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Comment by MatthewPhillips | Hacker News Reader

What's the last major OSX feature that wasn't bad? For a company known for its successes, you look at Launchpad, inverse scrolling, notification center... does anyone like those features? I've never read a single positive comment about any of them. The most positive thing I've read is that they are easy enough to ignore.

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To be fair, there are a lot. FileVault 2 is a massive improvement over the (hackass) first version. In 10.7, Mail got dramatically better at dealing with huge volumes (hundreds of GB, dozens of accounts) without crashing. Buttons finally became roughly rectangular. The OS supports Retina displays, one of the most significant general advances in recent history. Menlo beats Monaco. Resizing windows from any edge was only 20 years too late.

Most importantly to me, (since for all my bitching, I spend a lot of my work time writing Mac software) Xcode went from 'spectacularly awful bag of suck' to just 'kinda sucks', and ARC, blocks, Objc-2, non-insane literal syntax are all forces for Good.

And yes, I love inverse ('natural') scrolling and it is enabled on all my Macs. :)

It's not that Apple does nothing at all good, it's that their focus has become even more relentlessly "systems that the average shopper at walmart can use" at the expense of those users who have a stronger grasp of general computing concepts.

When they disable all the extra screens in fullscreen mode, the chances of my dad getting confused and looking at the wrong monitor are reduced. But at the same time, the amount of data I can see at once, and my ability to manipulate it, are also reduced.

Those improvements are nice and all, but I'm talking about features that would be featured on http://www.apple.com/osx/whats-new/.

Go look at that page real quick and count the number of things that are good. Not "not bad" or "you can turn it off". Good.

Yeah, I count one (Airplay Mirroring). Two if you include the new version of Safari.

Well I love share sheets, iCloud syncing, and AirPlay, personally. Gatekeeper is a great compromise between a fully locked down system and a fully vulnerable one. And the new Safari is the best Safari ever, as the saying goes. So I count 4.5 on my end.

Anyway, an OS is more than the sum of its newest features. On the whole, OS X 10.8 is a stable, polished, powerful, fully-featured operating system. There might not have been a big feature like Time Machine or Exposé in a couple versions, but I'd much rather use 10.8 than 10.5.

Gatekeeper is an okay compromise. I'd feel better about it if they didn't include restrictive app policies. What if I want to run apps that are signed by a certificate from some third party CA? I'd feel great about it if it would also inform me what permissions are being granted and let me disable arbitrary permissions like internet access.

I think 10.7 and 10.8 bring more irritations than anything else. iCloud sync and Gatekeeper are the only things I think are worth upgrading for, but the Gatekeeper implementation is still lacking and unfree, and I use other services to sync my files (I also think the implementation of iCloud leaves something to be desired... and it's another form of lock-in). I'm still using 10.6 and shall use it for the foreseeable future; at least until my next computer, which will most likely be running Linux.

Enough about Launchpad. It's perfectly ignorable, and no sillier an interface than FrontRow, which shipped on most of the supposedly better earlier versions of OS X.

Remember when every Mac shipped with an IR port and a little remote? Laptops shipped with remotes. But apparently an optional app chooser interface (LaunchPad) is the most anti-PC they've ever shipped.

I honestly miss front row.

If front row still existed, I wouldn't be throwing away my 08 blackbook. It's not really powerful enough to be a server, but it would make an awesome HTPC.

Movist has a “navigation mode” that works well as a simple Front Row replacement.

I thought I would use Front Row a lot when I hooked my Mac Mini up to my TV, but it turns out that most of the video we watch is through a browser--on YouTube, Vimeo, or Hulu. And I control my iTunes library through the Remote app on my iPhone. So I don't miss Front Row.

I like inverse scrolling. Old scrolling feels weird to me now. And anyway, why is a minor, optional tweak to scrolling direction anything more than a minor, optional tweak to scrolling direction? It seems like every move Apple makes, no matter how trivial, takes on apocalyptic significance to people.

Notification Center is a list of notifications you can turn off if you don't like notifications. What's the big deal?

Launchpad is a little icon you can click to see your apps. What's the big deal?

The big deal is that the nicest thing you can say about the biggest features of recent OSX versions is "at least you can turn them off".

That is clearly false. GP and others have said that they like inverse scrolling and normal scrolling feels weird now, which is nicer than "at least you can turn it off". QED. Geez.

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