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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

Arrrg! No way of uninstalling apps in one central location. Why, Apple, why? There is this nice list of installed apps, why doesn’t it have an uninstall button? It doesn’t make any sense.

I guess you are expected to drag apps to the trash like before? That sucks.

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What's especially bad is that the apps are installed as root and belong to root. This means that removing them causes a password prompt.

I wonder if the inexperienced user understands that for installing you need to provide the apple store password, but for uninstalling, you need to provide the admin password of your machine.

Inexperienced users will never notice because they only have one password.

That depends. My mom and dad share the apple account (why buy all apps twice) but not their machines. I'm going to have a hard time explaining this to them.

Tells them about Home Sharing. They should be able to share music and apps over multiple accounts.

The inexperienced user probably uses the same password for both... so no problem! :)

I realized something that I think is even bigger than uninstalling: There's no software trial mechanism in the App Store. That's always been the spirit of shareware (and a lot of hosted services, too). You install it, kick the tires, and then decide on purchasing before the trial is done. But here, even programs available for trial on the actual developer sites seem only to be available for instant purchase. (The equivalent to a trial period on the iphone I guess is the lite version of an app. I wonder if that will start to be the dominant approach for Mac software, too.)

I feel like developers will, an addition to building "Lite" versions, will start adding text to the production description that link users back to the website where they can download a full-featured trial version.

Apple has specifically mentioned that no trialware or Lite version of app is allowed on Mac App Store, and advise developer to host such version on their own. Good move by Apple.

Care to elaborate on why that is good?

It removes the unusable rubbish from the store. The last thing Apple (or I as a customer) want is a vast quantity of demo or crippleware on my computer and cluttering up the store.

Demo and full version of the app could easily be combined into one entry and that would solve the clutter problem.

I don't know about you, but even 50€ is a lot of money for me, and I'd like to try the app first and buy it only if I find it useful. And I suspect that the average Joe will not know how to find the demo version on the internet.

Steam does this, and it's great. Games have 3 buttons: watch trailer, play demo, buy game.

I don't mean the crippleware. I was intrigued by an interesting-looking code editor, but I couldn't test to see if it would really work the way I thought it would, and it was too expensive to buy on a lark. Without sharp eyes, you may not see the developer's site link or know to check for a trial version.

That's odd - while browsing it just now I noticed Autodesk's Sketchbook has both "Pro" (paid-for) and "Express" (free) versions on there. Seems like they're not applying that rule consistently, if at all.

There's no software trial mechanism in the App Store.

If your code isn't proprietary, you don't need that :D

I often wish Apple employed a few longtime linux users to point out certain glaring deficiencies (primarily in app/library management, and in how Spaces works).

I'm pretty sure most people are glad that long time linux users were not employed to point out any deficiencies in any UI metaphors (like Spaces).

(And I say this as someone who likes Mac OS X almost entirely because of its Unix underpinnings)

Fair point, I suppose I just want a linux geek to look at the areas of OSX I consider to be deficient. I was thrilled when virtual desktops came to OSX as a core feature, but there are some bugs that seem like show stoppers that I'd think a *nix hacker would have run into. Similarly, it seems like 3rd party dev package management is always a chore... but on that front I'm probably just being anal.

Care to elaborate on the show stopping bugs of Spaces?

I use virtual desktops constantly in Linux, but have abandoned Spaces when on the Mac. I haven't really taken the time to distill what isn't 'right' about Spaces, so I'd be curious to hear what others think are the problems with it.

Sometimes a confirmation dialog will popup in a window, and I'm not sure about what conditions cause this, but it gets stuck "between" spaces so you will catch a glimpse of the dialog while switching spaces, but it vanishes once the desktop-changing animation finishes. This is often a blocking dialog, so the app becomes unusable (from memory it's happened with Safari and Dreamweaver). The solution is to stick the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen, switch to the space the dialog should be on and click madly to make sure the dialog gains focus, then do the switch again but hit space or enter to take whatever the default option is in the dialog.

