I'm always amused by these posts praising how everything just works on the Mac, and how it's so nice not having to worry about [annoying linux/windows stuff #351].
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug
Agreed. It doesn't just work. It works until you want an opinion, then it stabs you in the face repetitively.
My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.
>My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me.
iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.
That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).
>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).
I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?
>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre
Never had that.
>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
I reckon Joe the average user is perfectly fine with that. Way better than my girlfriends "New folder X", where X is like 1-15 because she can't be bothered with sorting them while manually importing. It's way too time consuming.
Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.
We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.
>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").
Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.
>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
* >Incorrect in what parallel universe?
>Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.*
iPhoto IS one. As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages. iLife is just a marketing name. iTunes used to be part of iLife too. Now they're just apps, apps that 99.9% of people that purchase a Mac will find on their computers pre-installed when they open them. That was half my point: that iPhoto today is just about as much a part of a default installation of Mac OS X as any.
>Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
Now that we've gotten the fact that iPhoto will almost certainly be on my machine when I open it, it should be clear to you that it doesn't matter which of these I am. For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience. Drawing an imaginary line around a subset of applications and calling them "OS" or "not OS" does not take away from the fact that a bad iPhoto experience will understandably contribute to a bad Mac experience. As such, both by technical and laymen's understandings of OS, the critique is valid.
Edit: My mistake, iPhoto is included in the server one as well. So it turns out iPhoto comes installed on every single Mac.
> . As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages
However, reinstall MacOS, and you will notice it doesn't install iLife.
Similarly, most Windows computers seem to ship with that 30 day trial of MS Office these days; does that mean that 30 day trials of MS Office are part of Windows?
>For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience.
Sure, it's a non-part-of-the-core-OS, bundled for free, easily replaceable, with 10s of alternatives, peripheral to using a Mac, part of the Mac experience.
To return to our duck-ing topic, what does that have to do with OS X being bad or "not just working"?
If you had to bring up a bundled, non-essential, app to make your point of OS X not working well, then one has to conclude it works mighty fine overall.
And it's even worse than that: you haven't actually even made any point against iPhoto. Just that you don't like it's filesystem abstraction. Which is neither here, not there.
I am not the OP (read the usernames). In fact I don't have a problem with iPhoto at all since I never do photo stuff (don't worry I have issues with just about every other aspect of OS X). I simply wanted to point out that if he had a bad experience with iPhoto then it is fine for him to criticize Mac OS X. Especially considering that dealing with photos is a pretty basic thing for a user to do now adays, and that iPhoto comes with every single mac, and will automatically launch as soon as you plug in a camera.
I believe you are well aware that you are being disingenuous by treating iPhoto as some sort of unrelated third party application that you have no idea why anyone would bring up out of be blue in a discussion about OS X. Who cares if its "non essential", most of the stuff in OS X is completely non-essential (ahem dashboard, photo booth, even mail considering most people use webmail).
> My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.
> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
So... doing "find . -type f -name '.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?*
No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent
Automator + Photoshop.
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
> No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
In what way?
> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.
What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.
Pain in the arse because there is no easy eay of determining which was the master. Instead of a hierarchy, you have a hierarchy with a temporal aspect as well poorly mapped to a non temporal hierarchy.
The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.
Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.
I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.
I have had run ins with iPhoto as well, sorry but if I cannot quickly locate my pictures in Finder something is wrong.
Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?
I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.
I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"
It's sometimes not intuitive that some directories on Mac look like packages.
Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
No matter how awful iPhoto is, it's still better than almost anything you can find on Linux. I know because that was one of my biggest gripes while I was using Ubuntu up to about 5 months ago.
And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.
No. I used a MacBook Pro (2007ish model) for about 2.5 years. It was a miserable machine, where nothing ever "just worked" [1]. If I'd ever needed to use it more seriously than for occasional VPN access for ssh / a web browser, I'd have ditched it within months rather than wait for it to die of natural causes.
[1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI
connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking
from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted.
Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up.
I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.
> It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot.
That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk.
I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier!
When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).
The SSD models do a good job of hiding any underlying file system issues. With my MPB from 2010 it would hit a limit after a week or 2 of running where the file system would grind to a halt just about and struggle to browse a directory and be slow to sleep/awake.
With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
When developing on a mac the Finder is probably the single largest annoyance. I never thought i would ever miss Windows Explorer, but WOW is Finder bad!
With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder.
When I came to Mac back in 2007 I assumed my dislike of Finder was just a matter of what I was used to. Six years of using Mac at home and Windows at work and nope. I do like column view, and you'll get my new Mac Mini out of my cold dead hands, but if I had a choice I'd have Windows Explorer on my Mac in a second. No hesitation.
Why? What differences are there between the two? Also, Finder has Quick View, something Windows sorely lacks and is highly useful, as well as the integrated Spotlight search.
Exactly. Ever since I got one of those lil' white Macbooks in 2006 I've been so happy to be able to simply search for files with Spotlight and find them instantly, something Windows had never given me the ability to do.
Yes, I believe I was performing searches from the Start menu in Windows back in the 90s, but it was always horribly slow and still missed results. Ever since I got a Macbook in 2006 I've enjoyed instant results from Spotlight--I mean within 1 or sometimes 2 seconds, not 5 minutes!
