OK, don’t take me the wrong way, I love my Mac; I have had one since way back when, ‘98 probably. I bought Apple stock back at $11 a share b/c I so believed in where Apple was headed with the new iMacs and OS X (iPod didn’t even exist then). Like all good things, though, there are some things I think could be made better. And these aren’t your typical complaints about one-button mice and not enough software because anyone who thinks those are problems with a Mac hasn’t been paying attention. I have been using OS X since it came out and I will swear on the bible that in my everyday home and work life (I am a software engineer, I work on computers for a living) that THE ONLY Windows based program I have ever truly needed to use and haven’t been able to is Microsoft Visio.

1. Mnemonics for the menus. On Windows, you hit alt-F and the File menu drops down. This may seem minor, but it is big to me because of the way I like to work. I am a keyboard guy. You will never convince me that the mouse is a better interface. I can do everything from the keyboard. I know, I know, learn the shortcuts. How can I learn the shortcuts if I don’t have an easy way to see them by popping open the menus? Geez, I use probably 10-15 applications at a time, plus 10-15 more on a regular basis and I know A LOT of the shortcuts, but it would just be a whole lot easier to hit Apple-F to see what’s under the File menu. I also know I can hit some keystroke combination to pop open the menus, but it won’t let me open a specific menu, it makes me cycle through them all.
2. Terminal should have X windows built right in. I shouldn’t even need to think about launching the X server.
3. I still don’t really care for the dock. It is all right and it is cute and I use it, but it doesn’t let me organize applications very well on the left hand side. I would like to be able to organize applications under folders so that I can store more of them and make them more readily available. I wish I could get in the habit of using spotlight to find applications.
4. Why Objective C? Seriously. Someone explain to me what the benefits are to writing programs in it. I would love to write some Mac apps and it has gotten easier through XCode, but come on, who writes in Objective C these days other than Mac programmers? I know I can use Java and some other languages but most of Apple’s resources go into Obj. C.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 6:48 am and is filed under Computers, Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.