The second, less severe issue is that it will yank you between desktops 3 or 4 times for unclear reasons. It's sort of as if someone else is controlling the desktop switching and they just want to annoy the crap out of you.

FWIW, I used Desktop Linux/BSD for ~8 years before going to OSX, so maybe I have just been spoiled by a very old (eg, well debugged) virtual desktop implementation in X11.

I think the second issue mostly happens when things execute slowly (e.g. with a HDD bottleneck). So something takes focus, then something else completes and takes focus, etc. (I agree it’s terrible, just explaining what I think is happening!)

Not really a bug, but I mainly found it too slow. In linux you can just scroll over the desktop to switch. And I couldn't see how to drag windows across spaces for easy organization (without going the long way to show all spaces).

If you drag a window to the edge of a space it'll flip after a brief delay.

Well, dragging itself is a chore.

I get that he hates the desktop metaphor, but it still needs to be improved. Little things like the cube metaphor & wobbly windows go a long way.

Why is the cube metaphor better than desktop?

I mean it's a good way of representing a set of 4 desktops.

I'm with you for the most part on package management, but Spaces does some really crazy stuff. I'll be in one space, and suddenly get jerked into another. How can that ever be appropriate?

You mean like Jordan Hubbard, the cofounder of FreeBSD (I know that FreeBSD is not Linux)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard

Longtime UNIX users are not Apple's primary customer base.

> Why, Apple, why?

Probably because it's version 1.0

I don’t think that should ever stop you from complaining.

You can't close apps on the Mac either (you can, but it is only for experts). I guess no uninstalling is just the logical extension of that concept.

I don't follow. Command+Q and AppNameMenu->Quit both disagree with you.

You're right. But at the same time I wonder how many users understand the distinction. You can get 'rid' of a window by either hitting the red x (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-W), Alt-Clicking the dock icon (which I presume is the same as Ctrl-H) or going to Menu->Quit (Ctrl-Q).

It's easy to understand this, once you realize that window management is app-centric and is organized by Application rather than individual windows but that's a subtle distinction most normal users will not understand on their own.

To compound things, for some apps,closing the window will actually quit the app. And for some, closing the window leaves the app still running in the dock but clicking the dock icon doesn't bring up.

I know that an appeal to tradition isn't exactly the most persuasive of arguments, but the core Mac fanbase has been doing things this way for decades. I happen to like it a lot more.

Those few inconsistencies suck, though. Bad apps, what are you going to do? Well, you could reject them from a store...

Have you tried to explain that to your mum?

My mother grasped the idea pretty easily, actually, but then again she always used Macs.

If it wasn't for Windows confusing people by conflating windows with applications, I suspect most people's mothers wouldn't have a problem with it.

As a lab instructor at a community college, I explained this to hundreds of people. None had much trouble with it.

Does it make a difference?

Yes, because my claim was that closing apps is for experts only, just as uninstalling apps.

But users can still see that an app is open because of its dock icon indicator, and also when they close the window, the application's menu is still visible in the menubar until they enter another app. So that helps.

Actually, that's a pretty clever optimization for caching, IMO. The user tends to leave apps in memory, leading to much snappier performance on machines with sufficient RAM.

EDIT: And if you're savvy, you can always manage memory manually and quit from the top menu or from the Dock.

If the OS is intelligent, the memory doesn't get overwritten until it is needed. Even if an app is completely closed and its process is killed, doesn't it's image still hang around in memory for the next time it is run?

The binary and libraries and accessed (and perhaps saved) files should still be in whatever buffers/cache the operating system maintains in the unused portion of RAM, but the state of the application is gone (unless the application saved its state and will restore it upon starting up again, of course).

And it appears Lion is going to bring some help to devs on doing just that (saving/restoring state).

And the local disk is just a cache for the cloud. So installed apps are just cached files from the cloud. Hence my analogy holds.

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