Our biggest gripes with OS X Mavericks
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Mac Mail is now unusable with large inboxes, spotlight is slow, the finder is still stupid (explorer is better then finder at this point). New power management in the near macbook airs is the worst.
The biggest thing I'm happy about is the old version of itunes. I can see podcasts in a grid and group them by album rating.
NFS issues... sigh... I'm so used to them that I stopped noticing. Getting Linux and OS X to agree on exporting/mounting NFS shares is why people hate computers.
It also does some weird stuff with folders - if you had an IMAP folder named "Archive", it magically became special in Mavericks, which took some people off guard.
Spent too much playing with it last week or so, just to get the core functionality out. But hey, it works now. :)
I can't help but think the new App Nap is to blame for this, but I have no proof.
http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1q9dmc/mavericks_powe...
I've loathed multi-monitor support in OS X for quite a while now. Is this a case of Apple overthinking how to do things?
At first they blanked non-primary screens when an app entered full-screen, now they're offering this multiple totally-independent bodge.
Right, which was of course a terrible idea and I hated it so much I never ended up using full-screen support when attached to an extra monitor (even if I like it well enough when I was just using my laptop on its own).
It doesn't seem to be much different from maximizing in Windows but ever since full-screen support was introduced it's been a bizarre combination of good ideas and the kind of bad ideas that only come about from never actually using the feature.
There's other issues with multi-monitor support in OS X that it sounds like they're addressing in Mavericks, but these other issues as well as loads of app compatibility ones I've been reading about are enough to keep me from upgrading.
I have to admit to being a bit befuddled-- I don't understand the desire for full screen when you've got big monitors attached, so either and all options have always worked fine for me. I agree it was silly that full screen meant losing a second screen-- but I don't see what's wrong with this compromise.
It seems to me that all this madness would be solved if you could do a Windows style maximize on an app window and the menu bar and dock auto hid I think all would be right in the world. Instead we keep getting this overwrought mess.
That being said, you can drag the window to the size you want and have nothing but window and menubar. There are also a ton of third party software to automate this as a keyboard shortcut or similar if that's the key. Then viola, no weird dependencies on a weird feature not designed for 23" + screens.
I disagree, this is a strange sentiment that I see on HN all the time. That somehow the complexity of an IDE with dozens of debug windows and library organization trees deserve lots of screen real estate.
You know what deserves lots of screen real estate? Whatever I want to focus my attention on.
It could be a simple text editor, or VLC showing reruns of Road Runner cartoons while I balance my checkbook on another monitor, or a realtime log viewer in one screen and a process lister in antoher - point is, it doesn't matter, it's my way of working and it's not so bizarre that I need to acclimate myself to the clutter that inevitably shows up when using OS X for complex work.
The important thing is that I don't want all the other garbage I have backgrounded showing up in my field of view when I don't want to pay attention to it and I want this happen with a single mouse-click. This is a solved problem on virtually every other platform with a windowing metaphor in the last 25 years.
Apple's concepts around window resizing and full screen support make it seem like this is a problem so complicated we could solve P=NP and efficiently fold proteins with less effort.
I don't want to install addons, I don't want to spend several seconds breaking my work flow to resize windows just so or any other madness. This should have been solved with the first release of OS X, not the brain-dead hacks that keep getting shipped that nobody obviously thought to actually try and use in Cupertino.
> There are also a ton of third party software to automate this as a keyboard shortcut or similar if that's the key.
I do have an addon installed to solve this, but this is stupid core OS functionality and It's unbelievable that I'm living in the 21st century and full screening apps on multiple monitors requires years of waiting and entire OS upgrades.
Considering that mostly what I need to do on my Macs is virtualize Linux boxes, use MS-Office and ssh and run VLC, my next machine is going to be a Windows machine. Since
a) they're so cheap as to be virtually disposable
b) they haven't made core basic OS functions like moving files, accessing network shares without hanging the machine or Maximizing windows an unpossible task worthy of years of wait just to hope that they haven't screwed it up yet again and solved only by me wasting my time dragging things around or installing half a dozen third party kludges to hack the OS into something resembling a usable platform.
I'm not asking for weird edge case user environment things, or highly specialized workflows, or ultra-specialized niche window management or other things, just for the things to work as the user would expect.
I love love love my rMBP hardware-wise, but OS X as a user environment has been broken for a long time and it's regressing every release with problems that were solved on multiple platforms a human generation ago.
sorry venting
If you're spending several seconds to press a button on a toolbar you're already disrupting your workflow in a way directly comparable to resizing a window by grabbing a corner. If "disrupting your workflow" is such a huge concern you'd want a keyboard shortcut for this action anyway.
Sorry, but I actually think not full screening a window is actually the far superior handling in a world with high resolution, large screens. There are other ways to "hide" things you are background like using Spaces or whatever they're calling virtual desktops.
> I do have an addon installed to solve this, but this is stupid core OS functionality and It's unbelievable that I'm living in the 21st century and full screening apps on multiple monitors requires years of waiting and entire OS upgrades.
Ok. Seems like it takes virtually no effort one time to get the functionality you really want. If that's enough to make you super crazed and need a huge vent, that's fine. For me, that's a very plausible solution to a specific problem related to a preference that you likely developed because you are used to working on a different platform. It's true that:
> I'm not asking for weird edge case user environment things, or highly specialized workflows, or ultra-specialized niche window management or other things, just for the things to work as the user would expect.
... but you are asking for OSX to act like Windows has rather than how OSX has since it has had windowing (or at least as far back as my memory goes to the mid 90s). There was a choice made. It's a choice I didn't like when there weren't things like virtual desktops and when screen resolutions were lower and screen size was smaller. On a big screen with lots of pixels, I think it makes sense to double down on the traditional way they've handled enlarging windows.
All that being said, Windows needs to get on the multiple-desktop/workspace bandwagon. OS X's treatment of the subject is brilliant.
Other than that, pretty happy (though I don't use many of the Apple apps).
Except when hooking IBOutlets up between monitors and the little dialog disappears, which can be annoying as hell. But even with that irritation it's miles ahead of how it was previously.
Citation needed.
p.s.: a fix I've found is changing the screen resolution (and back again) each time you unlock. hmmmmm.
The biggest difference is that I updated while he did a clean install.
Wtf, really? That was one of the features I used to show as a sensible difference between mac and PC... that a windows pc will just shut down your computer if you mistakenly touch the power button while handling it, whilst a mac wouldn't...
The problem here is that Apple put the power button above the delete button and you end up sleeping your computer very often just because you miss the delete key.
Also they keyboard layout is fucking stupid. It really upsets me when i'm coding. Going from a standard UK keyboard to an Apple abomination of a UK keyboard is highly mentally disturbing for my small brain.
Windows 8, and now this. Although this is no where near as bad.
Don't worry, by 2013, KDE 4 is a better and more stable UI than OS X. :)