Dumb Shit That OS X Does
Tuesday, March 15th, 201190% of OS X is great. Every day when I open my laptop and the wireless network connects within seconds, without me needing to dick around, it makes me happy.
It’s that last 10% that is hopelessly retarded, and I want someone to fix it.
Terrible window management
The window management is atrocious. Their design is application-centric: to get a document, you switch to the application, then switch to the document. The way I work is task-focused: I have a bunch of windows from different applications all open in the same screen. If I have to switch tasks, I open up another screen (whether by switch VTs, spaces, window groups, tags, whatever). Spaces in Snow Leopard is absolutely useless.
The best way I have to work around this at the moment is to define a keyboard shortcut for each application that I use frequently. I still have to switch documents within the app, but it’s a little less painful.
The application layer architecture bites me in many other ways. If you close all of the documents, it’s not immediately obvious that you’re still in the same application. Instead, some other application’s window will be on top, and you’ll absent-mindedly press a keyboard shortcut which will go to the wrong place. Furthermore, an application which has no open documents will still appear in the Command-Tab list, cluttering up an already uselessly cluttered list. There is no good reason to keep an app around which has no open documents. Quit them.
No keyboard shortcuts to launch applications
Why isn’t this built in? I have to use Quicksilver, which is unsupported and rather buggy on Snow Leopard. I can redefine individual shortcuts within an application, but not something useful.
Can’t remap Caps Lock key to anything useful
I want it to be Escape. But seriously, Apple are in the best position of any computer vendor to change the Caps Lock key to something useful. Why not remove it? Make it Command by default? Make it Expose by default, if you have to. There is no good reason to leave it on a keyboard any more.
PCKeyboardHack works consistently on the internal keyboard, once you set the Caps Lock action to ‘None’ in Keyboards->Modifiers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to the Bluetooth keyboard, and I have to double-tap Caps Lock every time.
Home and End behaviour differs for every application
As far as I can tell, Home and End are meant to go to the start and end of the document.
Unfortunately, this is not very useful to most people. The other platforms use it to go to the start and end of the line, and OS X has no consistent way to do this.
Worse, some applications make Home/End work on the line, but don’t handle modifiers correctly. Case in point: Google Chrome, which I’m writing this in, will do start/end of line if you press Home/End unmodified, but if you hold Shift to select to the start/end of the line, it will select from the cursor to the end of the document. This behaviour alone has caused me to swear out loud about a dozen times in the last hour.
Office for OS X does sensible things with Home, End and Control. Thankyou, Microsoft.
FileVault is only on your home directory
There is no compelling FDE alternative (yes, I know about PGP, and I stand by my statement). OS X is the only platform without a free, performant FDE implementation.
Time Machine is useless with FileVault
If you’re using FileVault, Time Machine won’t back up until you log out. I log out maybe once a month. This makes Time Machine rather useless to me. The reasons why elude me — can’t Time Machine just run on the encrypted filesystem like any other filesystem?
The best solution I’ve come up with is the same as I used on Linux, but involves more manual labour — rsync to a removable encrypted disk. Yay, command line!
Deleting files in a FileVault volume doesn’t recover any disk space
Your disk space doesn’t come back until you log out. Worse, the ‘recovery’ process only runs if you’re connected to AC power. This is especially annoying on laptops, exactly where you are most likely to want FileVault.
I could sort of understand if this only impacted other users (i.e. the sparsefiles needed to be defragmented and removed,) but it applies to the FileVault user as well. Surely it’s just a plain old filesystem in there?
Or, perhaps, it’s just the reporting that is off. No matter what I add or delete or empty trash, I still have 6.36GB free.
Seriously, a proper FDE implementation would fix a lot of these issues, and help me sleep easier at night. Apple, please stop adding dodgy hacks to the massive duct tape bodge job that is FileVault.
The screen doesn’t open very far
Sucks for viewing in bed. Sucks for use on a desk. Sucks for use on your lap. Why restrict this? Supposedly, it interacts with the heat vent, but there are other scenarios where you’re allowed to run the machine closed.
File Sharing is seriously crippled
No read-only shares. No hidden shares. Windows 95 had more flexibility. You can make it do what you want, but you have to dick around with the Samba config.
I’m also not 100% on this, but if a client tries to modify something it’s not allowed to, OS X says “yeah, I just did that think you asked” instead of saying “no, you’re not allowed”. This confuses the shit out of pretty much every client implementation, including other OS X machines.
No WWAN
WWAN has only been cheap and near-standard on laptops for 5 years now. Why have it on the iPad but not the MacBook Pro? I need WWAN more than I need Thunderbolt.
No ‘brief list’ option in Finder
MacOS has had this since the beginning of time. It’s the only useful layout. Why take it out?
You can bodge the settings on Icon View to do something similar (set icon size to 16×16, set text position to Right, set grid spacing to Maximum) but then you can’t use Icon View. It also doesn’t resize to show the whole filename length, and you have to use Command-O to open an item instead of Enter. Would a fourth menu option really be that bad?
