Question:
The biggest and most pressing problem with OS X prior to the release of Tiger is:

Choices:
Speed/Performance
Interface Design, Intuitiveness, Consistency, etc.
Application Stability
Type Rendering
Hardware compatibility (such as hard drives, printers, digital devices, etc.)

 

It was all I could do to keep myself from choosing "Type Rendering". Is there a more important chore for an operating system than this? Perhaps not, but earlier today I tried to drag an icon to the Dock. Instead of dragging it to the dock it drag-selected it and about five files below it in the Finder column view. I tried again…a bit slower. S-e-l-e-c-t….H-o-l-d-l-e-f-t-m-o-u-s-e-b-u-t-t-o-n-d-o-w-n- f-o-r-a-n-i-n-s-t-a-n-t-t-o-l-e-t-t-h-e-O-S-c-a-t-c-h-o-n -t-o-w-h-a-t-I'-m-t-r-y-i-n-g-t-o-d-o….b-e-g-i-n-t-o-d-r-a-g-s-l-o-w-l-y…and then I proceeded to select the same list of files that I had done before with nary an icon headed for the Dock. I felt like one of those great outfielders who is so sure that they made the game-saving leaping catch at the wall that they are truly surprised when they look into their mitt and it is empty. They are so sure they had made the catch that they even take a second look as if there was some place for that ball to hide inside the glove. Well, same thing here. I'm dragging my mouse across the screen toward the Dock and I can't believe the cursor is empty…there is no "ghosted" image of an icon to show that a drag operation is in progress. So I tried again. This time I selected, paused, and made darn sure to drag 90 degrees perpendicular to the window so that in the drag process I wouldn't be invading the airspace of any underlying icons. It worked. Well…sort of. The icons on the Dock separated like the Red Sea did for Moses and I dropped the icon into the Dock…but for some reason the Dock decided to drown all the Hebrews because the icons that had parted collapsed back together prematurely and so the application icon, which I had intended to add to the Dock, proceeded to be launched by Photoshop. To its credit, Photoshop was smart enough to give me a "Can't open this kind of file. What, are you stupid or something?" message, although it was definitely NOT to Photoshop's credit that it wasn't smart enough not to try to open another application in the first place. But maybe that was the OS's fault.

Does anybody seriously wonder anymore why someone would still want to work in OS 9?

I really wanted to pick speed, but picked interface because I think it's the bloated interface that's CAUSING the speed and performance issues.

Oh god, do I feel your pain with the dragging thing. The thing that makes me do the Godzilla sound is the fucking "bounceback"... trying to drag a bunch of files wherever, doing it slowly, painfully, carefully... waiting for the ghosted feedback... enduring beachball... wasting my fucking time, only to have the interface show the bounceback animation like "NOPE! Sorry! Na ga da! Try again!" I swear I've almost put my fist through my Cinema Display a couple of times.

And I also told you about the time where I mistakenly dropped something like 500 files into the friggin' dock, right? Trying to trash them. Oh mercy. There's only one way to get them out... manual poofing.

i have picked type rendering. It detracts me #1 on OS X.

..but i have to add, that speed (i like to call this efficieny) and interface-design is on par with speed. That means low. This unholy alliance of slowness, blurry fonts and cheesy-UI design always drive me nuts and make me use OS 9 again. The laggy mousepointer is a bad joke <cough>.

What drives me nuts even more, the current hardware could power such cheesy bloated UI easily - if it would be coded in a more effective manner. But using Open-GL for stupid 2D Stuff? Apple lost it...

Brother smithz,
I knew you'd pick type. Good man. The whole idea of this poll, is that it's a nexus of ALL these things, they all add up to make OS X a nut-driving mess. Really, the only way to handle the bullshit, is to deny it's there. To crap-settle. Or to start restricting your Mac computer use to those casual use activities that it can handle.

If, like an X-Man, I listened to iTunes all day, and only worried about which picture of Jennifer Love Hewitt to put on my desktop... or which big sexy icons to show in my dock, I'd probably be all set. I've heard from Mac people in the real world, and they all say a variation of the same shit: "well, I just use it for email and surfing... but I love iTunes, iPhoto, and have played around with making home movies!" That's Apple's target market. And those digital hubsters are not going to become mini thalos, because their sights are set so damn low.

