Ten Things to hate about OS X

Re: TUAW site issues

Comment previewing would be useful.

Renaming items in the sidebar renames th actual folder. I think what the poster meant is he wants to be able to shorten a folder name as it is displayed in the sidebar. I mean, do you want to drag your "Folder full of cool stuff" to the sidebar and have it make the sidebar huge? Or would you like to be able to change what is displayed without changing the actual folder name?

Personally, I always cringe at "hate" lists, no matter what the topic. I think too many people use the word too casually. Owen Linzmayer says he hates all those things, but in the end, he himself (in his replies to comments) admits he's just pointing out some weaknesses that make OS X less than perfect. He had some nice points, but a lot of people just brushed him off as a novice who hates and complains instead of fixes.
Anyway, I have a lot of small irks with OS X, but I only have one big gripe worth mentioning: my Powerbook works horribly with my secured Linksys wireless network. My older and shoddier Compaq laptop always connects to the network without a problem, but my new Powerbook with the better wireless card would consistently lose signal and not be able to connect. It's a well-documented problem that occurs with a variety of Macs, but I haven't seen a single solution to it. I can only assume it's because of OS X, since my Powerbook's hardware is basically better in every way in comparison to the Windows laptop, and the problem seems to disappear when I make my network unsecured. While the problem has stabilized so that my Powerbook is only unable to connect half the time upon wake-up (this is after meticulously testing a slew of different router settings, since the Mac doesn't allow nearly as much customization), it's unfortunate that I had to go through months of trouble with a supposedly superior operating system. And more unfortunately, getting a $130 Airport Extreme base station to satisfy the one Mac in the household is out of the question.
But in the end, I wouldn't have tried so hard to solve this problem if the Mac wasn't worth it ;-).

""My biggest annoyance is how it looses connection to my bluetooth mouse constantly...

sucks when you wanna check mail quick and it has lost connection, and you have to reconnect (takes around a minute or two)""

Wait, what? What type of bluetooth mouse do you have? I have the Apple one, and have had no problems with it, other than the fact that it eats through batteries if I forget to turn it off. That is a problem with the way bluetooth works, not with the mouse. And taking a minute or two to connect? Once again, not typical by any means.

I am also not a fan of the Dashboard.

And sometimes I miss the old "Find" function - Spotlight I have yet to get used to...

The one thing I really hate is that every time you try to change the suffix of a file (from .txt to .rtf, e.g.), the Finder will ask whether you really want to do so, and the default is that you want to keep the current suffix.

The annoying 'Are you sure you want to change the extension from ".whatever" to ".whatever else"?' dialogs are a personal least favorite thing of mine. Every time I see it it reminds me of using Windows.

I'm sure Owen Linzmayer actually knows most of the "doesn't he know about X" shortcuts mentioned here - but even I, a 20-year Mac user, didn't know some of them. Now imagine encountering these annoyances from the perspective of a complete computer newbie or a Windows switcher - Apple doesn't really need to fuel the flames of the "mac suxs" crowd, do they?

No matter what OS you use, user interface consistency, plain-english dialogs, and smart error handling make for a more seamless experience, and Linzmayer's top 10 list points out some egregious examples. In some ways, OS X added many cool core features while throwing out a lot of the simple elegance of the Classic environment...

I disagree with Software Update though - I'd rather that be kept Apple-only - no one wants the core of their Mac exposed to potential trojans from a wider variety of third-party sources, and imagine the liabilities Apple might face if a 3rd-party update tanked someone's production system.

And who knows why it parsed my comment like that...I only typed the info once
and used single-returns like
this
here

One of the "new features" that the TUAW blog seems to have, VanillaSpice, is replacing a newline character (created when you hit return) with a pair of line break tags. Non-valid line break tabs, I should add. The document claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but makes no attempts anywhere in the markup to actually follow what it claims to be. It's no wonder people are having problems: the page is telling the browser how the page is going to be marked up, and then it's just random, poorly cobbled almost-HTML. What this means for you, VanillaSpice is that to avoid triple spaces between your paragraphs, just hit return once. It will look dumb in the textarea, but will render properly when it makes its way back to the TUAW comment page.

Staff: No offense, guys, I know you have a lot to do, and who knows who actually is in charge of the design and development of this site for you, but it sucks.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftuaw.com%2F2006%2F01%2F09%2Ften-things-to-hate-about-os-x%2FOne of the "new features" that the TUAW blog seems to have, VanillaSpice, is replacing a newline character (created when you hit return) with a pair of line break tags. Non-valid line break tabs, I should add. The document claims to be XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but makes no attempts anywhere in the markup to actually follow what it claims to be. It's no wonder people are having problems: the page is telling the browser how the page is going to be marked up, and then it's just random, poorly cobbled almost-HTML. What this means for you, VanillaSpice is that to avoid triple spaces between your paragraphs, just hit return once. It will look dumb in the textarea, but will render properly when it makes its way back to the TUAW comment page.

Staff: No offense, guys, I know you have a lot to do, and who knows who actually is in charge of the design and development of this site for you, but it sucks.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftuaw.com%2F2006%2F01%2F09%2Ften-things-to-hate-about-os-x%2F

Can I ask how I should format the paragraphs in my comment to avoid having three lines between each para in the output (there was only one in the inputted text) ?