an open letter to mac

guys and girls of mac.

you know i love you. i am a loyal convert. but dammit, there are things about your OS that are making me curse you more and more each day. i sure hope you employ someone to search around the web for people making comments about mac OS X. I'm running 10.4.10, I guess.

if so, Hi, Person, please take my comments to heart. and also, take them to someone important who can decide that they need action, and to someone smart who can make that action happen. (unless either of those is you. in which case, be empowered, go for it!)

1) directories organized by Date Modified. When I look at a directory, 99% of the time it is like this. The problem arises when a file "F" exists and is displayed in the window. Then, as I am almost always doing, I re-run the script that created F. Therefore, F has now been modified more recently than the Directory window displays. It does not update automatically; it only updates when F has been selected (by a single-click or by moving around the list with the arrow keys).

OK, fine, I suppose I can live with that**. Whatever. Maybe file info is hard to display dynamically. But here's the thing that makes me utter shameful words that i'm not even supposed to know. When I click on F, the OS decides to update the info and move it to its "proper" spot amongst all the other [not-yet-updated] files. But then, if that one click was in fact the first of a double-click, the double-click gets exerted on something different [the thing that got bumped down to where F had been based on its old update info]! I curse and am thus ashamed. And you should be, too. If one click is on one file, and the other is on a different file, don't you think THE FILE I MEANT WAS THE ONE I CLICKED ON WITH THE FIRST CLICK?????

**(Although it becomes Extremely obnoxious when I've re-created many Files, as EACH ONE doesn't change its info until selected. and the selection jumps to the top of the list with the file, meaning that i can't just tell the directory to update them all at once without doing this weird chutes-and-ladders dance in which i jump up to the top of the list and then step through all the unchanged files down to the next changed file, which jumps to the top of the list again)

2) Spotlight. Again, my world is an organize-by-date-modified world. Yet, organizing by "Date" in Spotlight is the "date last opened." That makes me mad. A) It prevents me from doing something I want to do. Fundamentally un-American. B) Who the hell wants to know the last time s/he opened a file, anyway? If s/he didn't change it, it probably wasn't what s/he as looking for, is it? Ah, you remember that time I clicked on "agenda.txt", but it was the agenda from my kid's girl scout meeting instead of my schedule for my presentations in chicago? Good Times. I hope I can preserve that precious memory; i'm certainly going to organize the way I remember my files based on that. Ridiculous. C) If I have a bunch of files of the same name (as is pretty normal for us half-assed programmer types that are a big part of your demographic), I can't even go through the f'ing list in an organized way to see which one is the one I want. Why? Because every time I open one, it moves to a different spot on the list! And because I can't choose to display the basic directory info in Spotlight that is easily displayed in a regular window, they all look the same.

Oh, I know. Maybe i'm supposed to wait until the clock ticks over to the next minute so that each file gets a unique feature on the list. That's much better than just having a way to display its path, or showing the date-modified, not date-last-opened. Much Better.

3) Spotlight, part 2. What are the odds that the file I'm looking for is in the Trash? Isn't it more likely that the Trash is a place where files I Don't Want live? OK, yes, there is a way to turn this off. But you sure have to ninja your way into it, don't cha? Do you think maybe a radio button or check box would be a better solution than shift-apple-G, then ~/.Trash , then drag that onto the Spotlight Dont-look-here box? (sorry, cliche time). WTF???

4) Why is the default view of any window always big stupid icons (or little stupid icons, if I so choose?) Does ANYONE actually like looking through big stupid icons? Maybe you could make it easy to set the default view to be the organized list of information one? (Note to Windows: as far as I know, this is a problem for you, too. Note to everyone: it seems possible I just don't know how to do this. I don't even know the vocabulary to google for a solution. I admit it. If there's an answer, tell me, please! Anonymous comments allowed and encouraged.)

5) OK, so if i'm looking at a window with big stupid icons, I can set the background color. cool. but A) I can't when i'm looking at the window in an actual useful way, ie, the listy view. B) The color doesn't inherit down to subdirectories. If i could make that happen, then perhaps I could use colors to let me know whether which version of the directories-of-same-name with many files-of-similar-names i happen to be looking at. I don't fault you for B, but it's on my wish list. But A is as unacceptable as anything else in this rant.

Now, can I get back to my dissertation now? Thanks.

and oh yeah, when I get an actual job, you better come out with a 12-inch MacBook pro to allow me to replace my beautiful, wonderful, can't-live-without-her PowerBook G4. Did you do some kind of research that all the thousands of us (hundreds of thousands? millions?) who bought 12-inch Powerbooks didn't like them, or something? Or maybe the research says that indeed we like to be forced to choose between maximum portability or superior components? Yes, that's it. When Mac customers have everything they want, it makes them nervous. Makes 'em feel too big for their britches. We'd rather suffer a little bit.




and iPhoto still sucks.