Re: Misery Loves Company
 

OK, but it's not really that black-and-white (or red and green ;)). Take AHunter's statement: But compared to anything except that, the Aqua appearance is pretty damn ugly too. What bugs me about a statement like that is its tone of "objectivity." Is Aqua appearance "pretty damn ugly," or does AHunter (and you, apparently) judge it so?

Me, I like it . . . better than any theme I've used, and I've tried a lot. In the end, I come back to Aqua.

I also like the Dock and, as has been pointed out in many forums, it isn't a Windows knock-off but a NeXT ui feature (which Windows later copied).

More options for tweaking the ui would be nice, but, hey, what did we really have in Classic Mac? Not much. I could change a few colors on my windows, but it was always still the Platinum UI looking at me in all its boring splendor.

Seeing what PathFinder can do in presenting all sorts of configuration options, I'm surprised that Apple hasn't done as much, or more. Options seems to be the solution to this long-standing frustration some have with the ui. That failing, it's 3rd party stuff to the rescue. . . still a better solution than using Windows (which btw, I use about 30% of the time each week at a work station I'm stuck with.)

The Dock is lame for these reasons
 

First of all: It is an unefficient launcher. Take XP start menu for an example: you have a custmisable number of most used-apps on the first level, then a hierarchy of menus. To start applications I use most it's a 2-click deal (instead of one for the dock, I agree).

But wait! in windows, there is the Quicklaunch pad available for one-click access. Or even better, I can add any quantity of toolbars all around the screen with auto-hide on or off containing any shorcut or document I like, accessible in only one-click. All that without running third party haxies!
This, in my opinion, kick the dock's ass.

The dock changing position and scale is also a drag. As I don't use it as a launcher so I only have running apps in it, its scale depends on how much programs are running, wich is kind of annoying.

The dock also fails as an app switcher. While Aqua puts so much effort in fading colors on OK buttons to help me click on them, it only provide a 10 pixel wide black triangle to differenciate running programs from their shortcuts. And also fails to provide efficient document switching, due to the fact it uses beautifully 3d-rendered large semi-transparent icons or tiny screenshots of document windows instead of good old reliable text.

At least, Exposé is there to greatly ease the pain. And Panther improvement on the open/save dialogs are a good thing, although I don't understand why it wont let me perform every task a finder window do.

Firstly: I'm with Phil. I love Mac os, And Aqua. I think it's really kewl looking, and very contemporary. I also love the dock.

Secondly: We aren't really accomplishing anything. We are saying what we like and what we don't like. Not everyone is gonna be happy with everything, so use what works for you. If you don't like Mac OS, stop complaining and buy a windows machine. Some people like everything to do with the Mac OS, like me. Some people hate it all out. Either way, you don't have to make the other guy feel bad for his likes and dislikes.

If you don't like something, don't try to make other people feel bad for liking it. Even if you don't think it works, or is a waste, if some people like it, than good. Not everybody can agree on everything.

right... I admit my last post wasn't constructive at all. At least, it illustrates the fact that if OSX was customisable, I would have less reasons to complain.

Originally I hoped that some poeple would reply to my thread things like 'hey you can do that or that, just type this obscure line in terminal'... But instead I had links to program I can't afford to install because of stability issues.

Also, to me, an interface being 'cool' is a con. It's not a christmas tree, it's a tool.

fruitless futility
 

i thought that is what we are supposed to do :D

Re: fruitless futility
 

No, this isn't Ars Technica. ;)

- post mistakenly edited instead of replied to -

My fault.

Slaps own wrist! :eek:

Phil St. Romain

schneb: Thank you. I can't swear that either the nice haxies or the official Apple changes are in any way due to us loudmouth complaining types, but if I were the programmer I would appreciate feedback.

We could very well be sitting here with an OS that would not give you the option of displaying mounted volumes on the Desktop, stick you with an Apple (but no Apple menu) sitting smack in the middle of the title bar, no Finder labels, no menu clock, 64 x 64 pixel icons everywhere, a single Get Info window so you could not compare file info on two different files, and a host of other things.

I would not complain if I did not expect great things from Apple and the MacOS.

