The mac is too good

[Kenneth]

Continued from this thread

Originally posted by Pentel Pen
We are now selling motor oil?
After one non-Mac item to another, everyone seems to be selling something.
We don't get to read as much mac tips as we used to.
I miss the old MUG.

[Edited on 3-8-2005 by Pentel Pen]

Well, the way I see it, this is actually a good sign. The logical reason (in my opinion) why you don't see much mac related threads is because OS X and the mac has reached a point where its so dang good! People simply have no problems, or hardly have any anymore, unlike in the days of OS 9.

Thank God for OS X. I remember wasting endless hours looking for extension conflicts. In this age of the Internet, highspeed file transfers via firewire, standard USB interfaces, gigahertz cpu speeds; dare I say we're already living in the golden age of computing? Perhaps when the $200 mac super mini me comes out and the wifi iPod. But its good to be alive in this age.

'ala lang.

[Edited on 3-10-2005 by Kenneth]

[hubes]

I know that several members have been Mac users for quite a long time and that most of them probably know most of the tips and tricks of OS X. For the benefit of newbies and the not so experienced users (myself included) maybe we should start a tips and tricks thread. I did a search on tips/tricks and although there were some threads it just covered a few topics.

[bagac]

Originally posted by hubes
I know that several members have been Mac users for quite a long time and that most of them probably know most of the tips and tricks of OS X. For the benefit of newbies and the not so experienced users (myself included) maybe we should start a tips and tricks thread. I did a search on tips/tricks and although there were some threads it just covered a few topics.

i agree

[victorpanlilio]

Many troubleshooting tips and tricks can be found in www.macosxhints.com and www.macfixit.com, no need to reinvent the wheel...

MacOS X 10.3.x, good as it is, is far from perfect, and I say this as someone who has used (and much preferred) Macs since 1987. Some of the fault lies with third party developers, but Apple ought to address this by making it easier for ISV's to let their products play nice with the base operating system...

Some recurring headaches:

1. Font management - if you have more than a few dozen fonts, including a mix of Adobe Type 1 and OpenType formats, this can be a nightmare to troubleshoot even with utilities like Morrisson Font Doctor X; FontBook is NOT adequate.

2. Access control lists - file permissions in multi-user environments can quickly get screwed up unless group rights and inheritance are set up correctly; SharePoints can be one way around this, but really, AppleShare was better in this regard.

3. Corrupted preference files - utilities like Preferential Treatment can help, but this still happens too frequently and causes application slowdowns... grrr....

4. Disk maintenance - UNIX was designed for 24/7 uptime, but the housekeeping cron jobs are set by default to 3AM, and few portables are on at that time, so you have to use utility programs or 'sudo periodic daily weekly monthly' to get it done

5. System software updates - after applying these, some apps break (e.g. Adobe Expert fonts no longer work, etc.); moral of the story, don't just install the latest software updates on a production machine, especially if you make your living from it; test on another non-critical Mac first, if possible, or hold off first and read the problem reports on macintouch.com, etc.

6. Wake from sleep gremlins with portables - need I say more?

7. Inconsistent third-party installation procedures - most are pretty good about drag and drop to Applications, but the recent Adobe Illustrator CS upgrade fiasco is one of the worst examples I can think of; for shame, Adobe!

I could go on, but you get the idea. I don't want this to sound like an anti-Mac tirade, I just want to add some real-world perspective to what could otherwise be one-sided cheering for our favorite platform. Looking forward to Tiger (with Core Image, Core Audio, etc.), I hope these issues will be addressed. New features are nice, but existing annoyances should be fixed first!

[angel_benet]

As a person who uses Windows 2000 and XP at work and Mac OS 10.3.4 at home, I am happy to say that of course, Mac OS 10 wins hands down. I have never had a problem with OS 10 (except for that one time my help program began going blank, which i fixed after research on the apple discussion boards). Oh, and Safari does crash but it's pretty rare.

Windows, on the other hand...oh please don't get me started. I'm going to go into spontaneous combustion if i do.

[bagac]

Originally posted by victorpanlilio
Many troubleshooting tips and tricks can be found in www.macosxhints.com and www.macfixit.com, no need to reinvent the wheel...

MacOS X 10.3.x, good as it is, is far from perfect, and I say this as someone who has used (and much preferred) Macs since 1987. Some of the fault lies with third party developers, but Apple ought to address this by making it easier for ISV's to let their products play nice with the base operating system...