I want to shake these people or put them in a time machine and bring them back to the glory days of the Mac, just for a vacation. To see what it was like when the Mac could really DO things. Even if you're just talking Word processing. Something like Word 5.2 was perfectly suited to doing real word processing work. Everything that happened to Word after that was bloat and problems and nonsense.

Apps have gotten more "feature rich", but sometimes the features just ain't features anymore. They're stupid wastes of code. Especially if they don't work and break. I don't know about you brothers, but in the past four years, it's seemed to me like nobody even TESTS their product anymore before releasing it. Crap gets through that's actually BROKEN or so easy to break it should never have been included.

Font rendering is like that. It breaks on me constantly. The Font Book is inadequate for pro font managment (there is not a pro alive who will disagree with that statement)... and yet the commercially available font management utilities don't work reliably if you use a big mess of fonts concurrently, as many designers do. Meanwhile, in the OS, font data is frequently corrupted, and many of the nastiest app and OS hard crashes can be traced back to font problems. And to cover their asses here, Apple blames the victim: oh, you must have a bad font. Nah-ah. Nice try. I've had some of these postscript fonts for 10 years and they never fucking burped. OS X comes along and they suddenly magically corrupt and it's the font's fault?? I'm not buying it.

Then there's blurriness. A big part of the mushy soft-focus nondistinct look of Aqua is because of the Interface fonts. They're smoothed at all costs, so only the friggin' JUMBO sizes work. To me, that's a waste of space. I'd rather have smaller and bitmapped/pixelated (for the interface)--which would be FASTER--than upsized and blurry. As long as I can read it, and it doesn't take up too much room, I'm fine.

As I have said over and over again, I'd really do ANYTHING for pixelated geneva 9 in my Finder lists again. Like I had in the legacy. If I could get that face to work in the Finder, I'd set my "appearance" to that and leave it forever. If I could put that underneath all my icons as the icon label, like the old days, I'd be happier. I never, ever needed big huge drop-shadowed type on my icons. The information is not important enough for me to give it that much visual prominence on, say, my desktop. A very small, crisp, black icon label text with a white background is FINE. And when I click on an icon, I want it to highlight properly, THAT would be the time to drop out text--especially if I chose a dark highlight color--but that's been broken for years.

I want my text highlight color to be BLACK. That's what I want. That's the only text highlight color I ever wanted, because it's highly visible, high contrast and makes the most sense. Hasn't worked in friggin' years and years.

That's how bad this interface is. There are choices which you can physically make (like nobody's stopping me from choosing black in "appearance")... but Aqua can't do it right. It's as if nobody went and friggin' TESTED stuff like, OK, what if somebody wants a dark, or black text highlight color? They should make it so it works.

There are still apps where the mushy border on type never properly overlays a background color. Giving you the dreaded "halo" effect. At small sizes, it impedes readability. It looks like mistakes, it's sloppy and shows a complete lack of quality control.

And I also told you about the time where I mistakenly dropped something like 500 files into the friggin' dock, right? Trying to trash them. Oh mercy. There's only one way to get them out... manual poofing.

That's a problem easily solved with common sense programming. 99.99999999% of the time no one is going to be intentionally adding 500 files to the Dock at the same time. I'll bet you could find the sweet spot at about 5 files. Any more than that and the Dock asks you "Are you sure you'd like to add those 5 files to the Dock and what you're not really trying to do is drop those five tiff files on Photoshop?" <Okay> <Cancel> <Dunno…just do something and pretend like you're a responsive GUI>.

When I coded a few simple things in HyperCard I found that 60% of my time was in coding for functionality. The other 40% was error-trapping and planning for all the things that a user could do and how the program was going to handle it cleanly and elegantly. For the Dock not to have some type of error routine is just not right. That should have been there from day one because it is so obvious. This shows either a lack of care for the GUI itself or a lack of understanding for how people use one. If a recent version of OS X has fixed this problem then I withdraw my remarks.

If I could put that underneath all my icons as the icon label, like the old days, I'd be happier. I never, ever needed big huge drop-shadowed type on my icons. The information is not important enough for me to give it that much visual prominence on, say, my desktop. A very small, crisp, black icon label text with a white background is FINE.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the way Apple did it before was simple, elegant, and the text labels could be easily read on the busiest of Desktop Pictures or patterns. They did the most with the least. The technique fit within an entire complex and ordered scheme of how graphic elements worked -- singly and together. One idea built upon the other. Now, of course, one idea competes with the other as in the very idea of highlighting having become mixed up with the idea of labeling. But this problem started from day one as soon as someone decided that the graphical user interface was no longer primarily a means with which humans interfaced with computers but was a means to dress them up as well.

