Apple sucks iBalls!
Tiger gives me few more reasons to stay a dog person.
Tuesday, May 10, 2005 by mormegil | Discussion: OS Wars
Today was a great day of disappointments for me on the computer front. After much pondering, for reasons I will explain, I decided to take a trip to the Apple store and Upgrade my Mac to OS-10.4 "Tiger". I have had a Mac for 3 years now. I spent $3000 on it, and have used it probably a grand total of maybe 80 hours. This is my own fault. There is nothing really wrong with it. It is just that I find myself using my PC. I'm a windows fan, even though that's not something most people will admit. As a skinner and a customizer there is much more possible in windows. This, along with a long list of reason why I don't use my Mac much, have caused it to be a bit neglected. Today I wanted to remedy that. So with much to-do I drove to the mall - a place I try to avoid at all costs - went into the Apple store and to my surprise managed to get a copy of "Tiger" without any of the sales people talking down to me. (This is something that I have become used to at the Apple store). $129 later I left the mall and aside from a great disappointment when I find out that Wetzel Pretzel is out of Grateful Garlic pretzels (I cried only a little), I start home with joy in my heart, and a fancy pull string bag full of OS-10.4 . On a side note; I could not help but notice that the nice Apple black box with the big brushed silver X that Tiger ships in is almost an exact duplicate of the 1990's teaser poster for "Malcom X". Coincidence..... well, probably. Now I get home, and the annoyances begin. First a bit of background. I bought my Dual G4 Power Mac Right when OS 10.2 had just been released. 10.2 was a big improvement over 10.1 so I was pretty happy with it. It did what I wanted and I do not use the Mac much so I never updated to 10.3 "Panther". I still had iMovie, and iPhoto, and iDVD installed. They had been updated several times and worked fine (when I found the time to play with them). A year or so ago they quit giving away iDVD and I hardly noticed. I still had the version that came with 10.2 and I had never actually used it, so I did not care much. I remember Steve Jobs saying in his Keynote at the time, "You can still get iMovie, and iPhoto, and iTunes, for free, and if you buy "iLife" you get iDVD as well, plus a bunch of crap." OK so that's not quite a quote, but that was the gist of it. Shortly after that I became quite busy with my new job and much more interested in the PC side of things again. In short, I quit paying attention to what was going on with Apple. Sure I caught the highlights, "Garage Band" comes out and "Dashboard vs. Konfabulator", but over all my Mac attention span was about as short as the amount of time that my Mac was on. This, I discovered today, was a bit of a mistake for me. | |
First problem: Now, it seams that I have lost some software. I am a bit pissed, but I don't use the iApps often except iTunes, and that one primarily on my PC. So I decide to suck it up an live with it. I suppose if I cared enough I could do a fresh install of 10.2, then upgrade it to 10.4. But I don't quite feel up to that. | |
Dashboard, or as I like to call it, "The Great Anti-Climax" Moving on. Now lets check out these cool new apps. First, since I am a skinner and I was one of the first people to start messing with DesktopX, I have to check out DA, DA, DAAAA, Dashboard. Now Dashboard was getting a lot of airtime, because on the surface it seams a blatant rip-off of Konfabulator, which is more or less a Mac version of DesktopX. (Another debate all together; we won't get into it here). Well the good news is that Konfabulator should not have much to worry about. Dashboard pretty much sucks. Now this is my opinion only but I can tell you what: I'm not impressed. Sure the graphics are nice, sure they have some nice widgets. BUT, and this is a big but, YOU CAN NOT LEAVE A WIDGET RUNNING ON THE DESKTOP. They only appear on the "Dashboard". The dashboard is essentially a full screen window that darkens the rest of the screen, and with nifty effects pulls you widgets out to be visible. So essentially you are task switching to reach them. At this point you can just switch to the real app. I realize that this means that if you want to see any one Dashboard widget, you have to show them all. You can't, for example, leave a to-do list up on you desktop and work in an app; its all or nothing. This should be Apples slogan. OK OK, but the widgets are so pretty.... So are Konfabulators. Well, that is also disappointing, but perhaps I am overlooking something. I go to the Dashboard configuration. Humm what can I change... I can change the keys it uses, I can set up hot corners to call up the Dashboard. That's it. OK I'm still annoyed by this..... Lets move on. Now still sticking with Dashboard I click on the Icon in the dock and it slides up this nifty tray of widgets. All of the provided widgets are very polished and work well. I try a few and am impressed by their cool spinney 3D effects that make it so the configuration for the widgets are on the back of each widget. You have to see this to under stand but its pretty sweet and makes me long for Longhorn to get its compositor working 100%. Hear that Ian? That sadly is about all that impressed me with Dashboard. When you go to the "More Widgets" webpage you find some nice widgets and some crap in about the same mix you find at WinCustomize or the Konfabulator gallery, but nothing to rock my world. Needless to say I don't need a "Next Episode of Stargate" countdown widget. That's what my PVR is for. One last thing of note: not all widgets are free. This is not surprising, but something to remember next time you see a pay suite or theme. Well...one last bitch about Dashboard: I was assuming that since Apple makes dashboard and they have full control of the OS that it would be very well integrated. So I check out the weather widget. Its pretty sweet. Nice graphics. New shiny weather Icons, nice. Let me change the zip from the default of Atlanta to mine. Look there the 6 day forecast, that's nice. I continue playing with Dashboard and when you call up the bottom tray these little X's appear in the corner of all the widgets. One of the early problems we had with DesktopX is that people did not know how to close objects, so I am glad to see that they have included that. So I close the weather widget. This turns out to be a bit of a mistake. It seams when you close a widget it is as if it was never run. That's right, when I run the widget again I have to change the zip, position it, as well as set it to show the 6 day forecast, all over again. Now I don't know if this is the case with all the widgets, but it seems that Dashboard only remembers settings for widgets that are running. You can't open and close them at you leisure and expect to keep the settings you have established. You have to leave them running ALL THE TIME. Well like I said, you cant have them visible while you work in any other app, so I guess it is not really a drain on memory, but let me just say if I made a widget for DesktopX that behaved like that I would get flamed with complaints, and I would deserve it. |
|
Well, it is late, and I have been ranting too long. I shall try and summarize my OS 10.4 "Tiger" experience. The loss of my iApps was my fault for not reading the manual first but still, come on Apple, this is the kind of bait and switch that you would be screaming at Microsoft for doing, and everyone would be screaming for court action. Luckily Apples market share is so small that they can get away with things like that. (Well lucky for them at least). I assume that eventually I will crack an buy a copy of iLife that I will never use and Apple will be a little closer to being popular enough to start suing. I am sure there have been tones of usability fixes and such, but the one thing that I was looking for, better Samba sharing, was still not there. Come on Apple, can't you have one of you programmers take a day to come up with a GUI for the smb.conf file? I have been able to right click on a folder or drive in windows and share it since windows 3.11. You just took Samba for UNIX, can't you afford to at least give it a pretty face? As for Dashboard; very pretty at first glance. For a skinner or widget user it is pretty much useless. I will be keeping Konfabulator on the Mac and have already begun the search for a way to disable Dashboard. This is a great example of how an idea can be taken, yet not understood at all. I could be wrong. I'm sure some people out there are wild about Dashboard. I can just say I'm not one.
|
Reply #2 Monday, May 9, 2005 10:03 PM
Reply #3 Monday, May 9, 2005 10:33 PM
I saw the G5? when I bought my Wacom tablet - sweet looking machine, sleek design, nice dock, large monitor - kind of tempting.
Now, Longhorn definitely sounds like the path for me.
BTW - shameless pitch = "Core" series gadgets....hint, hint.
Reply #5 Monday, May 9, 2005 10:55 PM
Reply #6 Monday, May 9, 2005 11:02 PM
Reply #7 Monday, May 9, 2005 11:12 PM
I hate to end this typo tyrade, but 10.4 is a huge improvement over Panther. I am the last guy to take a bullet for a Mac, trust me. My Compaq lappy is nearer to my heart than any previous pet. But you have to realize that your case is an isolated one.
Dashboard and Garage band aside, the OS upgrade has most of its improvements under the hood. You really can tell a difference once you use one. The H246 alg blows anything I have ever seen out of the water, Spotlight is a great aid in searching for files and content, etc...
I don't mean to be confrontational, but your arguments are based entirely on emotion, and--quite frankly--loaded expletive remarks. XP comes loaded with little more than MsPaint, MovieMaker, WordPad, and Media Player. This is hardly a legion of unstoppable hardworking software. These programs are place holders, if anything, for better programs.
I emplore you to cast aside your prejudices and truly evaluate what you say. Fallacious predilections tend to extenuate ones credibility.