It's not nearly as fast, by at least an order of magnitude. Also, because there is no centralized location for apps to be stored (e.g. /Applications) it has a harder time succeeding as an app launcher.
Windows explorer allows you to drag a file from any folder on your system to any other folder in single window. This turns out to be something I do a lot. So I wind up opening another finder window to do this. Inevitably I wind up with finder windows of different shapes and sizes all over the place. It boggles my mind that the Apple UI team can't see how inferior Finder is.
I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.
Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.
Not in one window. If the folders are nested in in different directories you need two windows. There is that feature where if you drag a file over a folder in the sidebar, and hover, it will open the folders you want in series, but it's very awkward. Unless I'm missing something, which is always a possibility!
As far as I can tell Windows and OS X are the same in this respect. I just moved a file from my Documents directory to my home directory on both systems, and the steps were pretty much identical.
hmmm, you can do that if the folders are close to each other in a directory. How do you do if each is nested deep in different paths? On Windows explorer you can drop down the folders to open any folder in the left side window to drag a file from the current folder?
I've switched over to mac as well. However, Finder is my #2 annoyance. #1 being I so fricking love Winamp, and nothing has come close to that on a mac (or linux) for that matter. And sure, winamp did come out with a mac app, but it was useless I found...
It looks the same. It's still Lists. Lists lists lists. I'm tired of playing music in lists. I want something that organizes and helps me discover music the way I think about it. Lists are not a good interface for this and I don't understand how they persist to this day.
play[1] and cog[2] used to be good, but it doesn't look like either of them have been updated in quite a long time...though the bitbucket repo for cog is showing some action, so maybe it will become active again at some point.
Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).
Why do you say that Finder is an annoyance? I find it pretty great for sorting, searching or connecting over afp or smb. And while developing, I just use the Terminal with pushd/popd and dired.
And then you want to access a hidden folder, which on Windows or Linux you could just go to the address bar and type in the name. On OS X, I have yet to figure out how.
That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.
Type cmd-shift-g in Finder or just type a forward slash in an open or save dialog to bring up a path entry window, much like the old GTK file dialog.
To connect to a SMB system, use cmd-g and type smb://server/share
Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.
The people who are limited by Finder use Terminal... The people who can't use Terminal don't need more than Finder. Apple is great at hitting sweet-spots that way.
At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser.
Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
Agreed, I spend a significantly large amount of time with 5-8 terminal tabs open and I've never been bugged by it. It's just very feature bare compared to iTerm.
How is Terminal.app embarrassing? In most of the ways that a traditional terminal is important, it acts exactly as expected, and still has convenient "new" terminal things like tabs and profiles.
Very true. If you are using an IDE, it already affords a great FS browser (like dired for example). If not, you're probably not a developer in which case the Finder is great!
That's very much like saying, 'If you have a plumber van, it already drives fine. If not, you're probably not a plumber, in which case a rusty bicycle with a broken crankshaft is great!'
The brokenness of the Finder affects users of all stripes. You don't need to be especially technical. It has been reviled for years and years by developers and non-developers alike.
Sorry that came out wrong. I meant that if you're not using an IDE you're probably not a developer, in context of the parent comment to which I was replying. Your PoV does make sense and I agree with it.
I've used Macs for 5+ years and can safely say "It just works" is pretty much BS.
At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder.
Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises.
This is wonderful ! The very limited Finder was the thing that I found most annoying with OSX.
Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.
>Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003).
"It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work.
And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations.
>I suppose I'm just not the target market.
Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.
Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).
From what I could understand when this bit me, OSX uses a different normalization form from what Linux uses (I'm not even sure of what that means, but hey). OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8.
I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.
On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.
On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.
On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.
I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'
> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:
- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.
- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding
If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
Does mac have problems? sure. But it CAN do what you're suggesting. Just get the right finder alternative or crack open the terminal. Done. What Miguel is talking about in the "just works" category is more basic, like sound and graphics.
Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision.
On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.
I too have switched from Linux to Mac in the last two years. Every OS has its annoyances, but the problems you describe are minor/few compared to the problems I experienced routinely on Linux.
I would agree with this, except for my Cr-48, which just keeps trucking along with Ubuntu. My daughter chooses it over a 2008 MacBook with twice the CPU, twice the RAM, the chic of the Apple logo, etc, etc. That and my 2003 Dell tower running SuSE as a home server refuses to die.
A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.
I switched full-time to a Mac a year ago. Multiple-monitor support is pretty horrible, especially when combined with the newer full-screen app mode. It's almost like no developers at Apple use their laptops plugged into a monitor full time. Granted, there's several 3rd party options available, but I hate paying the $10 - $40 for OS-level features that should just work in 2013. When I have my Macbook hooked up to an external monitor and make an app full-screen, the whole desktop slides off of the second monitor, making a dual monitor setup frustrating.
Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc...
My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere.
Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues.
These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.)
Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.
That is often the case on all OSes. At least most of them let third-party be first-class, so the replacements are complete. iOS is an obvious failure here.
I'm confused. I use share with Windows computers and use files with international characters in their names all the time. What problems did you encounter?
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug