Saturday, April 21, 2007

My Top Three Mac OS X Annoyances

Now that I have switched to Mac OS X as my main OS, all my troubles seem so far away and it's a wonderful life.

Just kidding! Though OS X is a great OS, it carries a fair share of annoyances, pretty much like every system does. Here is the list of the top three glitches that drive me nuts:

  • Bad keyboard support: I find myself forced to use the mouse too often. Not that I dislike this kind of small mammals, but having to leave the keyboard to twiddle the mouse is really slowing me down, usually at the worst moment (when typing code for example). Very often a dialog will pop-up and I will have no other way to get rid of it but to use the mouse. Or when paging up and down in large texts, the fact the caret does not actually moves will also force me to use the mouse to click to position the cursor. Windows XP does a much better job with keyboard support, as you can do almost everything with your hands on the keys.

  • Lame file explorer: I am sorry but Finder is a pain in the neck. Navigating in a folder hierarchy, creating folders at the place you want them to be, moving files around, renaming them... all these operations carry a certain degree of clunkiness that quickly makes me fume and rant. Again, Windows XP does a much better job here (except for network folders, which consistently freeze the file explorer, if not worst).

  • Sweet and sour JVM: though Apple boasts about their superb JVM integration, not being able to use a standard one from Sun prevents you to be up to date. So the JVM is great but dragging behind the official releases from Sun. At this date, version 6 is still a developer preview while the mainstream VM is already an update 1 version. I think Apple should keep working on integrating the JVM in OS X as they do, but also make it simple for developers to deploy Sun ones in "private" mode.
Now that I have written this down I start to realize that my good old Kubuntu Dapper Drake machine, with its archaic looking UI, is not doing so bad, after all!