My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.
iPhoto is an application. Not the OS. Tons of apps in Windows and Linux that work with similar abstractions as iPhoto. If you don't like the abstraction use another app. There are around 10-15 for photo management on the Mac, from big guns like Lightroom and Aperture to tons of lightweight image managers.
That said, what you write makes no sense. You might as well have written: "My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction PostgreSQL decided to enforce upon me" (I want my tables in plain CSV files, damnit!).
>This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser).
I fail to see how it "didn't work properly". Been using Gmail and Mail.app for 7 years. Any particular real-world problem?
>As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre
Never had that.
>Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.
Ever thought of upgrading it?
This is needless (and incorrect) semantics. An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS"). As far as the end user is concerned, when they get a new Mac it comes with iPhoto, which is made by Apple, the same people that make the rest of the OS (unless they get the ONE configuration of the Mac Pro which is the only hardware that doesn't include it). More importantly, when they plug any photo taking device into their freshly opened Mac, iPhoto pops up until they find and explicitly turn off the preference to do that. To and end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Same with my parents, every time I'm visiting they give me their camera to import the pictures. It would be godsent if iPhoto popped up in their face and asked for import and sorted photos for them.
We're all/most power users here, it's a factor of a gazillion times easier for us to opt-out of stuff like iPhoto, than it is for my mother to opt-in for it.
Incorrect in what parallel universe?
>An OS is just a collection of applications (perhaps the distinction you were trying to make was the kernel or "base OS").
Yes. OS X is just a collection of applications of which iPhoto is NOT one. IIRC, they don't even bundle iLife anymore (you're supposed to get it from the App Store) but that's beside the point.
>As far as the end user is concerned (...) To an end user (and even by many of the existing technical definitions of OS), iPhoto is part of the OS.
Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
iPhoto IS one. As I distinctly explained in my previous post, iPhoto comes installed on every every single Mac that Apple sells with the sole exception of the server configuration of the Mac Pro. Go to the Apple web page and click on any Mac and look at the "Built-in Apps" section, you will see iPhoto displayed right alongside "system" apps like Mac App Store, Mail, and Messages. iLife is just a marketing name. iTunes used to be part of iLife too. Now they're just apps, apps that 99.9% of people that purchase a Mac will find on their computers pre-installed when they open them. That was half my point: that iPhoto today is just about as much a part of a default installation of Mac OS X as any.
>Are you some naive end user OR an HN commenter that CAN tell the different between OS X and iPhoto, and doesn't complain about the latter on a thread about the first?
Now that we've gotten the fact that iPhoto will almost certainly be on my machine when I open it, it should be clear to you that it doesn't matter which of these I am. For better or worse, iPhoto is a part of the Mac experience. Drawing an imaginary line around a subset of applications and calling them "OS" or "not OS" does not take away from the fact that a bad iPhoto experience will understandably contribute to a bad Mac experience. As such, both by technical and laymen's understandings of OS, the critique is valid.
Edit: My mistake, iPhoto is included in the server one as well. So it turns out iPhoto comes installed on every single Mac.
However, reinstall MacOS, and you will notice it doesn't install iLife.
Similarly, most Windows computers seem to ship with that 30 day trial of MS Office these days; does that mean that 30 day trials of MS Office are part of Windows?
Sure, it's a non-part-of-the-core-OS, bundled for free, easily replaceable, with 10s of alternatives, peripheral to using a Mac, part of the Mac experience.
To return to our duck-ing topic, what does that have to do with OS X being bad or "not just working"?
If you had to bring up a bundled, non-essential, app to make your point of OS X not working well, then one has to conclude it works mighty fine overall.
And it's even worse than that: you haven't actually even made any point against iPhoto. Just that you don't like it's filesystem abstraction. Which is neither here, not there.
I believe you are well aware that you are being disingenuous by treating iPhoto as some sort of unrelated third party application that you have no idea why anyone would bring up out of be blue in a discussion about OS X. Who cares if its "non essential", most of the stuff in OS X is completely non-essential (ahem dashboard, photo booth, even mail considering most people use webmail).
This makes no sense. iPhoto stores your photos in a directory structure on your system. This directory is like any other. If you want to extract the photos from them you can. You can also just right-click on your photos from within iPhoto and extract them.
> After removing iPhoto, it was bearable.
What was bearable? Why didn't you try and fix the problem? I've been using iPhoto for almost 10 years, across ~6 different machines, and have never had any issues with it.
a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.
c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.
(I know how to access the source files BTW).
So... doing "find . -type f -name '*.jpg' -print" is outside of your capabilities?
> b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.
What were you trying to do?
