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Saturday, April 30, 2005

Meow. (Warning: Nerdy)

(Um, this post is a little stream-of-consciousness-y)

Aside from taking about 23 million years to index my hard drive for the "requires no indexing!" Spotlight search function, I'm up and running with Tiger.

So far, I'm underwhelmed. The niggling details are driving me mad. There are about 18 new, random highlighting colors used in the Finder & Mail, none of which respect user preference settings. You want a graphite system with orange highlighting? Too bad, you're getting shades of blue. Why bothering even OFFERING a choice if applications made by Apple aren't even going to pay attention to them?

I seriously feel like the Finder team at Apple has lost the plot--using command-option to navigate up through the file system from a Finder window's name menu is borked for no reason whatsoever; command-clicking a selection in a Find window doesn't unselect the selection (breaking every convention in the OS--plus, hell, that Find window is borked in about a hundred other ways, starting with how it reverts to the stupid "Grouped, show only five items per folder" mode every time you use it, no matter how you many times you tell it to use a normal list view); Spotlight is slow as hell on my brand new, top of the line PowerBook, and trying to select an item while it's still chugging away sends it into spasms; Item selection, highlighting & renaming on the Desktop or in Finder windows still operate differently and look cheap, like they were drawn with rounded-corner-boxes from PageMaker. kung-foo.tv has a Tiger report where you can see some of the weird highlighting issues--draggable list items have light blue "pills" around them with dark blue borders; when selected they turn dark blue with a highlight rectangle around them. Why? The application selection popup in a dialog box is light blue, and has a darker blue rectangle around when selected. Why?

<"http://daringfireball.net/misc/2005/04/tiger_details">Daring Fireball's constantly updated Tiger report has more bugs and info. The .app extension bug that he noticed pretty quickly is a stupid regression & a lame "feature"; it better be fixed in 10.4.1.

It stuns me that while Dave Hyatt (and, possibly, his underlings--if he has underlings) is (or, um, are) so unbelievably focused on detail in Safari, whoever is in charge of the Finder (which is undeniably the most used & most frequently seen application on the whole computer) appears to be doing random crap all day with no oversight.

(disclaimer: I still heart my Mac and nothing in this entry should be used as fodder to keep mattymatt from switching to the light side)

Posted at 12:50 PM

Comments

001. matt

yeah, i immediately turned off the file extensions, cos i couldn't abide looking at the .app.
one thing with ichat -- when people message me (and initiate the conversation), the windows show up with a black background. i have had to close a couple, type something to them, and thus start the convo so as to avoid the weird blackness.
and, of course, there's the itunes status thing. ;)

Posted at 01:15PM on Saturday, April 30, 2005

002. Jeb

From someone who (unhysterically) uses Windows, at Apple's defence - they seem to respond to customer concern fairly rapidly. So my thoughts are - give it a few weeks to iron out a few kinks, and then review it all :)

Posted at 01:53PM on Saturday, April 30, 2005

003. brian w

I try to be an Unhysterical Mac User--what I like about the system is stability, subtlety and an attention to detail. I set it up the way I like it, then it stays out of my way.

But sometimes I just have to get a good rant out of my system. Now my head is clear enough that I can give them a week for kink-ironing :)

Posted at 02:06PM on Saturday, April 30, 2005

004. Katie

hehn. you said "niggling" hehn hehn...

Posted at 12:32PM on Tuesday, May 03, 2005

005. Jamison

One of the many things I find amazing (and not amazing as in good, more like amazing someone let them release it like that) is that while they took out the wonderful feature of Mail where you could choose to have you folders on the left or the right, forcing you to have them on the left, they started also putting these option panels on the right side of windows and not let you choose to put them on the left.

The RSS view of Safari is one, where you end up with the scrolling bit of your page on the left, then the sidebar fixed to the right that doesn't scroll and then to the right of that you have the scrollbar that scrolls the bit of stuff on the left. The same thing happens in the Spotlight search results window.

The Spotlight search results window also seems to be something more out of Windows than an Apple product, since it doesn't have it's own set of menus, instead it shows the Finder menus, but the Finder is all grayed out, since it's no a Finder window its a spotlight window. Perhaps that's why they gave it it's own color scheme unlike anything else in Finder so we could tell it apart?

Ok, I'm done ranting for the moment and will return to being happy with Panther and trying to ignore Tiger's existence entirely.

Posted at 01:44AM on Saturday, May 07, 2005

006. MattyMatt

"doing random crap all day with no oversight"?! that's what mattymatts do best. you're winning my heart.

Posted at 04:28PM on Monday, May 09, 2005

007. Cowicide

I wonder how much money Apple is losing by people not upgrading from Panther to Tiger just because they don't have the option to turn off the dreaded, slow, buggy, crashy control freak.. SPOTLIGHT. Is Apple starting to take cues from Microsoft or what???

Posted at 09:11PM on Wednesday, August 03, 2005

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