20 years later, apparently it’s okay to force users to enter a special mode to access certain programs. Another thing I don’t like about Dashboard is that it’s too easy to invoke by mistake, either by pressing F12 when you really want to eject optical media or by clicking the Dashboard icon in the Dock when you intended to click the Finder icon instead.
Modern Macs are complex enough without adding a new class of programs that are installed, removed, and accessed in an entirely new way. Fortunately, EGO Systems’ free Widgets preference pane simplifies widget management and allows you to disable the Dashboard entirely or use widgets outside the Dashboard environment.
6. Painful Pinwheel Pauses
Mac OS X is much more robust than any system software previously released by Apple, but it’s not immune to inexplicable behavior. Despite the fact that my iMac is running the very latest Mac OS X 10.4.3 on a 1.8GHz PowerPC G5 with the maximum of 2GB of memory, not a day goes by that I don’t confront the productivity-sapping pinwheel cursor, which indicates that the Mac is busy with some unknown task. Usually the cursor reverts to normal if I just wait a few seconds, but sometimes I must resort to force quitting applications to set things right again.
Call me unrealistic or naive, but I can’t understand why my relatively powerful Mac with seemingly boundless amounts of free memory and disk space would ever be so busy during normal operation that Tiger can’t keep up with modest user demands (writing, emailing, browsing).
7. Permission Roadblocks
Mac OS X is built upon Unix, a robust, secure multiuser operating system that relies on the concept of resources having owners with specific permissions. This allows each user to have an individual home folder, with its contents protected against intrusion. And users can configure their own workspaces with preferences set the way they like—without screwing things up for other users. That’s the good side of permissions.
The downside is that for Macs with only one user, permissions often get in the way of performing common tasks such as updating system components, deleting files, renaming folders, and so on. Even though you are the only one who uses your Mac, there are times when Mac OS X insists you don’t have permission to perform a specific task. If you’re lucky, you’ll be asked to authenticate as an administrator, and that will allow you to continue. But other times you are told you lack the appropriate permission and it’s up to you to figure out how to circumvent this roadblock.
8. Exposing Package Contents is Confusing
In Mac OS 9 and earlier, applications were comprised of separate data and resource forks that the Finder treated as a single file. The problem with this approach was that when files were transferred through other operating systems, the forks could be separated, rendering the file inoperable. To get around this, Mac OS X uses packages that bundle everything an app needs into a single file that maintains its integrity, even when crossing platforms. To see a file’s package, Control-click the file and choose Show Package Contents from the contextual menu that appears.
For the most part, packages are a clever way of reducing the complexity of managing lots of files and folders. However, the Finder is a bit schizophrenic when it comes to packages. If you’re just browsing a folder, you might see a single application file that you want to duplicate. But when you press Command-D to make a copy, the progress dialog box lists all the individual pieces of the package as they are duplicated. If you intended to copy just the GarageBand application, for example, you might understandably be confused when the Finder reports that it’s copying a bunch of TIFF files (see Figure 4).
Figure 4 Oddly, the Finder exposes package contents when copying files.
9. Dumb Deleting
Several small things bug me about the way Mac OS X deletes files. If you have ever selected a lot of items and then pressed Command-Delete to move them to the Trash, you’ve no doubt encountered the progress dialog box that appears for several seconds while Mac OS X prepares to move the files to the Trash (see Figure 5). Why isn’t this action instantaneous, at least from the user’s point of view? Sure, the operating system must update its directory of the files’ locations, but this could be handled in the background, no? Likewise, why expose to the user the amount of time it takes to actually empty the Trash? From the user’s perspective, emptying the Trash should occur immediately, whether it contains one file or thousands.
Figure 5 The many frustrating dialog boxes related to the Trash indicate a problem with its implementation.
It also bothers me that if the Trash is being emptied, you can’t open it or add more items to it. If Mac OS X were truly helpful, it would honor the user’s desire to delete additional items, not insist that they try again later.
The final injustice occurs when you are trying to empty the Trash and a dialog box notifies you that "the operation cannot be completed because the item is in use." Fair enough; I don’t expect Mac OS X to allow me to delete a file that’s actually being used by another application, but is it too much to expect to be told the name of the application or thread that’s laying claim to the document?
10. Sidebar Items Can’t Be Renamed
For the most part, I’m a fan of the Sidebar, the leftmost column in Finder windows since Mac OS X 10.3. The Sidebar addresses a common complaint users had about previous versions of the Finder: Moving and copying items on a volume often required opening multiple windows, and it was easy to get lost; or the desired destination might snap closed unexpectedly if you moved the cursor to the wrong place. The Sidebar solves this problem by keeping commonly used items easily accessible (see Figure 6).
Figure 6 Items in the Sidebar behave like aliases, except you can’t rename them directly.
To add an item to the Sidebar, all you need to do is drag and drop it into its desired position in the Sidebar. Once installed in the Sidebar, the item functions a bit like an alias, or pointer to the original. If it’s an application, it launches when clicked. If it’s a folder, it reveals its contents to the right. All that is very intuitive, but what if you want to rename an item in the Sidebar? Everywhere else in the Finder, if you see an item you want to rename, you just click its name and start editing. But that doesn’t work in the Sidebar. Mac OS X forces you to open the Info window or locate the original to edit.
For more information on the Macintosh, visit our Macintosh Reference Guide or sign up for our Macintosh Newsletter.