My Own Ten Peeves About the Mac
Owen Linzmayer got me thinking again about the Mac with two recent articles at informit.com, Ten Things I Hate About Mac OS X and Ten More Things I Hate About Mac OS X. Some of the items on his lists don’t really affect me. Nevertheless, as a Mac user from the beginning, you can be assured that I’ve had time to come up with a list of my own. Maybe it will be helpful to actually write it down here. I don’t know if Apple will find my list, but since Linzmayer is a Mac author I hope they will at least take his suggestions to heart.
I’m sure some will find fault with what I write here, but hey, this is my list, and after suffering through the valley in the 1990s I’ve got a right to my opinion. If there is a crazy part, it’s that I still sort of hope Apple will take us to the personal computing mountaintop! Well, here are at least ten of my top peeves with the Mac, mainly OS X:
1. OK, I’m going to cut right to the chase. Without a doubt, my Number One Pet Peeve is that after 22 years, Apple still hasn’t delivered on its vision for making the Mac easy to program. Originally, there was a whole group of components/aspects to the Mac revolution. These included the Mac itself (as an information appliance), an automated factory in Fremont, California, which was to crank them out inexpensively (so they could be sold to the masses), a capable serial network - AppleTalk - with many possibilities for expandibility (even though the initial hardware wasn’t expandable), and Macintosh Basic.
Macintosh Basic?? Yes, that long-lost but highly-touted language, rumored to have been sold to Microsoft to get it to renew the Apple II Basic license, was a key piece of the original vision. I’ve long wondered if Visual Basic has its roots in Mac Basic. I really don’t know, but did read once that it just kind of emerged in Microsoft, and was a surprise success for them. In all the years of press coverage on Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices, I’ve never once seen Macintosh Basic mentioned. Since Microsoft is often criticized that it isn’t truly an innovator, it’s odd that they haven’t held up Visual Basic as an example of innovation.
Anyway, the vision for programming by the masses, a key part of the original Mac vision, didn’t die completely at Apple after Mac Basic disappeared. Bill Atkinson developed HyperCard, which was introduced in 1987 and was a huge success, probably the most popular thing Apple did between the Apple II and the iPod. Unfortunately, HyperCard languished, perhaps because Atkinson insisted it be given away for free. Eventually just the reader was given away, and the programming tool was priced around $100. It was obvious Apple management didn’t share the vision of programming for the masses, and HyperCard remained in limbo throughout the 1990s, until Steve Jobs pretty much killed it when Apple refused to carbonize it or let anyone else do it either (now that Apple is switching to Intel and Classic is being abandoned, HyperCard won’t run at all on the new hardware).
Around 1990, Dave Winer created a scripting language, Frontier, for the Mac. Apparently Frontier wasn’t visual or really all that simple (I don’t know what Winer’s vision for it was), but Apple management woke up long enough to scuttle Frontier by creating AppleScript, a supposedly easy-to-use scripting language for the Mac. Several years ago, after refusing to heed the pleas of HyperCard devotees, Jobs seemed to hold up AppleScript as an entry-level programming language for the Mac by creating AppleScript Studio.
This is just my bias, I suppose, but I’ve always been rather skeptical of AppleScript, and have never wanted to mess with it. Even Matt Neuberg, who wrote the book, has noted that “AppleScript is a curious language, to say the least. It’s a dinosaur, an almost unchanged survival of code written in 1993 to run on a slow computer with a mere speck of RAM. The language suffers from peculiarities of architecture and design, from a dearth of accurate documentation (which my book is intended to correct), and from the fact that all scriptable applications are utterly different from one another.”
Maybe AppleScript will somehow end up being a great language, but Apple still has AppleScript Studio hidden away from users, which hardly helps to make it a programming tool for the masses. On the other hand, with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) there is now Automator, a much more visible and simpler tool than Studio that some seem to like, so maybe this is progress. Nevertheless, I’m still waiting for Apple, as the vendor of choice for creative types, to exhibit a real devotion to the vision of programming by end users.
Well, moving right along …
2. Doesn’t run Windows apps. Need I say more? OK, I guess I ought to mention that now with Intel, perhaps a future version of Virtual PC (or just OS X?) might finally do this efficiently.
3. Wasted screen real estate. Screens are huge compared to the original Mac’s 512x342 monochrome display, yet as screens have grown, Apple seems to have wasted a lot of that space, with bigger icons, etc. It’s nice that you can have big icons and fonts, and some things are adjustable, but I wish Apple would put more thought into making the most of the screen, since it’s still a major limit to productivity.
4. Folder panes. This is related to #3. I don’t use Windows, but one of the things I notice is that folder panes, which are in my opinion a highly-productive interface, seem to be used more commonly, and the listings are smaller, so more can be seen at once. Entourage uses a folder pane, but I can never fit enough on the screen at once. When I was recently trying to decide between a new eMac or 17″ iMac, my choice was made once I realized the 17″ LCD (because of its different aspect ratio) actually would display less vertically. That would make the Entourage folder pane even less visible at once, and I can barely stand it as it is!
5. Drawers. This seems to have been Apple’s answer for a ubiquitous folder pane interface. When I first read about drawers, I thought I would love them, but as they’ve been implemented, I hate them, because they impact window positioning (see #6) and the listed items are too big (see #4). What would be better would be a reallocation of window real estate, rather than having to reposition to see the drawer, etc.
6. Sloppiness with window positioning. To be fair, this is mostly an application programming issue, but I wish Apple could find some way to get applications to always remember precisely how windows have been positioned and to return them when they are reopened. Dave Winer’s outlining program More, for example, offered a great deal of control over window positioning, which again is important in order to make the most of screen real estate. More also had a Resume file that would save the exact state of opened files, so when you restarted you were returned to just where you were. I know some programs have something like that, but it would be nice if Apple standardized it somehow.
With OS X, apps aren’t restarted as often, but I hate wasting time getting started on something, when the computer could easily do that for me. Besides, unlike Apple’s mostly visual types, I’m the kind of person who looks at the edge of things, so misaligned edges look messy and distracting to me. I know this will sound like a rather minor quibble to most folks, but to me it isn’t.
7. Small/clunky open/save dialogs. I agree with Linzmayer on this one. One of the most obvious things about using an old program such as More in Classic is the tiny size of the open/save dialog boxes. On the early Macs this was done both because the screen was small and also so if the program crashed you might be able to retrieve (by hand) some of what you just wrote (well, it worked for me a number of times). The new dialog boxes are a vast improvement, but as with window management, resizing them is an unnecessary recurring annoyance.
8. The spinning pizza/beachball. The pizza is cute for the first couple of times you see it, but it’s all downhill after that. One culprit behind this is Apple’s longstanding policy of not packing Macs with enough RAM (or even room to add enough RAM). This prompted the accusation that the Mac was underpowered and continues to feed that perception. The problem has persisted with the recent Mac Mini.
9. Inconsistent strategy for a low-end Mac. Here I’m not talking about Apple clones. That’s a separate debate and maybe Jobs was right on that one. In any case, Apple’s market share, and Apple’s user base, have both suffered tremendously over the years from Apple’s lack of commitment to having a competitive value-priced Mac in its product lineup. At times Apple has had a strong entry at the low end, such as the Mac Classic or the first-generation iMacs, and these have just about always sold well. At other times, there has been little or nothing for someone on a budget.
Right now we are unfortunately in the latter situation. To be fair, Apple is in a transition to Intel which is ostensibly going to lead to lower-cost hardware, but right now prices are going up. The Mac Mini was raised to $599, but this isn’t really the kind of computer that would appeal to a budget user. Its frame-rate benchmarks are pretty bad, so it wouldn’t appeal to kids, and it isn’t really suitable for a home office either.
I think the magic price point is somewhere around $649-699 for a full system. If Apple could hit that target with something that did well playing games, they could probably sell a ton of Macs (even the Mini sells for a lot more than this once you add in the memory, display, etc.). Even if they can’t reach it, a price void all the way to about $1000 is just too much. The iMac and eMac used to fill this void, but the iMac is now way above that range and the eMac has been discontinued.
This kind of thing would never happen in other industries. Can you imagine Honda discontinuing the Civic? As with the Mac, the Civic isn’t the cheapest small car, but in the same way Apple needs to stake a claim at the low end of its market and stick with it.
10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.
Bonus Peeve: Yes, Owen, those eternally-bouncing dock items are downright irritating! Like the pizza, the physics of computer-screen motion is fascinating for a brief while, but when you’re deep in concentration enough is enough. At least I was fortunate to discover recently that Entourage has a preference to turn that off. Now I don’t get that bouncing icon every 10 minutes when my email comes in.
Someone ought to design a widget to shoot those bouncing dock items, and provide some needed comic relief. Well, maybe you could make it an arcade game and shoot them all!
