iSwitched: What I didn't like

25/12/2004 19:29 | Categories: Apple | 0 Comments 

It can't all be so nice and after a very long post giving some of my reasons why I liked OS X and the PowerBook, there are also a few not-so-nice things that I'd like to write about... Keep reading

The first thing that annoyed me the most, right from the very first moment, is the mouse driver: it is annoyingly slow... If you, like me, like fast mouse pointers and be able to go from side to side of the desktop with only a sharp turn of the wrist, you're not going to love the default mouse driver. Long moves are just fine, and in fact one can set the mouse "Tracking Speed" in the system settings panel, but that will only make the mouse accelerate faster (I think it is called "Acceleration" in for example, KDE) When you move the mouse slowly, it will move terribly slowly on the screen... The same in other words: no matter how much distance the mouse travels on the mousepad/desk, if it is moved slowly, it will travel very very short distances on the screen. And that was, for me, desperating. I felt impossible aiming at links in web pages, or even at the red bubble that closes a window. It was easy to get close to a link in a page but it took forever and a long displacement of the hand to reach it, even though it was only a few pixels away on the screen.

Perhaps Apple thinks that people don't need a faster mouse but the truth is that I, at least, do There is a little tool called MouseZoom that enables an additional preference panel in the system settings tool, but that will only allow to specify higher tracking speeds than Apple's maximum (yeah, that's another thing: the mouse can only travel as much fast as they have decided) The solution was to download a shareware utility called USBOverdrive that will replace the default kernel mouse driver with a new one that allows more control, even setting a different mouse resolution:

As you can see, I had to set the mouse resolution to 100dpi! (not even the cheapest mice have such low resolution!!) to get an speedier mouse movement. I've felt quite comfortable with the amount and lack of some of the options provided by Apple. Most of them are reasonable and if there were more, I would probably mess around with them (after all, I'm coming from KDE!! , but I found this one a big mistake from Apple. I think the mouse driver should provide more options in the same way USBOverdrive does. The problem with this little tool is that it is shareware and that you must pay 20$ to use it. Guess that I'll have to shell out some money...

Another thing that I noticed so far is that the system, sometimes and specially under heavy load, feels a bit unresponsive and slow. Aqua literally EATS memory and CPU time. Try compiling something from Fink and start resizing and moving windows around at the same time, specially the ones with the brushed metal look. Let's not deny the fact that the environment is simply stunningly beautiful, but all the window shadows, transparencies, blurs, zooms, ExposÈ and minimization animations take a lot of CPU time. Not to mention that applications need a lot of memory to run. I certainly wouldn't recommend anybody to run OS X with less than 512mb. I think Apple should also include the possibility to enable/disable some of the graphical effects/visual cues used throughout the system. It's very nice to see how message windows kind of roll down from the top window bar of the application to which they belong, but probably people with slower CPUs would appreciate that. And the same goes for window shadows, minimization animations, etc. It doesn't even have to be available from the preferences panel, if Apple believes that might confuse users, but it could be somehow documented and easy to find in one of the many preference lists in the ~/Library folder.

Continuing with the speed of the interface, do not even consider resizing the window of iTunes, iPhoto or Safari while doing a demo to one of your PC friends. The system can't simply keep up and you'll see how the window tries to catch the mouse while resizing. It is awfully slow! Of course these are applications that have a very complex "canvas" inside the window frame but still, I don't think it should be so slow.

I am not alone when I say that Apple should make virtual desktops part of the desktop environment. Luckily for us, there are GPLed tools like Workspace Manager that will bring that missing functionality to our desktop. With the latest version, 0.5.0 released a few days ago, it is even possible to use fancy transitions from desktop to desktop such as the rotating cube used with the fast user switching feature. Very annoying to work with but it makes for a nice demo (and there are other transitions as spectacular as this one, so check it out!) Workspace Manager is a very cool tool but I would still like to see Apple providing official support for this, inside the window manager.

The Finder supports connecting to remote FTP, SMB and WebDAV servers, but support for FTP transfers in the finder is not very good. I tried to transfer about 400Mb of files over FTP from my old Linux-based computer that was standing next to me, a few days ago, as I was transferring my old data. It worked fine for a while but then, all of a sudden, the transfer dialog simply got stuck and nothing happened after that. I forced the Finder to quit (the transfer the dialog would just not go away when clicking the Cancel button) and I restarted the ProFTPD server in the Linux machine. I tried again but it didn't work at all anymore... I found RBrowserLite, a very nice FTP client and everything worked like a charm, perhaps even faster. On the other hand, support for WebDAV worked very well within Finder when downloading some of the packages needed for running KDE natively in OS X. Upon mounting the remote server, it would just work and be displayed as any other folder, albeit it was a little bit slower.

And finally, though more of an opinion than anything else, ExposÈ is not _the_ answer for all the window management problems. I love it and I've come so used to it that I find myself at work in Win2k continously pressing the combination of key+mouse button to trigger it, but the concept of identifying the windows by only looking at its thumbnail fails miserably when all the windows look the same. Consider this: I have been using Xcode, a development tool developed by Apple to do my PHP development stuff and when you have 20 windows open with PHP code, when shrunk they all look exactly the same:

You can still hover your mouse on every window to get its name, but when you have twenty windows and the one you're looking for is the last one, then we have a problem. I am not blaming Apple because they never said that ExposÈ was the final and ultimate solution but people should also be aware of its limitations. And this is, in my opinion, one of them.