Reply #8 Monday, May 9, 2005 11:20 PM
I emplore you to cast aside your prejudices and truly evaluate what you say. Fallacious predilections tend to extenuate ones credibility. |
Fellatious preponderations tend to exacerbate ones incredulity....
Reply #9 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:32 AM
Reply #11 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:04 AM
Sorry Shotgun but you're sounding like a bit like a Mac fanboy there.
For someone who had 10.2 which came with iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and other goodies, the loss of these programs is not made up by bundling a google desktop type program, a Konfabulator clone, and a few unspecified "under the hood" changes for some people. Especially when you're paying $129 for it.
Reply #12 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 4:46 AM
Like the one button/no scroll mouse, omfg ONE BUTTON??!! HOW USELESS, but it sure is pretty.
Or the previous iMac that had the almost infinetly adjustable screen. Awesome design, but pretty well impossible to upgrade, and making use of any of it later on like the monitor?
But I'd agree with OSX upgrades. How many other names can we get now? And charge again for?
Leopard?
Lion?
Wildcat?
Big uber brushed-metal wild jungle kitty?..
Reply #13 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 4:47 AM
Reply #14 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:00 AM
And by all means, for $129, the software needs to meet your expectations, criteria, and approval.
Alot of interesting information that you packed into this article.
Reply #15 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:23 AM
Reply #16 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:28 AM
Reply #17 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:16 AM
I Had a spell checked version of this, but I seam to have posted the original draft. |
Who really cares if it is free of typos? I understood everything you said. Plus, I dn't know many people who are ticked off that don't make typos.
Reply #18 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 7:13 AM
1. Dashboard -
Yes, this is a disappointment as it exists in its own hidden layer that you call up over your existing apps. I was hoping for something a lot more integrated with the OS, not something slapped on top of it. I still can't believe there isn't at least a Widget management tool in the system prefs.
2. Spotlight -
Amazing search utility. Because it's so well integrated with the OS, it blows even the google desktop search away. Definitely a great addition
3. XCode2 -
Since I'm starting to play around with programming, I'm definitely digging the newest version of XCode, a nice and clean IDE. Not as flashy or crammed with features as VisualStudio, but it gets the job done without slowing you down.
4. Mail.app -
This isn't an Outlook killer, but it is an extremely well-built email program. The improvements in 10.4 were significant enough for me to actually start using it over my old webmail interfaces.
There are a lot of under-the-hood tweaks and fixes that make the OS just run better in general. One internal change I'm not too crazed about was it totally disabled PHP on my Apache server I had running, to the point where I have to manually rebuild Apache and PHP on the machine. This is very annoying.
On your issue of the lost apps, you would have kept them if you did a clean install from your old 10.2 discs (or 10.3, whichever you have) and then upgrade to 10.4. The upgrade won't remove the apps, it just doesn't install them since they're not on the CD. I just did a standard upgrade, no clean install, and I kept all my stuff.
10.4 has some nice stuff, but after sitting with it for a few weeks now, using it and pushing the buttons and adjusting the knobs, I have to agree that it just wasn't the great upgrade everyone was expecting/told about. Apple is falling victim to its own sort of success here. It can't just release pedestrian upgrades anymore, we expect each and every product released by them to blow our socks off.
Reply #19 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:12 AM
I know I can reinstall 10.2, then upgrade, I just dont want to have to go through all that just to get a the one app, iPhoto, that I used. I would pay for iPhoto, stand alone, if I could get it electronicly all the better. But I am not going to pay $79 for iLife, just to get the one app I "kind of use". Oh well.
On the bright side of Tiger I was impressed by the new "Smart Folder" there - pretty cool. "Spotlight" is a damn fine desktop search and Automator is very cool. I would love to have something like that for Windows. |
Reply #20 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 10:33 AM
So i'll say it again. Everyone expects typos but i stopped counting at 80. That's ridiculous. I understand now the wrong version was uploaded.
My comment was legitimate and to the point. There was no profanity, no hate message. Just an opinion. Everyone makes typos. But more is expected from an OP.
I expect a bit more professionalism if an OP is going to post an article considering they represent the site. How do you justify deleting my comments?
Please login to comment and/or vote for this skin.
Welcome Guest! Please take the time to register with us.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
- Richer content, access to many features that are disabled for guests like commenting on the forums and downloading skins.
- Access to a great community, with a massive database of many, many areas of interest.
- Access to contests & subscription offers like exclusive emails.
- It's simple, and FREE!
Reply #1 Monday, May 9, 2005 9:48 PM
Thanks for the input, I'll stick with Windows for now.