OSX Improvements
Posted by Ray @ 1:00 amOr, the Dark Side of using a Mac.
Computerworld has an article about 15 improvements Apple could make in OSX.
Some of them are good, like having document instances in the dock: Apple’s dock, the equivalent of the Windows taskbar, doubles as an application launcher; it does not show each separate document or window in any open application. Apple’s dock is a horrible piece of design anyway, we’ve known it for years, so all Mac users should download Quicksilver and DragThing and then forget all about the dock.
Some of them are annoyances, like not having a different backspace and delete key (Mac laptop users, press FN + BACKSPACE to achieve the delete effect).
But while they have a handful of good suggestions vis-a-vis the Finder (the equivalent of Explorer for Windows), they miss out the most critical flaw of all: the Finder is single threaded.
It can only do one thing at a time. If something is holding it up, it will wait… and wait… and wait… until it is done, before you can do anything else with it. If that spinning beach ball comes up while you’re using the Finder, you’d better hope it won’t be there for long. All the major “hangs” I’ve had with my Mac have all been related to the bloody Finder.
The Finder, for goodness’ sake! It’s the one thing all Mac users will be using (X11 snobs notwithstanding), and it can only do one thing at a time!
The worst thing is we’ve known about the dock and finder for a long time, yet they’re still the same old dinosaurs.
Apple, you can do much better.
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