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I am in the middle of moving, collating and collecting together all the little bits of personal and important data that I keep on my computer – an early spring clean so as to speak – when I stumbled across the invoice for my first Apple Mac and realised that today is my fourth anniversary as a Mac user. And, as I have been from time to time, writing up my thoughts and experiences moving from a long time relationship with Microsoft to the glossy Apple, it seemed like a good time to take stock and look at the small handful of things that still annoy even after all this time. And the best reason for that, of course, is that in the past when I have voiced a gripe I have more often than not been helped out with some advice on how to curb the errant behaviour I dislike.
On the whole of course, I am fully integrated into the ‘Mac Way’. Nowadays, when occasionally faced with a Windows machine, I feel lost and find it hard to dredge up the memory of where things are but being fully immersed in the ‘Mac Way’ is not the same thing as being happy with the way that OSX struts its stuff. There are still some major annoyances.
Take, for example, the menu bar. I have got used to the single menu bar at the top of the screen but it’s ’stickiness’ often causes me to curse loudly. As I don’t like to have too many windows open at a time – I just don’t like clutter – I tend to close a window when done. So the one thing that happens at least once a day is I try and perform a shortcut keystroke against the application that is on ‘top’ only to find the menu belongs to an application I just closed the window of. Typical of this is Mail. I’m browsing using Firefox and I open Mail. When finished with Mail I close the window and Firefox is back on top. And I press the Apple/T combination to open a new Firefox tab and get the ‘Choose Font’ dialogue instead. Press Apple/Q on that and bloody Mail quits. The only way, as far as I am aware, of closing the font dialogue is to click on that extra small little button top left. Some serious finger accuracy on the trackpad. What I want, what I really, really want, is for the menu to reflect the application window that is open on top of all the others. When I close the Mail window I want the menu bar to change to Firefox. And yes, I know in this example the Mail application is still open – but the window that the font dialog is aimed at isn’t.
Next up – the save dialog. Most seem OK but every now and then in some app or other I get a save dialogue that has decided for me where I am going to save this file and it is going to damn well put it there if it’s the last thing it does! In all fairness it will let me save the file deeper into the folder structure but it ain’t going to let me navigate to a folder earlier in the path than where it opened. What the hell is that all about?
And why is it that some applications – or more likely most applications – will not let me – the God of this machine – decide where I want the data stored? I just installed a copy of Barebones Yojimbo (for the aforesaid spring clean) and nowhere do I get this choice. I want to make a copy of this so I am forced to hunt it down. This seems to me a strange paradox. I am constantly being told that the Apple Mac and OSX offer a more sophisticated experience for the more sophisticated user, yet when it comes time to choose where I want things stored I am not allowed to make those decisions.
Which leads nicely into the total lack of good uninstall routines for applications. Sure, just send the app to the trash and it’s gone – poof! The ‘package’ structure makes it so much easier to get rid of something no longer wanted. But if I want to eradicate Yojimbo – for example – removing the app is only half the problem. The data is still there lurking in the bowels. So are the preference settings and Steve Jobs knows what else? Sometimes large quantities of little files get left orphaned with absolutely no way of getting rid of them except by trawling the file system and making educated guesses.
And finally how could I not mention the Finder. What a total and unmitigated heap of crap that is!
Andy, some thoughts…
AppZapper for uninstalling, brilliant.
MondoMouse for easy window moving/resizing. It also places the app you are hovering over in the bar by allowing ‘focus follows mouse’.
Overflow to replace Finder
Think (Freeverse.com)for a clutter-free desktop
Something to be getting on with
I use all these (apart from Free) and I must say I don’t find any real problems, but then I’ve never owned a PC. I’ve recently reinstalled Yojimbo which is much improved on it’s original incarnation. I’ve also also updated (today) to DevonThink Pro Office which is quite awesome.
Hope thereis something here that helps
AppZapper and MondoMouse I will look into straightaway – thanks for the tip Mike. I’ll look at Overflow out of curiousity but I am rather attached to PathFinder which I have been using for a long time now. The problem with a ‘Finder’ replacement is that it only replaces the front end – things like the ‘Open’, ‘Save’ etc., are still Finder based…
I had a play with Think last night actually as well as Isolator. Not perfect but a useful addition, especially with something like Photoshop where you get the image in a window and if you click outside of it by mistake, the whole damn app disappears!
Yojimbo seems like a half decent app for storage of all those little things I don’t want to lose so I bought myself a copy. Isn’t DevonThink a similar thing only with more muscle or am I missing something…?
To be fair I think Overflow is more a launcher than a Finder replacement. I’ve just downloaded PathFinder, it looks very good. I’ll test it out for a week or so. I see Yojimbo as a personal bookmarker really. As I use Delicious and Blinklist a lot I’m not sure how useful it will end up being. I do tend to prefer having things stored under my control. I used to use Jots a lot and it went down for days with no explanation. I thought I’d lost all my bookmarks. (I backup now!)
DevonThink is basically a notebook on steroids but the new Pro Office version (just out of Beta) does a lot more. They call it the paperless office (where have we heard that one before?). Like everything though, it all depends on your individual usage patterns doesn’t it?
I’m fortunate in not being a hoarder. I’ve been doing some spring cleaning myself and I managed to free up about 5gigs. So far I haven’t looked for something only to find it gone, but I’m sure it will happen.
Definite thumbs up to AppZapper and MondoMouse. Great thanks.
I remember Overflow now that Ive seen it again as I did look at it once before. I’ve no real problem with app launching. PathFinder is fantastic. I make great use of the drop stack and it’s got great image file handling. It is what the Finder should be in my opinion.
Thanks again for your advice here Mike. I knew someone would help me out
And I shall take a look at DevonThink. Might be what I need.
I’ve been playing with PathFinder and I’m very impressed indeed. Thanks. I’m not sure how I missed that one. And yes, I am still wide awake at 3-30am!
I gave up at about 2:45am! I am going to have to stop this when summer comes – I don’t want to be going to bed at dawn!