Kate MacKenzie - 04 October 2006 07:45 PM

I stand corrected on the right click to rename Sidebar items. Works great in Tiger. Scratch that one off the list.

To make up for it, here’s a little tip about using the Sidebar to connect to other Macs in your home or office. Use “Connect to” to connect to another Mac. On the other Mac, navigate to a folder where you’d like to copy files, say, the Desktop. Then, drag that Desktop to your Sidebar (now you can changed the name with a right click, select menu).

To copy files to the other Mac all you have to do is drag the file or files to the folder in the Sidebar. The Mac logs in, copies the file to the other Mac.

Vindicated? Or should I come up with a replacement bad thing about OS X? I’ll ignore the inconsistent GUI problems as Tera’s beaten that to death a few times (brushed aluminum, plastic, or platinum, or plastic platinum?).

How about an uninstaller for OS X. There’s a few commercial applications that do the trick, but OS X should take care of removing what’s been installed.

See? It’s easy.

The point is not to poke and tear away at Apple. We love those guys. A critical eye from time to time can point out glaring inconsistencies and problems which help to make a better product.

Haha, yes! Thank you for the vindication.

And, yes, I HATE that there is no, un-installer that just comes with OS X. That would have been a better bad thing to include in the list.
Luckily over half the apps that I’ve ever installed are just self contained and the way to un-install them is just to delete the app file (reverse of the installation, just drag the program into the trash). But that doesn’t account for the other half. :(

mikeg - 04 October 2006 05:08 PM

How are they more pricey? That one is no longer a statement worth spreading.

You have to compare Apples (no pun intended) to oranges.
A Mac Mini is 600 bucks. That’s as cheap as any PC of that caliber. A 17” widescreen monitor all-in-one dual core computer that has bluetooth, a dvd-rom, a cd burner, 802.11g for 1,000 bbucks? Show me a cheaper PC of that caliber.

And straight from mac360…

Apple PowerMac G5 - $2,999.
Dell Precision Workstation 670 - $3,070.

http://www.mac360.com/index.php/mac360/more/high_end_shootout_powermac_vs_dell_precision_pc/P1/

Good point. “ more pricey” portion of post withdrawn - thank you for the kind reminder of the “Mac mini.“

The key to understanding pricing between Macs and PCs is context.

Apple doesn’t build cheap crap. Period. So, can you find cheaper PCs? Of course. They’re all over the place. Fryes. CompUSA. Even Office Depot, OfficeMax have PCs cheaper than Macs. Ditto with Dell, and Gateway, and HP. Not Sony. They don’t build crap, either, hence the higher price tag.

Since context is the key, it’s important to consider at least three major points when comparing Macs to PCs.

1 - hardware cost: Apple’s hardware costs will be about the same as any PC maker, piece for piece, with the exception being the el cheapo foreign build-it-yourself boxes. But add Firewire, SATA, Core 2 Duo/Core Duo, and so on to the mix, and Apple looks pretty good on hardware costs.

2 - software cost: This one has some hidden costs for those who choose Windows. How many Windows PC users also buy three or four of these—antivirus, spyware, malware, hard drive cleaners, etc.? Most. That’s a huge industry that pretty much doesn’t exist on the Mac side of the universe. Also, OSX Tiger really should be compared to Windows XP Pro, not Home. The difference in software cost favors Apple, especially when considering iLife. There’s nothing like that on Windows PCs.

3 - cost of ownership: It’s really the difference between Cost and Price that most people don’t understand. My wife drives to a Winn Dixie store five miles away to save 10-cents each on four cans of corn. Price is cheaper than the nearby grocey store, but the overall cost of the corn is much more. So it usually is with Windows. Time is money.

Windows users usally don’t understand the love Mac users have of their Macs. We lust after new Quad Core Intel machines but are proud of our old G3s and G4s that actually run Tiger better than Jaguar and Panther.

Of course, I’m preaching to the choir today.

I’m pretty sure the pop to front issue is some carbon legacy stuff. The only apps I typically find that do it have an old codebase (Photoshop, I’m looking at you). But yeah, Photoshop quite happily pops to the foreground while batches are running, and I’ve accidentally terminated quite a few inadvertently while typing or whatever. The Dashboard thing, has a few shareware solutions though. I think I’ve gotten as far as installing one but never quite as far as actually using it.

And the beachball typically is either waiting for disk or network access of some kind. (The spinning beach-deamon of death). I’m sure there are other causes, but those are the most common I find. Especially if a volume is unmounted and aliases aren’t resolved or unmounted “unconventionally.“ In other words, pulling a firewire drive or a network cable without letting the OS know you are going to beforehand. The same type of hangup for seemingly inane reasons, too, though; there’s a tool called unlockupd that is supposed to, at the very least, resolve the network portion of this issue. It polls lookupd and restarts it when it stops responding.

Kate MacKenzie - 04 October 2006 05:15 PM

Vista has a couple of neat things going for it. OS X has plenty, but there are some GUI inconsistencies (brushed aluminum or platinum plastic—which is it, Apple?), and other items that could be improved.

Oh, thank you. I end up having to explain this one to a lot of the newer switchers. I tell them about how the dressing on all apps used to have a great unified design under Panther. Thank goodness we have UNO. It unifies everything under a consistent plastic design (UNO for Aqua, UNO Shade for Graphite).

UNO install:
http://img174.imageshack.us/my.php?image=uno13fullym5xj4.png

My desktop after UNO (you can see in this pic that I was telling others about UNO! :D ):
http://img174.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture3xf3dz0.png

How about complete compatibility with multimedia files on the net. Yes, there are programs to download that will allow us to run a lot of them with Quicktime, but they don’t always work without effort and sometimes not at all. Make it frictionless for us.

mikeg - 04 October 2006 04:47 PM

I use the sidebar too, and the menu bar. You can add applications, folders, files, whatever. You can also rename them, add, or remove any of the existing ones. I’m not sure what you want to rename, but you CAN rename sidebar items.

I may not concede this one so quickly. It seems that when you rename the sidebar item OS X also renames the original file name/folder name.

That’s not good.

Let’s say I have a Folder that’s named “Photos from grandma’s visit to Las Vegas 2001.“ I can drag that to the sidebar but it looks pretty ugly with the long name. So, I right click on the sidebar item to rename it to “Photos/LV ‘01”. It works. Except that OS X also renames the original folder with “Photos/LV ‘01.‘

That’s not what I want, so OS X doesn’t allow renaming of Sidebar items. It allows renaming of the items placed in the Sidebar, which isn’t exactly the same thing.

I imagine you could get around that by adding an alias to the sidebar. An extra step, but it’d work.

Kate was a spy for the other side. Always complaining about OS X and making the rest of us Mac users look bad as far as I am concerned. Just think how her Forums made us look every time a p.c. user would come to this site and read her rips on Apple. All she seemed to do was complain about Mac, This is bad, that needs fixing bla bla bla. I won’t miss her one bit. Glad to see her go. She was so miserable on this side well let me tell you something, I grew up on a p.c. and windows is nothing but a constant pain in the ass that always needs fixing. OS X is the Rolls Royce of all OS systems. Kate just bought herself a Ford Pinto with H.P. stamped on the hood.

Kinda rough, huh? What do you think about Joe Lieberman?