Re: OT: Let's welcome Apple to the 80's

Ian Rawlings <news06@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2009-03-22, Mark <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If he means the way Apple works, I understand it a _little_ more, but
still don't agree.

When I used Mac OS, I found it to be a terrible resource hog, unable
to play modest video full-screen on a mac mini

I don't know what res video you were playing, but I'm afraid if your box
wasn't playing DVD-res, or even HD properly, then there was something
wrong with it.

That machine was marketed as a sort of set-top box : video playback was
its raison-d'être. That said, OS X was/is a heavily eye-candied beast,
and it wasn't ideal for low-end configs, true. But that's improved with
every version, and is now a thing of the past.

without jerking (this
is straight out of the box and after applying updates). I was on a
high-res monitor and found the menus appearing at the top meant I had
to keep shuffling up and down the screen instead of just going to the
top of the window I was working in.

There have been volumes written about this. The fixed menubar is a
historic choice, and a very efficient one when Fitt's Law and muscle
memory are taken into account. Windows' menu-within-window makes it a
moveable, unpredictably sized and hard to hit target. And of course, if
you're working in multiple windows, it's a nightmare.

The mouse that was shipped had
the whole top of the mouse as a mouse button, meaning that when
dragging something across a high-res screen, if I had to lift the
mouse because I'd hit the side of the mouse mat, as soon as I lifted
the mouse it regarded that as lifting off the mouse button and dropped
whatever I was dragging onto whatever the mouse cursor was on.

That's nonsense : if you keep the button pressed down when you lift the
mouse, the file sticks to the pointer. If you don't, then the file is
dropped. Which is as it should be. Sticky icons are the work of the
devil.

Dragging and dropping files wasn't consistent with no hint as to what
the action would be.

Eh? When copying (alt-drag), you get a bright green shiny button with a
white plus sign pops up right next to your cursor; when creating an
alias (alt-cmd-drag) you get a curly black arrow; when moving a file
within the same volume you get nothing, which is logical. When you drag
an icon over a compatible app, the app highlights. When you move a
snippet or an image selection into a compatible open window, you get a
bright blue outline around the window. Drag something to the dock and
the dock reacts by expanding or moving.

"No hint"? Here's one : Specsavers, mate. :-)

The only way around the constant shuffling from
what I was working on to the top of the screen menus was to learn a
load of keyboard shortcuts,

Hmm. Generally it's wise to learn the basic key cuts that do most
things. Cmd-N, O, C, V, X, W, Q, F, Z have been there for 25 years, and
have been aped by the other OSes. You probably knew them already.

or to install various add-ons to get
around the issues. There's a "dashboard" screen that kept popping up
when I didn't want it to, something to do with that dopey mouse again

On a one-button mouse it means that you were either holding down, or
pressing a modifier key at the same time. User error.

I think, so I had to dig around to disable that.

"Dig around"? System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse. Not too hard,
surely? Especially compared to finding and manually tweaking something
like xorg.conf just to get a monitor to work...:)

Too much of the GUI
was single-threaded so I often had to sit there and wait for the
blasted beachball to go away, far more than even the far-too-frequent
hourglass on windows.

That is certainly true and has been the subject of years of complaining.
Why Apple hasn't fixed the Finder years ago is anybody's guess. Probably
because file managers have been destined to disappear for some years in
favour of tagging and searches. Mind you, as soon as you get a
reasonably powerful machine the problem does go away. Mine is only a
2Ghz Core Duo and I don't see the beachball, except in laggy old Adobe
Flash.

<snip>

Suffice to say it wasn't a nice experience, I've used Mac OS on
occasion throughout the years and early versions were far better than
Windows 3.11 but it got left behind by XP, and no I don't like XP
either. I didn't come across any advantages to using mac os over
linux, but did come across a whole mass of disadvantages, so why
should I bother with it?

Which begs the question : what were you actually looking for when you
bought it? Why buy low-end Mac hardware to run it as a Lin box? You
could've specced yourself a more powerful custom machine for less money,
and saved $130 on the OS alone.

I've now got three mac minis, all running
linux,

Why didn't you just build proper Linux boxes in the first place? That's
$390 wasted, right there. Could've bought a netbook with that.

it's good hardware although slot-loading DVD drives are satan's
spawn. Issues like video playback went away immediately, mplayer on
linux could play video full-screen, whereas even the same version of
mplayer under macos on the same hardware couldn't. Apple Quicktime
couldn't play the videos full-screen without a costly upgrade

$30. For which you get a bunch of pro export codecs and editing features
that catapult QT ahead of WMP. "Costly" is relative. Although it's true
: they should've included fullscreen for free. Either way, VLC is free,
it's far better than mPlayer, and it does everything you ask.

--
ric at pixelligence dot com
.

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