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New products and alternatives / Will The Iphone Replace The Zaurus?
« on: January 10, 2007, 02:52:24 pm »Quote
I find OSX hard to use, but that's probably just me not being used to it. I feel that they took perfectly good Unix and messed it up. The lack of a right mouse button is awkward too. I also don't like the bar at the top of the screen or the one at the bottom. I don't know what either one is called, but one seems to be a quick launch/taskbar and the other seems to be a standard launch bar.
I know I shouldn't feed trolls, but in what way is it messed up?! Open "Terminal" and there's a perfectly good Bash shell awaiting your command. Enter a common Unix command (note Unix != Linux) and it works pretty much as expected. In fact, Apple even provided command line tools that support administering many of the Mac's "custom" features. Sure it takes some time to learn. The same would be true if you were a BSD person using Linux for the first time or a Linux person using Solaris.
Install Apple's X11 server and you can install and run standard Unix X Windows apps (including a genuine Xterm if the Mac's Terminal prog isn't Unixy enough for you). For example, I use GnuCash on my Mac all the time.
As for the "bar" at the top, that's for your menus. The menus for your focused app show up there. Note how you can just throw your mouse cursor to the top of the screen and hit the menu bar -- much easier that having to aim for a 30 pixel thick strip of sceen real estate located at some random position on the display. Google for Fitt's Law to learn more about this aspect of GUI usability.
And the single button mouse argument? Please. You can use pretty much any mouse you want with Macs and they fully support the second button. Even Apple's own Mighty Mouse (though technically having no buttons) supports left and right clicks.
OS X is far from perfect (don't even get me started about the supposed "consistent look & feel"), but if you're going to bash it, at least pick on the "real" issues.