May 12, 2003
The last one in the pool.
I dare you to hear the sound of my feet dragging now. This is it. No more excuses, no more “maybe laters”. Today officially marked my first full day of using OS X. None of that booting into Jaguar to diddle around a little bit and then jumping back into the comfortable lap of OS 9. No more complaining about what application doesn’t feel quite right or what functionally is missing. Ok, maybe a little complaining. To be honest, I was missing way too many cool things by not using OS X all day, every day. NetNewsWire. iTunes music sharing. AppleScript Studio. Safari. NewtSync. DCL. Not that my world is perfect. Not by along shot. But it’s a darn sight closer to my standards than it was a few dot revisions ago. What’s still driving me nuts? I shall elucidate thusly.
- Even the smallest font the you can specify for Finder views and the Desktop is too massive. I work on a 22-inch Cinema Display and I still can’t fit enough file names into a list view window. I want nine point Geneva and I want it aliased, thank you very much. Chunky type is good at small sizes. Really. Please give me this option. Please?
- On a related rant, I hate that in order to make everything shiny and smooth and lickable for Aqua, every single interface widget has gained weight. Too much weight. This water-retentive GUI has bugged me since I first saw Aqua and I haven’t got over it yet. Maybe some day I’ll resign myself to the fact that the interface details aren’t going to change any time soon. But I hope somebody at Apple realizes that there is a lot of room for improving how the space is used on-screen. They used to care about this sort of thing.
- When you switch to the Finder, why the hell don’t open Finder windows always come to the front? Maybe it’s just me, but the application switching behavior seems inconsistent at best.
- None of the email applications available for OS X handle multiple email accounts or tens of thousands of archived messages as well as my five year old release of Claris Emailer. Luckily, it runs quite nicely in an extension-trimmed version of Classic. One interesting benefit to this set up is that all of my custom Emailer AppleScripts run much faster since they’re being executed under OS X.
- What big brain decided that Command-Shift-N is the shortcut for creating a new folder in the Finder? It’s been Command-N for what? Nearly twenty years now? Wouldn’t it make significantly more sense to assign the unfamiliar keyboard shortcut to the new function, namely creating a new Finder window? This one is so dead simple, I can’t believe it hasn’t been reverted. And yes, I know I can fix these keystroke malformations using Menu Master, but that’s not the point now, is it?
- The current version of Blogger Pro doesn’t work in Safari. However, Dano does. Sort of.
So much for day one. I realize that many of these issues have been around for a long time and have been griped about in dozens of other forums. Coming late to the game and seeing that many of the issues that I initially had with OS X still exist makes me wonder. I think the slow migration to OS X is justified for a lot of people, including myself. I feel like I’m having to compromise a lot of things that worked very well under previous iterations of the operating system. I’m not looking back, but I’m not completely satisfied with where I am either. I’ll just keep letting you know how I’m adjusting.
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