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
man mdls
No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.
b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent
Automator + Photoshop.
> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.
Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
This shot me badly.
The whole solution is just bad.
In what way?
> Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.
Moving goalposts. First you said the metadata was opaque. It wasn't. Now you're saying there is lag.
What were you trying to do? I do a lot of photography, and while I am no means a pro -- or even a semi-pro -- I have done automator scripts against iPhoto with zero problems. You still haven't said what you were trying to accomplish.
The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.
Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.
I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.
Who should have to go to a command line and run old school commands to find something they can clearly see otherwise using an app provided by the maker of the machine and OS?
I did the right click show in finder to find that directory for my photos and honestly could not determine how I would have gotten there in Finder starting at the top.
I really enjoy OS X but at times it can be downright annoying, annoying as in "If Microsoft makes doing "X" easy why is it so damn hard here"
Sometimes you just need to right-click View Package Contents to access the directory, and I'm sure that tiny fence solves many many support headaches for 99% of users.
That's pretty minor.
And it's not about how Macs just work, it's that you have apps for almost anything that actually work.
With that said PathFinder[1] is an awesome replacement for Finder. Expensive but worth every penny. Still not as clean as Windows Explorer, but it is night & day better then Finder.
Works fine for apps. Windows 8 actually makes distinction between documents, apps and settings.
If you want, of course, you can turn on locate, but it seems strange to have two local indexing things.
I've worked with different utilities, and combined with spaces sort of have a file browsing system that works.
Even Pathfinder can't do this magic easily using the GUI to drag files quickly between folders. Harrumph.
Uh, so does Finder. What are you talking about?
Vox[3] was also pretty decent last time I fiddled with it (quite a while ago).
[2]: http://www.cogx.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&...
I think the above translates to "no, not really."
That's assuming it saw my network computers in the first place, of course. If I try to get to them too soon after booting, they simply never appear.
Many months of Mac frustration taught me these things.
[1] It'd crash if an external monitor was connected after the machine had been asleep since the last reboot. WiFI connectivity was fabulously bad. There would be multi-minute black screen+beachball hangs when logging in after waking from sleep. The encrypted filesystem was a constant source of file corruption, though I only lost my home directory once. The DVD drive would vibrate like hell and make an absolutely sickening crunching noise for the first half a minute of a disc being inserted.
Even the industrial design was just ridiculous, like the gently pulsating LED light that was an order of magnitude too bright. So bright that it was literally not possible for me to fall asleep in the same room with the laptop without covering it up.
I'm not the target market of OS X either, but could probably had tolerated it if the basics really had just worked.
That sounds just like the MacBook Pro I was issued at my old job. The problem was to some degree mitigated by the fact that it was too heavy for me to want to move it off my desk.
I finally got so angry with the crashing and the irritation of installing anything relative to a Linux package manager that I just installed Ubuntu on it. It worked much better, and didn't crash when I (dis)connected a monitor. I was much happier!
When I left that job, I went to reinstall OS X only to discover that the DVD drive didn't work (a common problem, apparently).
With the SSD I don't seem to hit this and in any event the restart speed seconds instead of something like 10 minutes in the example above.
At any given time i have 3-4 iTerm2 windows open to which if someone closed i would freak and slap them silly. But just because i use the terminal does not mean i don't want a competent file browser.
Im not against there dumbed down version, but Finder as it stands simply isnt practical for a developer, and no i don't want to jump into a terminal to do basic tasks that developer would need to do every day.
ducks
I find the current version (in mountain lion) to be quite reasonable though.
The brokenness of the Finder affects users of all stripes. You don't need to be especially technical. It has been reviled for years and years by developers and non-developers alike.
At least the pain in respect of Finder can be almost totally mitigated by XtraFinder. [1] It's a truly useful addition to Finder.
Think cut&paste, tabs etc, without the slow bulk of CocoaTech's Path Finder. And it's free too! I mostly use the terminal, but nowadays I no longer dread having to fire up Finder when the situation arises.
Finally having tabs in Finder is almost cheating. Humans were not supposed to have a taste of tabs on OSX. I'm sure this XtraFinder technology was stolen from aliens or from a time traveler's Apple laptop dating from 2033.
Don't know, I've had productively using Finder for 8 years, shuffling UTF-8 filenames around, and connecting to Samba servers without problems. Heck, I've had more problems connecting to Samba during when I used Windows that I have on the Mac. And don't get me started on the tedium that was connecting to SMB from Linux when I used that (circa 1997-2003).
"It just works" is relative. Compared to Linux/Windows, most things just work.
And I'm not a guy that just used Macs all his life. I started with DOS and SunOS on SparcStations.