If I were an expert in information theory (and I'm not), I could probably tell you with some authority that as soon as Apple began to add gratuitous elements to their user interface that it automatically made it more difficult to expand that interface and to integrate new semiotic features. But I think I can do so intuitively if only because of what I've seen in OS X. For instance, as brother thalo has said time and again, transparency is another dimension that can be used in a graphical user interface to express some type of meaning. But right now that information is pretty much lost when all that it is expressing is "coolness". Once the idea of what a graphical user interface is meant to do is bollixed up then the problems of the user interface making sense are compounded. It becomes much harder to add new features and have them make sense in the milieu of visual clutter. And one day you wake up and a relatively simply task, such as showing that a desktop file is selected, turns into a Rube Goldberg affair.

Well put, brother Brad.

And at the same time, you know what, I wouldn't MIND if, built in to the interface was the ABILITY to clutter the crap out of it if somebody wants it. It's like customizing a motorcycle, or a leather jacket, or a gun, whatever. Some people friggin' LOVE to trick out their stuff. Make it their own.

Apple knows that. Everyone knows that. I'm not trying to FORCE MINIMALISM on the Mac community at large. I'm just saying that it strikes me as so much more logical and sane, to have a minimal FOUNDATION... a bonework on which anyone can hang anything they want. But the core should be uncluttered and wide open to individual customization.

Interior architecture is really the perfect analogy. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor. Can't get much more minimal than that. A guy like me might want to leave it pretty spartan, paint the walls white, have one or two really superb examples of minimal functional furniture design, tasteful art on the walls (note: this is how I WANT to live more than it is the way I REALLY live, lol)... simple lighting fixtures, one or two master drawings or paintings that make my heart sing.

The point is, I get to choose how I want to live. When it comes to furnishing and decorating, yeah, if I want I can hire Christopher Lowell to come in and give me gingham hell, or call the Monster House guys to give me an anime pachinko parlor. But that's not likely. Not when you are a designer yourself. You know what works for you.

Most people knows what works for them.

Some people, however, have their tastes dictated. And that's what Apple is doing for digis. They're dictating what "cool" computer user interfaces are. They've decided already what you are and aren't going to do. They've taken their marketing agenda and are forcing it on you, conning you into thinking it will work for you. They WANT everything to be cluttered and superabundant, because from a sales perspective, people who AREN'T sure what works for them, will at face value believe they're getting a lot for their money. Like a huge fast food meal. They're looking at the AMOUNT OF CRAP, rather than the quality of the individual components.

Because supersizing and postmodern excess are pop-culture standards, people who ride fads are gravitating toward Aqua. But I'm telling you, they're doing it backwards. Instead of just leading chimps to water, they're forcing them to drink. That's one of my major objections. Apple is treating everyone like a newbie, instead of really analyzing its human interface guidelines for EFFECTIVE computer use.

Instead, they're going for ENTERTAINING computer use first. They're going for pop cultural icon status before resolving the way people will actually USE this.

That's the heart of the con.

But the irony is, lookit the iPod. It --IS-- a pop culture icon already. And how did it get there? Hands? Right, freakin' MINIMAL-fuckin'-ISM. Ultimate simplicity in form and function. Clarity of interface... the controls distilled to the barest minimum to get the job done. And people embraced them. Everyone. Not just digikids. Not just GoGurt slurpers and nosepickers and skateboarding jackass-stunt doing fool hat wearing teenagers. Everyone. Me.

OK fast forward. Do digichimps buy fancy accessories, stick hello kitty stickers on their iPods? Wear them in kooky holsters? Buy them in stupid garish colors? Yeah, of course. But not everybody HAS to kick them up with happy horseshit. There's the plain vanilla white and stainless version.

Just as nobody can tell you what music to play on the thing, nobody should be able to control your personal computer experience the way Apple is doing. Personal computers should be that almost "blank slate"... a potential-engine. A thoroughbred poised and ready for you to saddle and ride it any way you want.