Some recurring headaches:

1. Font management - if you have more than a few dozen fonts, including a mix of Adobe Type 1 and OpenType formats, this can be a nightmare to troubleshoot even with utilities like Morrisson Font Doctor X; FontBook is NOT adequate.

2. Access control lists - file permissions in multi-user environments can quickly get screwed up unless group rights and inheritance are set up correctly; SharePoints can be one way around this, but really, AppleShare was better in this regard.

3. Corrupted preference files - utilities like Preferential Treatment can help, but this still happens too frequently and causes application slowdowns... grrr....

4. Disk maintenance - UNIX was designed for 24/7 uptime, but the housekeeping cron jobs are set by default to 3AM, and few portables are on at that time, so you have to use utility programs or 'sudo periodic daily weekly monthly' to get it done

5. System software updates - after applying these, some apps break (e.g. Adobe Expert fonts no longer work, etc.); moral of the story, don't just install the latest software updates on a production machine, especially if you make your living from it; test on another non-critical Mac first, if possible, or hold off first and read the problem reports on macintouch.com, etc.

6. Wake from sleep gremlins with portables - need I say more?

7. Inconsistent third-party installation procedures - most are pretty good about drag and drop to Applications, but the recent Adobe Illustrator CS upgrade fiasco is one of the worst examples I can think of; for shame, Adobe!

I could go on, but you get the idea. I don't want this to sound like an anti-Mac tirade, I just want to add some real-world perspective to what could otherwise be one-sided cheering for our favorite platform. Looking forward to Tiger (with Core Image, Core Audio, etc.), I hope these issues will be addressed. New features are nice, but existing annoyances should be fixed first!

thanks for the objective observations...

[victorpanlilio]

Originally posted by angel_benet
Windows, on the other hand...oh please don't get me started. I'm going to go into spontaneous combustion if i do.

I use WinXP everyday, and although I've never suffered the dreaded BSOD, I'm underwhelmed with XP's thread model. In XP, it's easy to bog the system down when you have multiple apps open, unlike in OS X, where the system remains responsive even with the CPU pegged at 100% utilization. But in everyday use, the Win UI can get pretty annoying after a short while, even if its font antialiasing (ClearType) is marginally superior to OS X's. Here's a tip to show how wrongheaded Windows can be at times: open up several windows on the desktop, making sure they're not fullscreen. Notice how each window has its own menubar? Now, try clicking on the menubar in a background window. In some cases, it will bring the background window to the front, and at the same time activate the menu -- the background window interprets the mouse click as a "change focus" and "mouse down" event in one. This is not even implemented consistently across apps, but what's worse, it increases the chance of inadvertent response to user events. In other words, in XP you don't really have "background" windows, you only have partially obscured foreground windows! Duh! What on earth were they thinking? This is one vivid illustration of Fitts's Law, which is why Mac users hit onscreen targets (menus, buttons) much more accurately than Windows users.

[carlodl]

Originally posted by victorpanlilio

Originally posted by angel_benet
Windows, on the other hand...oh please don't get me started. I'm going to go into spontaneous combustion if i do.

I use WinXP everyday, and although I've never suffered the dreaded BSOD, I'm underwhelmed with XP's thread model. In XP, it's easy to bog the system down when you have multiple apps open, unlike in OS X, where the system remains responsive even with the CPU pegged at 100% utilization. But in everyday use, the Win UI can get pretty annoying after a short while, even if its font antialiasing (ClearType) is marginally superior to OS X's. Here's a tip to show how wrongheaded Windows can be at times: open up several windows on the desktop, making sure they're not fullscreen. Notice how each window has its own menubar? Now, try clicking on the menubar in a background window. In some cases, it will bring the background window to the front, and at the same time activate the menu -- the background window interprets the mouse click as a "change focus" and "mouse down" event in one. This is not even implemented consistently across apps, but what's worse, it increases the chance of inadvertent response to user events. In other words, in XP you don't really have "background" windows, you only have partially obscured foreground windows! Duh! What on earth were they thinking? This is one vivid illustration of Fitts's Law, which is why Mac users hit onscreen targets (menus, buttons) much more accurately than Windows users.

Now, there's something new you'd learn about saying something bad about Windows everyday

Some techie stuff you've got going there man, but hey thanks. :beer: