I HATE APPLE

my mom? she uses the iTMS and iPhoto a lot. She your typical end user?

haha the one time I have had to investigate some invisible files to troubleshoot things was when I realized gcc was broken and I couldn't use CPAN. Oh and a week ago when the iShockXDriver flooded my logs and flung shit everywhere.

So I guess you're right, Jon, either I should devote myself to *nix and just get my next OS for free or I should just use iTunes and iPhoto and be a happy little imbecile with no interest in any functionality other than that Apple built in. I don't see what standpoint you're even arguing from besides rabid, drooling Apple fanboy. It doesn't matter though! you win! I use MAKE, I have no right to expect that Apple let me use the Finder the way EVERY OTHER *NIX WINDOW MANAGER WORKS.

Have you ever noticed how annoying female college students who are into Franz Ferdinand are, Jon?

xpost could very well have.

http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

except minus the easy change customizo fonts thing for your GUI :( :( :(

http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

I have to admit that I kind of thought the end of Mac was a long, long time ago, long before iPods and iWork and iCute and all that. It was when they released the EMAC for the first time. That was when I realized I would soon not be happy with their developments.

THINGS WERE ALL BETTER, FOR ALL OF US, IN 1994.

JON WHERE WERE YOU LAST YEAR, TO TELL ME ALL OF THIS SMUG NONSENSE???

For good measure
http://users.bestweb.net/~jdowney/images/sad-mac.gif

I ask you, what do you have to do to get same functionality level??????????????????

I hardly ever use my terminal application for anything other than ssh to real UNIX systems. My system runs (nearly!) flawlessly for months at a time.

When I ran a free UNIX, I had constant headaches with crappy x86 hardware and Linux. Package upgrades breaking things; OpenGL not workingp; blocking operations in graphical programs preventing GUI redraws, etc. Linux is SO FAR BEHIND OS X for normal desktop use.

I think Ned Ludd was onto something.

yes

gah I've just done a complete 180.

(Though to be fair the PC next to me is "Piss, bollocks, poo")

I just want a computer which allows me to customize its functionality in a relatively simple fashion which is constructed from reliable hardware. I think most of what is being implemented now, by all vendors, amounts to a lot of bells and whistles and doesn't improve my user experience really much at all. I think that OS and hardware design should be about creating a solid foundation, and functionality beyond basic administrative/file mgmt/config tasks should be left up to third party developers. I dislike the fact that Apple has taken the competition out of the arena w/r/t iTunes and iPhoto et al. and think it bodes ill for the future of the platform.

Yes, I used to be.

Hahahahahaha Tom you don't even have a caps lock key.

This is also OTM, individual parts purchased all seem to have better warranties than a plain ol' computer straight outta teh box! WTF.

As for "normal end user functionality", here's the simplest, stupidest, most pointless one to have removed I could think of, and one that, if my mom switches back to a Mac, would irritate the shit out of her (since I think we decided "moms" are the bench mark of "normal end users" for Macs earlier??): http://aroundcny.com/technofile/texts/mac111004.html

I'm not saying this is typical, mind you, just saying there's no perfect solution in building-your-own, either, as Jon points out above w/r/t Linux hardware support and such.

Honey, would you download and install TinkerTool onto my/our laptop when you get a chance? I'm kinda boggled I haven't already.

It's already done, you still can't change that ugly ass font that is under the icons but teh programs and clock are all PRETTY now

Smaller folx tend to be a lot less evil than your HPs. But yeah, it's only a "perfect solution" if you know what you're doing.

Of course Spencer isn't dumb enough to run any of these OSes, he's installing Windows on it, so what's the point here?

Caps-Lock (or anything else) as a sticky "bold" key - try Butler, I'm not sure if it will do that but it might, it does just about everything else.

Personally, I'd like to see some kind of stab at way of managing things and activating things that doesn't rely on this desktop/file folder model that we've been going with ever since the first Mac came out. Why should I ever have to know the "path" to where something's been saved? Why should I ever have to "save" anything at all? It's all so dorky, I feel like I spend half my time drilling through folders, it can take so long that I forget what I'm even doing half the time.

Amen to Tracers last point.

I don't have a problem with this "path" nonsense you speak of; what I dislike is that on certain programs recently released by a certain computer manufacturer who should not be releasing photo and music applications as far as I can tell and should be focusing on making their hardware nice as it used to be instead, files that are not saved in the "correct" path are treated differently by certain programs than files that are saved in the "correct" path. IE the old style Windows DO IT OURRR VAY OR VEE VILL BLOW UP YOUR COMPUTERRR. Saving I kind of agree with you theoretically except, err, I think there's a lot of people who don't want their computer to automatically save and archive every single thing they do on it.

But anyway I basically agree with you.

Fonts w/Tinkertool A) restart your computer B) it doesn't work on all of the screen fonts, only certain ones and certain programs, it's being BLOCKED on some of them. Change all of the fonts in the font screen, restart, and then open system preferences and see the new fonts in their glorious capacity!

And it is a good point to be made that strangleholding the amount of customization one can do to a system that used to champion its complete customizability is kind of a backwards step, esp as other OS's have gone towards the other direction.

Uh, come on ... now you're just being cranky.

Personally, I'd like to see some kind of stab at way of managing things and activating things that doesn't rely on this desktop/file folder model that we've been going with ever since the first Mac came out. Why should I ever have to know the "path" to where something's been saved? Why should I ever have to "save" anything at all? It's all so dorky, I feel like I spend half my time drilling through folders, it can take so long that I forget what I'm even doing half the time.

Like spotlight?

Tracer is completely on point here. Bullshit like Sherlock and Spotlight is NOT THE ANSWER and has never been. What's needed is a way for user to be able to ARRANGE THEIR FILES THE WAY THEY WANT and SURPRISE all of a sudden stupid fucking thumb stuck in the dyke revolutionary searching and indexing technology is TOTALLY UNNECESSARY.

the REASON people like covering their entire Windows desktop with files and shortcuts and never deleting them is because THAT'S HOW THEY FIND THINGS. it's a shit ton faster than searching the goddamn hard disk. you look at an icon and click it. twice. this is the way MY computer USED TO WORK.

Tracer you could take the files you need to use a lot and make aliases of them in the dock and use that but after a while that gets ugly and confusing too.