The more control the toolmaker takes out of your hands, the worse a tool it is. Apple needs to resist the impulse to decorate FOR us. They should be the landlord, giving us the four blank walls. A sturdy safe structure constructed with the finest materials. READY for us to move in.

Unfortunately, they pre-decorate. And I contend that the REASON they rush to do this, is because they have something to hide. And what they're hiding is that the quality of the foundation is poor. They believe our QUALITY of life is based on how much crap we can hang on the walls, how many rainbows and unicorns and glow-in-the-dark stars we can stick on there. How many fuckin' bobble heads and pez dispensers we put everywhere.

Well, my brothers, not everyone sees the world that way. Some people want to be buried in clutter. Others want a place for everything and everything in its place. They don't want to waste their time wading through kitsch bric-a-brac... they CARE about their environment NOT WASTING THEIR TIME.

Instead of finding better ways to do things, or straighter lines between point a and point b... Apple has pegged us all as time wasting easily charmed goofballs. The REASON they're giving us all this crap, is because they've decided that the computer using public wants it. And I must say, that some obviously do. But I think they do because Apple is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. They create this superabundant climate as most appealing to the most gullible, easily led demographic, and that's why it plays.

But holy crap, computers can be so very much more. When you strip away the bullshit, many people find the friggin' meaning of life. I did. And it's about following your own path. Not being controlled or led. A good tool doesn't tell you how to use it. It becomes what you need.

That's what the Mac has lost.

Oh my goodness, what amazing back-to-back posts. Just like old times. I'd put that sequence on the front page if I were you.

Has anyone played with Quicksilver? It is an atrocious mishmash of a developer aping all the worst of Apple's GUI efforts.

Zooming, fading, squishing, sliding...the developer packed in as many goofy trick as he could.

Yet LaunchBar does roughly the same thing in a compact elegant interface. (Note, I've pref'd it to only look for/launch applications, not all the other hoo-ha it is capable of).

I'm not at all against typing-based launching. I am against fugly mishmashes of UI elements floating everywhere. The effects only work when they augment the function, not distract away from or cover up disfunction.

Spotlight (which is more than mere Launcher) seems to be a very nice search with handsome presentation of the results. Apple is actually doing some very nice things (including little details, not just the big stuff) that will enable other applications to also make use of them.

Breaking away from mere list views for search results is long overdue.

Having the results be horizontally divided by file type (or [possibly?] other criteria) is wonderful. Having handy search filters next to it is also wonderful, so we can get myriad views of the same data, arranged as we see fit.

There is a lot of good useful stuff in Tiger (hell, in Panther too).

I don't have the energy to angrily pretend it sucks just in the hopes that Apple will take notice and implement my ideas for the few things that are missing or deficient. It doesn't suck at all for my needs. I use far, far less freeware/shareware add-ons in Mac OS X than I EVER did in Mac OS 9/8 because Mac OS X is packed with things I need and constantly use, not merely bloat and gloss.

I took a look at Quicksilver and thought, yeah, just what we need, yet ANOTHER way of doing the same crap with a slightly different interface. Somebody playing around with the spinning gears for programming practice.

Look, I have hopes for spotlight too. But it seems like just another utility showcase, when the dysfunction of the OS still ain't being dealt with.

If it's great, I'd never pretend it sucks. There's no point in that. I want everything to be great. I've just been consistently disappointed with the quality of OS X and apps that run in OS X. Sure, there's IDEAS for useful stuff in Panther, probably more in Tiger. But again, it never seems to get past the proposal "ain't this cool" stage. Crap never gets fully realized. It's never taken as far as it'll go. And it never gets to us in a form that feels tested and retested and perfected for function and usability.

I don't want to fire up spotlight, only to find a way to trip it up or make it break in ten minutes. That'll be a drag. And I'm always looking for the catch. I remember when Apple tried stuff like this before, and you'd get things like "cataloging your hard drive, time remaining: 74 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes"

My files change day by day and minute by minute. All I can see is paying the piper for spotlight working fast. All I ask is how much is all that cataloging gonna slow down an already slow OS even more? I hope I'm wrong, but my experience with Apple is, they can make shit LOOK like it works, but there's always some huge and usually hidden performance killer in there somewhere. Some massive tradeoff that makes it not worth it.