I had no problem with it when it first came out. It’s a natural extension to what the down arrow does, which is move the cursor downward.
It’s also a natural extension of real life. You don’t move the paper up when you are reading. You move your eyes and head down. Once you are used to it, a mouse is an extension of you. A touch screen is an extension of the desktop. The interactions are different.
The fact that it isn’t intuitive to everyone doesn’t mean that it’s more natural. Sure, I’ve encountered people who have problems with it, but I’ve also encountered people who grasped it instantly. Calling it more natural and forcing it on people who clearly were used to doing things the other way was rather annoying in my opinion, even with an opt-out option.
It’s the same sort of stupidity that Microsoft did with Windows 8–ignoring the people that are used to doing things the old way. There’s no reason a new installation and an upgrade have to act exactly the same way.
Note that, when you change versions of Office, you’ll likely be upgrading to one with the new interface. You can see it as a time to experiment with alternative software, since there will be a learning curve anyways.
(Sure, you could upgrade to 2008 if you can get it, but I figure that’s less likely. Plus 2008’s Excel is pretty crippled, according to Wikipedia.)
In defense of both, nobody likes change, but it has to happen for progress to occur. We’d still be typing in command lines if these sorts of things weren’t forced, and I guarantee you that every single step from then to now has been berated, loudly, as “stupidity of ignoring people used to doing things the old way.”
This (the new scrolling direction) is demonstrably easier for new computer users to use–I guarantee you Apple studied it. Remember, this is a Mac – most users are now scrolling by touch instead of a wheel (neither the trackpads nor the mice apple ships have wheels – they’re all touch surfaces), and have been for a couple years.
Finally, its a single bloody checkbox for the change-resistant to put it back. Exactly how much easier do you want them to make it? We’ve spend more time talking about it than it will ever cost you to reverse it on every Mac you own for the rest of your life. The wailing and gnashing of teeth I hear over this issue amazes me.
So I found out that the Mavericks free upgrade also comes with iWorks for free, which may or may not address my Office concern. How is that suite, especially the Word/Excel equivalents? (I’d be converting stuff to and from .doc and .xls, of course.)
Wasn’t sure whether to put this in its own thread, but it is relevant for this one nevertheless, IMO (plus, I wanted more opinions on 10.9 — I’m inclined to upgrade, on the logic that I can’t hold onto this computer and this OS forever, so I might as well start learning the ins and outs of the new stuff).
Pages (the word processor) and Numbers (the spreadsheet) are fairly pale shadows of Word and Excel in terms of functionality. They’re OK for a simple business report or “what I did this summer” sort of thing, but they’re very bare-bones–particularly with the latest version, which actually dropped a fair amount of functionality to achieve compatibility with the iOS versions. Pages converts pretty cleanly back and forth from Word, so long as you don’t use much of Word, but Numbers is very different in it’s basic functionality from Excel, and most things beyond the simplest of spreadsheets won’t be an easy conversion.
On the other hand, Keynote (the presentation software) is what PowerPoint should have been. It’s much easier to use than PowerPoint without sacrificing power.
All of you should be made aware that with Parallels (and, I presume, with VMWare) you can run one MacOS natively and run the other one as a virtual machine. My choice was 10.6.8 as my native everyday OS but I have 10.7, 10.8 and now 10.9 available to me any time I want them.
The proper arrangement of scroll controls is that there should be an up and a down arrow on BOTH ends of the scroll bar, because why should you have to move cursor focus to switch scrolling directions? (Thank you, TinkerTool).
Hmm. Interesting idea with Parallels. On one hand, it costs. OTOH, it’s cheaper than getting Office. I do have a copy, but it’s really old (4.0; they’re on 9 now).
Shame about iWorks, though. If it were better, that might’ve been a good solution.
I have done that, and it is indeed convenient, but NSScrollBar does seem to have some difficulty synchronizing the actual thumb to the reduced space. IME. The irritating thing about Apple’s clean look, with the ghost scroll indicator, is that you have to scroll the document just a little if you are not sure how extensive it is. Although, with a really big document, neither the thumb nor the ghost are very helpful as they reach their lower size limits.
For those complaining about the “Natural Scrolling”… did you actually give it a chance? I find it more useful. I suppose it is a lot like the argument between up-looks-up and up-looks-down in first-person controls.
An update on my own experience updating 10.6.8 to 10.9.1
The app to do the update is downloaded from the Apple App store. It’s about 5.9 GB, so takes a while on ADSL. Once downloaded, you run the app, so you can download it at a convenient time and then run it when you are able to babysit if you wish.
Two things that I have noticed in a negative way. The Quick Look function in the Finder no longer shows videos of flv, mp4 or wmv type. There is an Apple support discussion of this which attributes it to the change in how the OS handles video. I didn’t understand the discussion, so can’t precis it here.
The other is to do with CDs burnt from playlists in iTunes. I use to be able to view the track titles and details on my burnt CDs just by inserting the CD in my drive again. If I had originally burnt the playlist, then I could see the titles. Now iTunes only shows Track 1, track 2, etc. just like an unknown CD from somewhere random. Apparently it’s been like this since Lion (10.7) but I’d not seen any online comment about it so didn’t know it was going to affect me.
This one is annoying for me. I do a lot of CDs for shows that my husband directs and performs in. If a CD is untitled, I used to just pop it in my Mac optical drive and I could see what tracks were on it. Can’t do it now.
I don’t know yet if this foible will persuade me to go back to 10.6.8 and the earlier version of iTunes, or even if it is iTunes or Mavericks that is the cause. I do have a complete backup from before the upgrade, so would only lose some recent imports of songs and photos, both of which I still have elsewhere. Maybe I’ll just try running Parallels with 10.6.8 as the VM OS and keep 10.9.1 as the ‘real’ OS.