Absolutely! :-)

Scheb, the "tone of objectivity" I refer to is the stating of what's really an opinion as though it were an incontestable fact. Statements like "Stripes are ugly" is an example.

There are lots of issues pertaining to the ui that can be discussed on the basis of what could be more efficient--as in slamex's post about the Dock. I've also been on forums where people talk HIG principles about how the UI could be better designed. Even there, however, so much of that seems subjective to me and a matter of preference.

I'm not denying for a second that there are many ways the ui situation could be improved, but I do know that I enjoy the workflow and find myself much more productive in OS X than I have in OS <9 and Windows. I suspect a lot of others who post here feel much the same, and that's a pretty important bottom line. It provides an over-arching context for discussing the areas where improvements are still needed, so the tone is more like "This is good, let's make it better." That's different from what I've experienced on other forums where the tone seemed to be more, "This is crap--not a real Mac: give us OS 9.5!" I don't think that second attitude will fly here; too many people who've had good experiences. But we should all definitely want to help make things better.

- Arrggh!! Apologies, schneb. I mistakenly pressed edit for your post above instead of Reply and I can't seem to fish out your previous post.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

Phil

Time to lay off the Egg Nog, Phil. :p

Part of the deal for me is, that after spending a decade in the software industry, hearing things along the line of "well, it's just code, changing these things should be easy, why didn't they just do it right in the first place" combined with a (learned the hard way) notion of the economics of software development just makes me want to curl up in a little ball and weep for the future of humanity.


I think I'll just go have some Egg Nog, instead. ;)

Admin--Please Do Not Erase ;-)
 

Glad I read this post before wondering if I got censored. ;-) No problem.

In response your clarification regarding objectivity, I agree, this statement says it all... "This is good, let's make it better." And I agree. I usually just look past the emotional nature to pull out what the poster is really trying to say. Usually I just clarify for them in another post.
Sometimes I have just gotten tired of something that the Dock does to me (such as "What's Up Dock") and I just have to rant. I will be the first to say it is subjective at that point--OK, VERY subjective. Sometimes I like listening to a good rant, especially when it is cleverly worded like AHunter's, I laughed out loud and it did me some good. Helps me not take a computer OS so seriously.

To end on a high note, I really do love alot of things about Panther. I like that the stripes and brushed aluminum have mellowed. The Fast-Switching is awesome and worth the full upgrade price. I like the left menu, and they fixed a thumbnail bug that was driving me absolutely crazy in Jaguar.

I do a little code myself, and it is not easy by any means. Most of my suggestions posted to Apple are fairly simple items to code and designed to fit some of their OS philosophy such as (I am just guessing of course) having an OS that fits the user rather than visa verse. Having an OS that is simple enough for the new user, yet powerful enough for the power user--Not an easy task, and OSX is a prize winner. Personally, I think 10.3 is 90% there. In fact, the only problem I see with OSX is the occasional preference file corruption (which needs a utility for identification and quarantine).

I do think Apple could create a theme application that would supply, say 10 "blessed" fonts, selection colors, button styles, window texture and such. If the application would allow import of custom TIFFs and PDF files, the Mac community would have a ball.

I think it would be a simple code to allow the dock to behave as a utility and not attached to the OS, as well as making Trash a standalone utility that you can display in the dock, left menu, custom menu bar, or not at all (in the dock by default). These simple changes would put the user in charge of whether to use them or not.

What ever they come up with, it would have to be pretty darn good to suck another $129 out of my ever-shrinking wallet. Since the upgrade price seems to be a thing of the past, the only thing I see that would turn-my-crank would be those items I mentioned above. I have a few others, but CSI is almost on. ;)

What you are missing is that the $129 is the upgrade price. It's just that Apple has chosen to make the full price the same as the upgrade price. Compare with the prices for MS Windows and you will see that $129 is a fair price for an upgrade:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/538514

I'm begginning to understand what choices I have:
1- Hope for a better tomorrow, and begin saving for yet another update to implement interface alteration and customisation.

2- Hack my way to hapiness using third party programs, and begin saving for yet another update to fix stability issues. (Although I'm pretty sure most haxies will have trouble with 10.4, as well as a proportion of my software).

