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. |
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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.
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Reply #22 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:05 AM
Reply #23 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:53 AM
But you know all about censorship. And i'm sure we'll see more of it in the weeks and months to come after you deal goes through with that other site won't we?
Reply #25 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:04 PM
This isn't a corporate communication, it's not an advertisement for a product or anything. It's Paul posting his thoughts on OS X. Would you have these same complaints if someone else had said the same thing? Or if it had been posted on a different site? I don't see how it's fair to hold non-corporate postings from Stardock people to a different standard. They're allowed to blog here just like the rest of us.
Another thing, it's all available for FREE. It's not like you're paying for the article content. You're paying for software and better access to OTHER site features. The forums and JoeUser articles are a secondary bit that are provided 100% for free. There's no real right to "expect" anything in such a case.
Reply #26 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:06 PM
Anyhow here's the rub: My wife is looking for a laptop to read her emails and do all of her onlinne stuff to replace the aging 21b (weight) vaio running XP in 128MB RAM. Will I get a Mac? I'd like to but the chances of her being able to access all of the websites she needs to (online banks, bill payment, credit cards, flight trackers etc. etc.) and have them actually work is about zero. Somme of them don't even work in FireFox! So I'll probably be sticking with windoze and there goes my only real justification for getting a Mac.
I can only hope that Longhorn lives up to my hopes - but then what are the chances of being able to use its fancy compositor on a laptop weighing 21bs anytime before hell freezes over.
Technology eh? Its never quite good enough.
Reply #27 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:10 PM
Reply #28 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:14 PM
Reply #29 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:22 PM
You're one of those kooks who claims first ammendment rights and protections in forums and chat rooms aren't you?
I'm not saying you can't express your opinion, it was just that you were a complete brat about typos and misspellings in the first place. That's what sparked this whole mess. Your expectations are unfounded in this case. By your reasoning I should be able to expect you to be fluent in Swahili... sure you don't actually owe me anything, but I can have certain expectations right?
Also, he has every right to censor his own site. On my JoeUser blog I have certain users blocked out-right and am more than happy to delete trolling posts. You were trolling, and you're still trolling.
Reply #30 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 12:34 PM
AND.....as for the article..I'm still thinking of getting the Mac Mini. I haven't had a Mac before so I won't miss the iLife stuff. It sounds like it's the Mac fans who are getting the royal screw job from Apple. New users seem to get the royal treatment.
Reply #31 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:35 PM
Paul, or anyone who knows, can you outline what a user ends up with after purchasing and doing a clean install of Mac OS 10.4 "Tiger"?
Do we get?:
- A file saving structure
- A streamline search feature
- A "something" for MultiMedia interactivity
- A dock for links
- A "something" for browsing
- A "something" for text editing
- A "something" for graphics creation
- Dashboard for widgets while bored? (not sure I understand providing a platform for using information objects that can not be available at all times).
Anyway, can someone create an outline? You know like the Windows IE, WMP, Paint, Notepad, etc.
Just trying to get a glimpse at what can be expected out of the box and onto the machine.
Thanks.
Reply #32 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:46 PM
-iCal - A pretty darn good calendar program
-Mail.app - E-Mail client
-Safari - Web browser
-Text Editor - Generic notepad like thing
-Address Book
-iTunes & Quicktime - Play multimedia files
-Dashboard widgets and such
-Excellent integrated search functionality
Nothing like Paint that I remember. There are actually a ton of little applications socked away with the OS that I never use. In general, OS X comes with more "stuff" than Windows does, but the usefulness of much of it is pretty questionable.
Reply #33 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 1:57 PM
Reply #34 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 2:08 PM
Go figure.
-Kelvin
Reply #36 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 4:52 PM
Reply #37 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 5:49 PM
Now it seems that his whole argument would be void.
Reply #38 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 6:02 PM
The appeal of OS X for new users has always been that it has everything you need right out of the box. |
I agree....once they mess with that it's a slippery slope to mediocrity...
Reply #39 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:30 PM
Reminiscent of the democrats who were dubbed "traitors" or "unpatriotic" when they spoke out against the war |
And this has nothing to do with a post about Appple. Just gotta put some defense for democrats in a thread I guess.
Reply #40 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 8:40 PM
Just gotta put some defense for democrats in a thread I guess. |
Aye...They need it.
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Reply #21 Tuesday, May 10, 2005 11:02 AM