I HATE APPLE

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.

My main problem here, which I will reiterate again because, you know, spotlight and dashboard (uh didn't Windows try to do this integrated embedded browser/"active desktop" thing too? Dashboard, I mean. Wasn't that, uh, a problem?) will not fix my problem with OSX: they've taken some integral functionality features, "petty" ones or not petty ones, and removed them to give the user less ability to customize their computer. SEE ALSO: MICROSOFT, A FEW YEARS AGO BEFORE DOJ STEPPED IN AND SUDDENLY THEY MADE THEMSELVES A BIT MORE MAC LIKE. I'm going to pick again on the simple cosmetic issues because it seems to be the only thing that I can get people to agree on, without a judgement call as to whether or not xyz would use this feature, has definitely changed from previous versions of the OS to now. Adding a feature like that--and the slew of far more useful customization features that came with it--was like an integral part of why the OS was so great. You could make it react exactly how you wanted it to without having to use command line not-exactly-hacks of the system or third-party programs that don't always work. This wasn't a feature that caused any drain of the system and it wasn't a bug that needed to be fixed due to instability or computer-destruction issues. It was a feature that a lot of people liked. So why get rid of it? Why is Steve Jobs being quoted as saying customization is dead and why are they forcing people to use exactly this theme?

I absolutely, without reservations, despise Helvetica and Lucida Grande. A lot of people don't. On my old Mac, I deleted those fonts. I can't do that now. That was my very first, quiet disappointment when I opened up my iBook. Going to system preferences and realizing this system preference no longer existed. Yeah, this is a minor issue but it goes along with about 20 bigger issues of things I used to do a lot on my old Macs to customize programs and the way it reacted to certain things that seem to require a rather obtuse level of hoop jumping to get to now.

So basically, what I am asking here is why? Why have these features, which were a really large bonus of previous systems and features that are slowly being added to other OSes, been removed from OSX? Mac was a pioneer in this department--why are they going backwards, why are they going cagey and proprietarial and territorial, and what does this say for future developments?

No one ever wants to answer this question for me at all, but I think it is a perfectly decent question to ask. These features were NOT system drains. They did NOT cause computer/OS instability. They were GOOD. Why do they no longer exist?

If I could get a good reason as to why the system is becoming more dictatorial and less user-trusting, that might change my mind. As far as I can see though there isn't a good reason for this.

Spotlight looks fantastic, but I'm wondering if it would be a serious resource hog.

They should have implemented this already. I think it's a great idea.

Ally, where you and I differ; I have a T-Shirt with the slogan 'USE HELVETICA' on it, although Johnston would be better than Lucida grande which is an unpleasant font I'll grant you.

I'm kind of in love with this "Hollywood Hills" truetype I downloaded but strictly because it makes all my official documents really amusing and stupid looking.

Johnston and Gill Sans are superior and more beautiful sans serif fonts but helvetica has it's place.

Haha Tom, that's what I loved about the old easy switcheroo font crap on Mac, you could make, like Budmo Juggler your default list-view font, it was hilarious.

I would like to know what the name of the font used for place names on french 1:25000 maps is called. See bottom right of the above image.