>I suppose I'm just not the target market.
Well, considering that tons of alpha level developers, from people like Miguel De Icaza to Rob Pike and the majority in most US based programming-conferences, from the audience to the speaker, use a Mac, I wonder what that "target market" is.
Given that your complaints are Samba and weird file name encodings? Yes, I think your assessment is true. (HFS supports UTF-8 file names, so I'm guessing you're doing something weird with file systems that treat filenames as 8-bit ASCII supersets and hope for the best).
So, if you use scp (Finder and the UI seem to convert things on-the-fly) to move files with UTF-8 filenames (mine where of korean origin), you'll end up puzzled because you're supposed to have some UTF-8 on both sides, but it's not the same UTF-8.
I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normal_form...
> OSX uses NFD, while pretty much everyone else uses NFC (by default).
It depends on the file system. HFS+ uses UTF-8 NFD, as you noted.
On Linux, ext4 uses whatever encoding your tools happen to use, as long as it's an 8-bit ASCII superset capable of representing / and \0.
On the Mac, this means you can rely on a consistent file encoding, and you never wind up with weird encoding issues when using different software, sharing files between machines, or when writing code to parse file names.
On Linux, this means you're at the whim of whatever happened to write the file. There's no real way of telling -what- the file name encoding might be, and if you wind up with files with mismatched encodings, you just wind up with garbage.
I think Apple chose the right approach; it's the only way for it to be possible for things to 'just work'
> I don't disagree that it might be a corner case that doesn't concern a lot of people, but it's not like I was doing black magic.
Well, technically you were doing black magic, in that:
- scp(1) is not file name encoding-aware.
- The Linux ext* file systems do not provide a guaranteed encoding
If you used a name-encoding aware tool/protocol (such as modern network file systems), and you have consistent and correct encoding on the server (there's no gaurantee with Linux), then transferring files between machines should always "just work".
It looks like some versions/builds of rsync are encoding-aware (e.g., http://blog.gimpe.com/2009/09/13/tip-use-rsync-to-convert-fi...), although some recent builds may not be (http://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2011-05/msg00467.html).
Have you tried to use a dual screen setup with linux? It took me a week to set that up in a reliable way, and it still required futzing around with every couple of days. Every time I turned on my machine, it was a gamble whether my second screen would show up. As Miguel says in TFA, the sound is inconsistent as well and required constant supervision.
On a mac the sound just works. Plugging in a second screen just works. Hell, plugging in a third USB to DVI graphics adapter just worked. Plug it in, install drivers, done. I never had to worry about it again.
Another thing that mystifies me is the Finder search window, always being global by default. I've gone into Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced and selected "Search the Current Folder", but it still doesn't work properly. Heck, a lot of things about Finder mystify me when I think further about it: like sorting files, folders, copy and moving folders/files around, etc...
My local coffee shop changes the wireless password every day. Ever have to do this on OS X? Very painful. Open Network Preferences -> Assist Me -> etc.. I haven't found a quick "change netwrok password" option anywhere.
Everyone always touts how great Homebrew is. I've had a lot of issues with it, getting Postgres running natively (though there's now an App to make it easy to install on OS X). Also, at times I've installed versions of XCode broke everything and found the dev environment very unstable....so I now do almost all this stuff in an Linux-based VM that mimics production servers. This solves a lot of issues.
These things aren't really the end of the world, however I often think that if I'm doing a lot of development in a Linux VM, why not just move back to Windows? (One reason is that I like Keynote a lot for wire-framing apps.)
Note: I noticed someone below knocking on iPhotos. I don't use it personally, but I've had to help two different people rescue corrupted photo libraries that was a pain. Not sure if it's better in newer versions of iPhoto, though.
I don't have a mac in front of me, but don't you just simply go to Tools -> Connect To Server then type in smb://IPADDRESS ?
Why is this difficult, and what would a better alternative be?
... or right click dock finder and choose connect to server
open works with loads of protocols, not just files, for example 'open vnc://host' works out of the box.
A chronic problem with any macbook I actually travel with is that various programs seem to dislike waking up in a different network environment. I'm not sure what gives with this, but it seems to have not changed since I started using them in 2007.
At least there are very easy solutions for Finder. At the very least, you should check out the free XtraFinder extension.
Am I really the only one blind to this effect ? I've used a mac. It's nice. But it "just works" only until you want to productively use Finder, or you want to connect to a Samba server, or you want to shuffle files with UTF-8 filenames around, or a dozen other things like that.
I suppose I'm just not the target market. But I would have expected someone like the author not to be in it either, so.. shrug