About iTunes and CDs - are you burning “Audio” CDs or “Data” CDs?
Because, Audio CDs never supported track names.
What format are the music files on the CD?
I didn’t respond to you because I was frustrated by the change, as I don’t even own a Mac. I responded to you because you asserted that the old system was backwards and that the new system is inherently better. I made an argument that this is not the case, that the change is actually arbitrary. I argued that the way you consider counterintuitive actually has its own logic that works, and is not inherently inferior. I do have a problem with arbitrary change being touted as progress.
As for how they could make it easier–I guess I didn’t spell that out. It’s rather simple: ask the user during the upgrade. You should not just suddenly change a fundamental part of how you interact with the OS without warning. And you shouldn’t hide the option to revert in a check box that most people seem to have to have searched online to find. Giving them a choice that they are aware of fixes both problems.
I’d address the rest of what you said, but I get the feeling that you do not want to discuss this any further, and it’s become somewhat of a thread hijack at this point. Suffice it to say that I do not have your faith that Apple tested this and determined it was better, at least, not while also taking people who had habituated to the old way into account.
Apple support disagrees with you. It states that iTunes remembers the track names of burnt CDs by saving them in a database. Apparently, though, that database does not persist through OS upgrades. Perhaps, since the OP still has access to a backup, they can restore said database.
I never did understand why so few disks or programs would just use CD-Text to save the track names to the disk itself. Okay, so you lose one minute of CD availability. Oh noes!
As a matter fact, Apple has always been quite open about the fact that they don’t do any kind of consumer testing, based on the conceit that they know what the public wants better than the public. And if it bites them in the butt and they have to fix a problem, they try to pretend they’re introducing a new feature rather than fixing a known issue.
matter OF fact.
It’s a lot worse than that. Apple no longer supports any videos that are not in the H264 format. Their solution is to force you to convert your files if you try to open them in QuickTime. The only way to get around that is to use version 7 of QuickTime or another program.
This sort of thing is the real reason not to get a Mac, not GUI problems with the OS. Apple thinks they have the right to tell you what to do with your own files on your own computer. Especially this time, since it’s only due to laziness. Quicktime wasn’t 64-bit, but the renderer on iOS was, so they’re taking that one. But that one only supports one type of video (something that makes sense on a limited device).
They wouldn’t even have had to create their own 64-bit code. They’ve used open source code before, and open source 64-bit decoders exist for all but the most esoteric of codecs. But, no, they use a renderer that can’t use any other codec.
it’s actually a type of hubris. They apparently think that there will never be another codec that is superior to H264. The new QuickTime cannot use other codecs at all.
This sort of thing is why I will continue to rag on Apple even if I don’t use their products. This sort of thing needs to be called out lest others start thinking they can get away with it.
I thought issue was NEW CDs not having track names on another computer.
If OLD CDs aren’t showing track names, it’s most likely that it’s an iTunes upgrade issue.
iTunes creates a database of burned CD data - CD_Info.CIDB.
It used to be here: /Users/username/Library/Preferences/CD Info.cidb
I haven’t checked for iTunes 11 (since I never burn CDs).
It might be worthwhile seeing if replacing the current version with the old (backup) version fixes the problem.
My home setup has a MacBook and a PC running side by side…I don’t have any problems switching between the “traditional” wheel on the PC’s mouse and the “natural” scrolling of the MacBook. The mouse wheel corresponds to the slider on the scroll bar. The trackpad on the MacBook feels a lot like my phone…I expect it to respond like my phone, not like a wheel.
By the way, I’m still running 10.7.4…I guess I’ll have to upgrade at some point for software update compatibility.
There were too many issues I couldn’t resolve easily, with new versions of iPhoto not allowing sharing for some unknown reason, iTunes not ‘remembering’ my burnt CDs as well as some programs that were PowerPC versions that I couldn’t find Intel equivalents for.
I did think of trying running 10.6.8 in Parallels but I find that it is not supported, apparently because the Apple licence forbids running it in a VM.
I have reverted to my backup with 10.6.8.
I may try running 10.9.1 in a Parallels VM instead and see if I can resolve the above issues. I decided to roll back before getting too far away from my backup done before the upgrade.
This is just me, but I’m a longtime (since 1988) Mac user who has historically shouted the praises of the Mac OS to the rooftops and vowed I would never get anywhere near a Windows operating system.
I haven’t changed my view on the latter part of this statement, but I have become greatly disillusioned with the direction Mac OS has taken in recent years.
The savaging of the iWork suite in its latest incarnation (Pages in particular) has been the straw that broke the camel’s back. There are over 100 documented features in Pages that have been lost in the latest “upgrade.”
Contrary to an earlier poster, I have used Pages every day of my working life ever since it was released, and I’ve found it met every one of my needs, about 100 times more elegantly that Word could ever hope to.
Yes, there are some features of Word (used by a very small percentage of the total universe of Word Processing users) that are unavailable in Pages. But for all but these users, Pages is more than enough…plus it does certain things (e.g. tables, page layout) a thousand times easier than Word could ever hope to.
But back to the original point…I’m so pissed off at what was done to iWork that it’s killed any desire on my part to upgrade to Mavericks. A further incentive to stay right where I am: Apple Mail has, by many reports, become severely hosed…again, simple things that were always possible in Mail before have been taken away.
Strictly from my perspective: 10.6 was the acme of Mac operating systems. I’m staying on it on my work Mac for as long as possible. I’m on 10.8 at home (because I have a newer Mac that wouldn’t run 10.6 natively). I have no plans to move off of that either.
Everyone’s needs are different, but if I had a Mac running along nicely on 10.6, I would leave it right where it is.
