Apple Nag

I’ve used your products primarily since March 1, 1984 when I bought my first original Macintosh and ImageWriter printer. I was proud to be a Mac owner because it was so superior to the alternatives.

In the subsequent years leading up to the present time I became a Mac bigot. Everything else was not only not good, it was trash and I wondered how anyone could use that crapola.

Then Macs started going downhill with quality problems in the hardware and software. Macs just sucked less. I stopped doing unpaid sales and evangelizing for you and kept pretty quiet. When people asked me what kind of computer to get, I would no longer say, “Get a Mac”, I’d say, “What do you want to use a computer for?” I often told them to buy a PC.

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Most of my small nags are on Twitter now. I only put larger articles on the blog because they require more work.

Since the Twitter updates are as important as the blog postings, I’ve moved up the Twitter widget in the side-bar to just below the logo. You can read a few of the most recent postings there.

The sum of Twitter and this blog indicates how much trouble just one person has with your venerable and exalted Mac OS X Leopard. To say I am looking forward to countless bug fixes and consistency work in Snow Leopard would be an understatement.

Aside from my conspiracy theory that you release “security” patches to destabilize the OS in preparation for a paid upgrade — “Anything has got to be better than this OS!” — perhaps there’s another reason for the abysmal stability of OS X Leopard and the mess your applications are in.

It’s all those Windows and Linux switchers who are coming over to the Mac platform. It’s all their fault. Well, mainly.

You look at your market share rising as a result of the poor, down-trodden Windows users seeking salvation with the Mac and say, “Hey, these flea-infested customers are used to having crappy software so why should we expend much effort in maintaining high quality or a consistent user interface?”

When your market share was closing in on the low single digits and was less than half the percentage of people who donate blood each year (yes, that bad), you needed to offer some differentiator to Windows. You tried quality and consistency and succeeded quite well, with the occasional brain fart.

Now that it’s cool to own Macs — geez, even Microsoft thinks that’s true — you’ve been spending time adding features and stealing resources for the iPhone. But, you seem to have forgotten the user interface designers and quality inspectors in that building you sold a few years ago. They might still be there, you should go have a look.

OS X was improving in stability until 10.5 Leopard came along. Now, every time I try to do something I hesitate not knowing what wonderful behaviour I’ll experience.

While you integrate your apps, there’s so much inconsistency between how they function now, that it looks like they were designed by totally different companies. I’ve covered this in several previous postings.

Without the Switchers, there may not be an Apple, but they’re lulling you into a false sense of godhood.

Having Switchers in the Mac camp is like being adrift on a life raft surrounded by salt water. You need water to survive but this water will poison you.

If the following is a typical Windows switcher, you know what I mean …
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That’s the new name I’m going to use when a background application “brings up” its windows and “spews” them all over the windows for the foreground application. It conjures up visions of projectile vomiting, which is how disruptive this action is.

Now if only there was some preference Pepto-Bismol to prevent this behaviour and settle the background app down.

For the history, see this post.

The more I use my Apple TV, the more I wish you’d stop treating it as a hobby and go pro. I mean, I’d be paying the same price regardless, right?

iTunes decided it couldn’t sync with my Apple TV because it could not connect. But wait, why was it still in the sidebar then? Was there some delay in realizing it had lost touch with the Apple TV? If so, then why wasn’t the device removed from the list as soon as it realized it couldn’t connect after I asked it to sync?

The first step was to quit iTunes and relaunch. The iTunes menu bar remained even though the Dock said the app had quit. Sigh.

After relaunching, the Apple TV showed up in the list of devices, but still wouldn’t sync. I guess that means I’d have to reboot the Apple TV.

Now this is where I get annoyed.

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Your networking design allows remote users to hold us hostage. “If youse want us to release dat disk, den maybe youse wanna tink about payin’ up, capiche?”

I connected my MacBook to my G5 that had a disk image mounted. The MacBook connected to the disk image but I decided that it was not what I needed.

I tried to unmount the disk image from the G5, but it could not because it was in use. There was no option to force disconnect. In fact, the message is misleading and is asking me to waste my time closing applications in a vain attempt to release the disk. As long as a remote user is holding on to the disk, it can’t be released.

I can quit iTunes and it warns me that someone is sharing my library and I can disconnect, but no option for File Sharing.

This is how one person on the network can hold hostage the disk on another user’s computer. We must be in control of our computer at all times, not someone on the network.

An exercise to the reader. How do you know who is connected to your disk so you can go beat them up? Leopard doesn’t think you need to know that vital bit of information.

A couple of nights ago I thought I’d watch a TV show I recorded using my EyeTV 200 to my G5. But, I wanted to watch it comfortably in bed streaming the content over the LAN to my MacBook.

With your AirPort Express running an 802.11n only network at 5 GHz, I can get about 6-7 MB/s when copying files. That should be no problem for streaming — and it isn’t — assuming I can actually connect to the server.

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Windows experts say you should reboot your PC daily to clear out the crud. Apparently, it will run faster for awhile.

I don’t know if there was any truth to that, or if it’s a problem with Vista or Windows 7. It’s sure good advice for Leopard.

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What are you saying to me, iCal? I touch you softly with the cursor and you squeal with joy. Beep, you say. Beep, beep, beep! I can’t understand you dear. Try putting up a warning dialog.

Yup, it’s time to nag you guys again about meaningless beeping and useless error messages. For efficiency, I can understand beeping once, maybe twice. But if I keep doing the same thing because I haven’t a clue why you’re beeping, then maybe it’s time to say something intelligible.
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Now that I’m using this blog to document all the things about your software and hardware that nag at me, you’re going to see some really old issues show up.

I’m almost embarrassed to talk about your window gum-drops for close, minimize, and whatever the heck that green one is supposed to do. I think you call it the “zoom” button, but it functions more like a random window resizer.

There is no way I’ve been able to predict the size of the window when I click the zoom button. In OS 9, it used to maximize the window to fit on the screen, I think leaving room for the icons along the right side.

In OS X, uh, I have no idea. Let’s check out a few of your own apps …
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