I HATE APPLE

it's called "[tracer] - hard disk - 1998 - mac os"

what struck me was how neat and organized everything was. everything in subdivided folders. everything in its place. i had added little icons to everything. i think i know why. because i got to choose where everything went. with os x you don't get to choose. it chooses for you. now i've got like 80 files on the desktop, two different "tmp" folders... yeesh.

where i think apple went wrong in the beginning is not offering a quick guide to the fundamental differences between OS9 (and below) and OS X. i knew just enough about unix to be very wary of moving anything in X; where a lot of users went wrong in the early days was by blithely shifting vital folders from place to place and renaming them, then wondering why their entire system had fallen over.

i'm not saying the finder's perfect: it annoys me the way icons on the desktop occasionally get moved around, for instance. but, er, this happened before X as well. i mean, i'm writing this on an OS9 machine at work - i can't do any work because uShare has just died, meaning we've lost access to all our unix mounts - and i would give anything to be using X.

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

ooh: that's the servers back up. back to work.

exactly. this is what made the original mac os so wonderful and what inspired such bizarre loyalty. as long as you didn't mess around with the mysterious "system" folder you could do whatever you damn pleased.

Dan: Nice idea, but aliases don't resolve correctly between cocoa/carbon -- and cocoa does it by fucking STRINGS, so you can end up with folders that won't open. The finder is really, really woeful and I won't defend it for a minute.

exactly. i navigate nimbly through the unix-ness with a series of aliases that take me exactly where i want to go. and i'm running two machines, each with two users and all the shared items/permissions stuff that brings.

(i have just thought of something i HATE about the way it handles aliases to files on shared mounts, but fuck it. i don't expect perfection, yet with OS X i think i'm about 80 per cent of the way there. OS 9 was 60%. windows is in the low 40s.)

As for aliases, they're a *complete joke* -- you can't make them to anything other than local disks, and they resolve to the file-in-that-place first, unlike the OS 9 ones, which kept track of the actual file and where you'd moved it. The brain-dead behaviour is now universal ... EXCEPT ONLY SOMETIMES, because apps using FSRef (the good old OS 9 system) WORK CORRECTLY. The inconsistency is the worst bit. Grrrr. For the v. technical: http://rentzsch.com/macosx/pathmaxBlackholing

Stationery: also fucked. If you set something to be a stationery pad, then open it, it creates a copy first then opens that. No more folders of template documents then, Apple?

fandango, if you're really going to go back to a windows box: i wish you luck. but i think, in the long term, you'll have made a big mistake. still, like i've said to you before: horses, courses etc ;)

In the long term, they might have switched over to an intel architecture, and, FIXED THE FUCKING FINDER. Maybe they'll even allow me to do something about the bizzare window management *chuckles* :-)

However, until hell freezes over, I'm far more content typing this from a Windows box and have had NO REGRETS about switching back.

isn't that what it always did? i know i could check, but i'm busy.

The new way, it copies it then opens it. So if you Apple-S, it saves to, say, "GF'S Bad Service Template -1" in the "GF's Complaints Letters" folder without asking. If that folder is locked -- like the Designer Masters are at work -- it fails! Silently!.

xpost

While we've got the hedz here, anybody have a good solution for fucking FONTS? I use Suitcase, but all my fonts are on an external drive. Suitcase forgets what it's activated, for some reason, so I have to go turn on the sets I want every time I restart. That doesn't happen for fonts on the local drive.

Yes, why are fonts on an external drive? And if suitcase is forgetting, either your suitcase is fucked or the preferences are set wrong. Whatever fonts I open stay open untill I close them.

Now I have a problem with autoactivation with Quark, but am pretty sure it's a bug with Quark, which is a TRULY problematic application I've come to learn to live with.

http://www.targus.com/us/product_details.asp?sku=PA241U

http://www.apple.com/support/powerbook/doityourself/17al/

http://www.assistedlivingstore.com/