Focus on Finder columns isn’t clear
I just clicked a folder. If I Paste some files, will the files go at the same level as the folder or inside the folder? Perhaps I’ll just drop to the Terminal and do it there, where it’s safe.
Can’t disable sleep
One of the things that I find funniest about corporate life is watching people trying to carry their laptops without closing them.
They drop them. They put papers in the middle. They dangle them in precarious positions. All because they can’t close the lid without sleeping the laptop.
InsomniaX is solving this well enough for now, but it’s still dumb. In my Linux-using days, I never had the laptop sleep automatically — only when I explicitly asked for it with a key combination. It worked very well.
Windows can only resized with the lower-right thingy
This is especially dumb when you get applications - like Quicktime - which open windows which are larger than the screen. You can’t move the window far beyond the screen limits, Zoom only makes it larger and you can’t resize it because you can’t reach the Resize widget. So you can never interact with the lower and right-hand edges of the window. Sigh.
Copying a lot of files will block and fail totally if any single file cannot be copied
Windows does this too, and it’s a huge pain. Imagine you have to copy a lot of files. You start the copy and walk away. You come back an hour later expecting your copy to be done, and then see that a minute in, OS X decided it couldn’t read one of the files, so it threw its hands up and said “nup, I clearly don’t know what to do about everything else, since they’re all dependent on this one file.” Lazy piece of shit.
Lock dialog doesn’t cover the screen
WTF? This is a serious security problem. Half of the time I lock my screen, walk away, come back, wiggle the mouse and my screen is totally visible and able to be interacted with, with the Password dialog sitting on top. Apparently, Apple never considered that someone might *move it out of the way* before proceeding to ravage my hard drive for valuable data.
Font rendering
Yes, hinted text is a bit less accurate. But non-hinted text looks like ass. Hairy man ass. At least give me the option and reduce my eyestrain.
Not that it’s totally relevant, but this is especially annoying on the iPad, which:
- is frequently used for reading stuff off the screen, and
- is generally not used for high-precision typographic output
so you have a great deal to gain by enabling hinting and nothing to lose. I will pay money for a good-quality iPad PDF reader with hinted font rendering.
I could live with this more if the MacBook Pro 13″ had a higher-resolution screen. For some reason, the MacBook Air 13″ got a higher-res screen and the Pro didn’t. Unfortunately, the Air is limited to 4GB of RAM, and the 15″ Pro is too heavy, so I’m stuck with crappy text.
External monitors
I don’t think anyone at Apple actually uses external monitors with their laptops. Which is surprising, because the displays look very well designed.
If you plug in a monitor and set it to Mirror, you can’t increase the resolution beyond that of the internal display. Which makes Mirror as useful as a bicycle to a fish.
You can’t disable the internal screen by any sensible means. Instead, you have to jump through some retardedly arbitrary hoops, like so:
- Sleep your Mac. Already, this is a bad start.
- Plug in the power and monitor. Note that this doesn’t work without the power plugged in, which eliminates another very useful use case (laptops with the screen turned off can easily last through the work day).
- Plug in a USB device. Doesn’t matter what it is. The laptop will wake up.
- You can now open the laptop and reconstruct all of the state that you lost when you put it to sleep in Step 1.
Don’t let the screen go to sleep. This includes locking it. If you do so it will redetect all of the screens and turn the internal screen on again.
But wait a minute, you’re asking. Why not just enable both screens? I’m glad you asked.
You still only get a single active application layer. This means that if you put an application on the secondary monitor and want to open a menu, you have to move the mouse all the way to the other screen to do so. Infinitely high menu bar, my ass.
You can have an application on each screen and send keystrokes to the wrong one. OS X doesn’t have a consistent ‘focus’ concept, so you pretty much have to refer to the menu bar. Which will be on the wrong screen. Command-Q-ing the wrong application gets old quickly.
If you’re working on the second monitor and hit Command-Tab, the switcher will appear on the first monitor. But your mouse is still on the second monitor, so you have to move it all the way across again.
The Dock also does some funny stuff, but why would you use it?
Terminal steals Page Up/Down
Linux - and now everyone - uses Shift-PageUp and Shift-PageDown to scroll the window. PageUp and PageDown are sent to the terminal. Why do it differently?
The Zoom button is useless
Every application does something different with this button. Word shrinks the window to be one page wide (i.e. half of your screen.) iTunes (yuck!) goes to tiny mode. Preview does the correct thing, thank heavens, and that is to take up the whole damn screen.
It’s tiny and has no keyboard shortcut, or even a key sequence like Windows’ Alt-Space-N.
The resize handle is tiny, so manually zooming is a slow process.
Sheesh.
There’s no Cut option in the Finder
The option is tantalisingly greyed out, but you can never use it. Apparently, you’re supposed to copy the files, wait until it’s done and safe, then delete your originals.
I bypass the whole Finder mess by using muCommander, which sensibly allows one to move files.