@ vacri:

Yes, it is limiting. I was more or less impressed with it when looking at it from a technological neophyte angle. Sort of trying to put myself in my students’ or coworkers’ shoes.

I wasn’t really worried that much about the restrictiveness of the GUI because it has a unix running underneath it. So if I need to do something complex, I can always hack it on the command line – or so I figured. That’s what I usually do on Linux too because sometimes the GUI’s are a bit shaky. For example, I still use aptitude from the command line because Synaptics or whatever the KDE equivalent is used to love crashing in the middle of installation leaving the system in a funky state. :P

As for Vim – did you look at the screen-shot I posted? Have you not recognized the Vim icon in my dock? That was the first thing I installed on that machine. I hardly use anything else for my text editing.

I was looking for a Notepad like editor that I could give to my students when I’m going to be teaching them HTML. I tried telling them how to disable the rich text editing thing in the properties dialog but in the end they would just bring me their laptop and make me do it. I figured dragging an .app file into the applications folder may be easier.

(sorry, brainfart – missed that you had dismissed textedit. It does have Vim, though, king of the text editors…)

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

I have to agree here. Longtime windows user migrated to medium term linux user/admin, and in a mixed office am now picking up OSX support duties.

So many times I’ve gone to help an OSX user and had to rope in another person to help because either a) Apple does things differently to everyone else, just for the sake of being different; or b) what you want to do is simply disallowed by Apple. The very idea that you might want to do it goes against ‘simplicity’ and is verboten.

Occasionally there is simply no way to do what I need to do in the gui, so I break down to the command line and do stuff there, which completely confuses even experienced OSX users if they’re non-technical. The main backup guy I rope in for all these little pecadillos is an Apple fiend (seems to get a Foxconn box every week) and I’m constantly asking “okay, how do I do this in the gui”, only to get “you can’t”. Eventually I’ll crack at a point and just exclaim “that’s just shit”… and he’ll agree that many of these restrictions are needless.

Apple’s UI is simple. It is integrated. It is not comprehensive. It is not enabling. It is needlessly controlling.

I would say that OSX is pretty, but not beautiful, because to me beauty in a system involves elegance – and something isn’t elegant if you’ve got there simply by chopping out functionality.

I still recommend OSX for new computer users since Win has management overhead to stay safe and Lin just has management overhead… and if they’re new users, they’ll never know just how constrained they are by OSX if they never get to try something else :)

Sorry, just a bit ranty because I had another run-in this morning with OSX :)

@ Luke Maciak:

TextEdit is a plain text editor.

@nitro2k01
Thanks for trying to help! Let me clarify: we were setting OSX up for collaborative use in a conference room. We tried a number of suggestions from google, but couldn’t find a satisfactory solution. Regarding your suggestions:
1. To zoom in and out may be ok if one just want to e.g. start/stop movies. For normal programs it is more or less unusable.
2. In this specific case it was not an option to run the tv at lower resolutions, as this was an interlaced 3D tv with every second pixel row polarized differently, so it had to run at optimal resolution for the 3d features to work. But in general, doesn’t running monitors below optimal resolution look quite poor?
3. Front Row is just for media use, right? Again, in our case we wanted to collaboratively run regular programs.

Maybe it is because I am primarily a Linux user, but the part I couldn’t get over is that a workaround is needed at all. Why isn’t there just a “menu font size” config option somewhere?

Macs at least have a reputation of just working. And I think there’s a grain of truth there. It’s an all-in-one package that comes with…

* Solid hardware. (For example, the firewire chipset has a reputation of giving a low latency for audio applications.)
* Software that is tuned to work with said hardware. (No driver hassle for the hardware in the computer.)
* Comes with a calibrated display. (Important for graphics work.)

Not that a PC couldn’t do these same things, but it would take more effort and research.

Tino: You have a couple of options.

1. Hold ctrl and scroll to zoom.
2. Use a lower resolution.
3. Use Front Row to operate the computer while on the TV.

As I remember it, once upon a pixel Macs were superior in music/video-related stuff. Or rather, all the awesome applications were released for Mac first/exclusively. Unfortunately people tend to not realize that things change, so no matter what we tell them they still believe this is true. I’ve seen it first-hand many times. An extreme case would be a friend’s sister, who insisted on buying a Mac because – and I quote – “I want to listen to music, and Macs are better at music”. It’s kinda sad.

@ Tino:

Oh wow, that’s interesting. One would think that increasing the system menu font size would be a must-have feature…

@ Dr. Azrael Tod:

Re: inconsistent shortcuts – I was thinking more along the lines of IE vs Firefox vs Opera for example. Copy and paste is the same in all of them, but stuff like jumping ot address box, or opening new tab depends on the application. But yeah, I get what you are saying.

As for the “macs are good for graphic designers” thing, I never got that. I honestly don’t see how it would make any difference. I mean, is Adobe suite magically better on a mac somehow?

I think it is brilliant stealth marketing by Apple. They somehow managed to start this thing, and clueless people just keep on repeating it. :P

@ nitro2k01:

Yeah, that “we want to make it more like iPod” worries me. Why would I want my desktop/laptop UI be more like the UI of an oversized iPhone? That UI works great on a handheld device, but I fail to see how it could make desktop experience any better.

@ nitro2k01:

I’m getting the internal server errors too. Not sure what is causing it. I’m trying to track it down.

Thanks.

@ nuroten:

Oh, NovoEdit is exactly what I was looking for – an idiot proof notepad replica so my Mac using students can sort of have similar experience coding HTML as the windows using students.

Thanks for the tip!

Interesting blog, been reading it for a while. :) First time out of the woodwork.

On keyboard control, there’s a list of OS X shortcuts at creativebits.
– To access the top menu, the shortcut is Ctrl + F2.
– To move focus between button elements in a dialog, Ctrl + F7 to toggle keyboard access to all controls then Tab to move focus.
– There’s an app launcher called Butler, like Quicksilver that another poster mentioned (though they are different species) that lets you assign hotkeys for certain actions, say Alt+Cmd+T to launch a terminal window. It’s not freeware and there’re probably other apps out there that let you do the same, but the older version (4.1.6) was donationware and works fine with Tiger.

Imho, some of the “intuitiveness” of keyboard navigation is acquired through experience, and that most if not all OSes require some level of adjustment on the user’s part when starting out (this from a “non-technical” user.) Alt+F4 to quit an app might be quite natural to Windows users, but alien to a Mac user who’s used to Cmd+Q. Similarly, the behaviour of the close button in application windows on a Mac used to make me pause, because with some exceptions, it doesn’t make the app quit. It would sit happily in the Dock and I’d forget it was still running. On the other hand, it’s all right if what you really wanted was to move the window aside so that you can do something else, but be able to return to what you were doing later on without having to restart the app. Part of it comes down to understanding the behaviour and how/whether it fits in your action flow.

Plain text editors: TextWrangler and CotEditor are nice picks, if programming-oriented. If you just wanted something very simple, NovoEdit might fit the bill. (Check MacUpdate for them.)

Graphic editor: Cinepaint?

ditto on the 500 error