3- Bite the bullet and get used to it. After all, if Apple decides it's good, there must be a way to get along with it...

I guess I've been used to more flexibility, but I should get over it already and submit to macOS if I really want to use a mac. Maybe it's just part of the deal...

I also find that maintaining a sense of humor about this stuff goes a long way.

Doing support fulltime for a lot of other people's systems (after leaving the software industry in the mid 90's), you get to see how folks manage to get themselves into deep water by a tendency to over-tweak things, without really understanding what they're doing.

My rule of thumb has been: learn to manage things the way they start out, and over time you figure out how to change the things that are most important to you, and leave the rest alone.

One of the goals of this site is to promote understanding of how things work in the normal mode, so that it's a little easier to understand how to modify them, and how to recover from over-zealousness in those modifications.

Otherwise before long you wind up creating a thread about why your machine freezes, locks up, bluescreens, panics or a host of other evil things, and why did those nasty vendors do that to you.

IMHO. :)

Mr. Arko's personal rule concisely reflects my attitude. I've used various Macintoshes as my primary home computer since 1985, and I've dealt with all the OS frustrations along the way -- anyone else remember System 7.5.2? -- but I've also managed to have a bit of fun as I learned my way around or through them. I'm currently running 10.3.1 and while I see plenty of room for improvement with Apple's current GUI choices, there's nothing I can't deal with serenely and steadily.

With one major, glaring, clamorously noted exception: I cannot abide the Dock.

If you like the Dock and find it useful, I'd bet you've got more screen to work with than I do on my iBook. Even on my G4's desktop monitor it seemed positively anthropomorphic in its intuitive ability to disrupt my concentration, showing up whenever I had just managed to engage myself thoroughly in the task at hand. The Dock must die, or at least be made mortal to the extent that it will not resurrect itself until the next reboot. After all, as previously mentioned in any number of posts, there are any number of superior replacement launchers available. Suitably phrased in the language which best expresses my true desire: Which isn't really a very good idea, as its absence on booting seems to mess up the desktop more than a little. I've found a few Apple Scripts and mini-apps that function as temporary Dock killers, but they, too, have problems. The mildly useful command-tab mini-switcher goes away and any minimized window apparently heads off to the land of /dev/null.

It may be apocryphal, but I recall reading somewhere that the Dock was one of Mr. Jobs's personal innovations from the NeXT days, and he not only refuses to consider removing it, but has requested that it be so thoroughly interwoven with the GUI of the OS that it cannot be easily disabled.

That being true or not, the best and least disruptive workaround I've found (and my suggestion for fellow dock haters) is to let it run... but run somewhere out of the way. Since capital punishment seems to be unavailable as a remedy, long-term incarceration will have to do. Putting the Dock at the top of the screen works out best. One can use Cocktail, TinkerTool or type in a manual adjustment for ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist to do this.

When the Dock is in the balcony, as it were, and Dock hiding is turned on, it is necessary to hover the cursor over the bottom-most row of pixels in the menu bar to make it appear. That is not likely to happen by accident, in contrast to so many of the Dock's usual appearances. The jailed Dock now shows up only when you actually want it to, either by pointing at that line of pixels or by typing option-command-d. No more annoying pop-ups and no more stripes of screen real estate held hostage.

Phil St. Romain: a) All opinions I have voiced pertaining to the ugliness of Aqua's GUI are my own subjective ones. I would not anticipate that very many people would join me in preferring even System 6's simple black-and-white flatness (although a few minimalist types do); a bit more concurrence on preferring Platinum to Aqua but not a majority, certainly not in here.

b) I find myself moderately less productive in OS X now than I have in OS <9, somewhere between 9 and Windows, but the gap is not as bad as it was in earlier iterations of X. I suppose this is still subjective insofar as I don't have a table of minutes per task under each OS, nor data points other than my own experience (and yours apparently would differ).

I'm really looking forward to getting Panther installed on my WallStreet just to be rid of column view in Open/Save/Save As dialog boxes. These things alone have probably cost me an average 20 seconds per open or save operation in comparison with 9 even with the aid of Default Folder (without it, and comparing to 9 also stripped of Default Folder and of FinderPop for fairness, probably an average 1 minute 30 seconds per open or save operation!!! I don't mean total, I mean that much extra!!). The bigger font, especially in contextual menus, has cost me around 5 seconds per use in browsers alone, where the huge font and the way the contextual menu does not always scroll up when you mouse down sometimes means scrolling the browser window up and trying again. Not having the contents of the Desktop folders of all volumes show on the desktop has cost me some time too. (There's no excuse for not bothering to hack in such a thing; and, looking forward, they should display contents of /Users/Shared/Desktop from any volume in the same fashion). Random unnecessary changes that are just "changes for the sake of changing something" have cost me in a similar fashion just because I know the old ways and waste time applying keystrokes I know which don't work, realizing it, then redoing it the new way -- things like Command-SHIFT-N to create a new folder and having to hit the Enter key before I can give it a name if I'm in list view -- but I had to relearn some stuff when System 7 came along too (like the delay when you want to rename a file or folder, I remember that drove me nuts for a long time until I got used to rightarrowkeying first). On the one hand, these are only negatives under OS X if one postulates that the user knows the OS 9 keystrokes and whatnot. On the other, they weren't changes that needed to occur -- they accomplished nothing aside from slowing down legacy Mac users like me. (Command-Y no longer unmounts mounted volumes. Now it is Command-E. Command-E is the old dreaded "eject disk and leave a ghost on the Desktop" command dating back to System 3 days and I just can't get used to it being a good thing). [edit: actually, System 1 days, but I wasn't a Mac user until System 3]

I suppose it is all subjective until someone commissions efficiency studies (and even that won't address the aesthetics, of course). But then I'm not arguing that the Aqua GUI or the Dock or other X-newnesses should be taken away from those who like them, am I?

re: compatibility and the "zillions of modules" thing -- all Apple needs to do is switch from referencing specific files at specific filepaths such as the ones inside extras.rsrc (chock full of tiny little TIFFs or PDFs to generate the GUI) and provide a folder containing the default ones to which 3rd party alternatives can be installed, plus a Prefs pane letting you pick Platinum or KDEclone or whatever instead of Aqua. Much as Duality and Shapeshifter and so forth do, quite successfully, except that they have to do their thing by patching how the OS thinks (Shapeshifter) or by swapping out the Apple-supplied files for substitute files with the same names (Duality). The instability comes not from "zillions of modules" but from the fact that the hacks have to work around the corners and margins of how Apple set up OS X to work. (I myself have not found Duality themes to be unstable, but I had a crash in mid-switch one time and had to manually copy in healthy versions of about 2 dozen files that got munged before I could boot again. Mostly I don't change GUIs around though, I set it to Classic Platinum and leave it there).

While we're at it, although I personally would not make use of it, I bet the Windows and Unix transplantees would appreciate the option of making an application's menus appear just below the top of the currently active window instead of in the menu bar.

ambrose: Naah, it's not so hard to nuke the Dock and live happily without it.

a) The Dock, if moved out of CoreServices and placed elsewhere, behaves like a regular application, aside from not having a File:Quit command. If you move it to /Applications or some other alternative, you can nuke it from Terminal, or batchscript a kill to get rid of it.

b) Under Jaguar and presumably Panther, you have to let it launch at logon or your Finder is glitchy, but it doesn't need to keep on running. So if you add it to logon items and then have a batchscript terminate it with extreme prejudice after your screens come up, you're fine.

c) WindowShade X will let you swap the behavior of the minimize-widget so that you get Window-shaded windows instead of windows that went into oblivion. Does other nice things too.

d) No Command-Tab? Good riddance! But if you liked it I'm sure there are 3rd party process swappers that will accept keystrokes including Command-Tab if you like your Mac to behave like a Windows PC.

e) You'll still need some kind of process swapper / access to running programs. Lots of them available from VersionTracker. I use X-Assist very happily but it's far from the only game in town. And you'll need an app launcher. X-Assist does double duty due to its customizable "Shortcuts" menu, but again there are a vast number of nice alternatives, including FruitMenu.

Hickory Dickory, baby, and hallelujah.