I truly love my MacBook Pro! I want no other machine. I would love to be able to use a Mac all day at work.
Well, since you asked…
[ul][li]Why the heck doesn’t the green widget maximize my window? I know that it’s supposed to size the window to fit content, but it behaves totally inconsistently across applications.[/li][li]Why does OSX have this beautiful brushed-metal theme, for some apps… Safari, for example, but then other apps such as Mail don’t match. Still others look like iTunes. Mac was synonymous with consistency; this doesn’t fit.[/li][li]Why the heck did I have to buy a text editor? TextEdit isn’t one – that’s like Wordpad. I just wanted something like Notepad, only a little better. I used vim for a while, since that’s my style, but I finally ended up buying TextMate.[/li][li]What’s up with QuickTime? MS gives away MediaPlayer, and it plays lots of stuff. You have to pay $30 to enable QuickTime Pro features if you want to see the darned thing in full-screen mode! Want MPEG2? Another $20 for that.[/li][li]I can’t watch many video formats – it seems that Windows Media Player can show them, but even with various bridge apps and such, QuickTime chokes on many media files.[/li][li]Once upon a time, AppleScript was one of the shining examples of consistency and extensibility of Macs – you could script amazing things. These days it’s sort of half-assed implemented, and it seems to not be getting the attention that other parts of the OS get.[/li][li]About scripting. What’s the right way to do it? I can write Unix scripts; I can write AppleScript; I can create Workflows, and there are probably half a dozen other ways to do a scripting job. At least the problem is too many rather than too few.[/li][li]Here’s a big one: Why the eff doesn’t my Mac seamlessly automount my network drives when I start it up? Windows does this perfectly! I have my MP3s on a Linux server running Samba. In Windows, the drive is available soon after boot. In Mac, unless I double-click the shortcut I made to the drive, iTunes will scream bloody murder. I have heard rumors that these drives can be automounted with great scripting and voodoo, but isn’t it supposed to “just work”?[/li][li]Why the heck did I have to buy a little tool called “Remote Buddy” just so that the included Apple Remote would actually do something useful? They went through great pains to make a beautiful little remote control, but it works with only a very limited number of apps. Remote Buddy is definitely worth the ten bucks.[/li][li]What about context help? When you are in a strange field in a property sheet in Windows, you can hit F1 and (hopefully) see some useful context help about that specific field. It just doesn’t exist on the Mac.[/li][li]In general, I find that the Mac help is less useful than comparable Windows help.[/li][li]What’s with all of the secret keyboard chords? You can do amazing things if you understand a list of magic key combinations that include “ctrl”, “option”, “command”, and perhaps “fn”.[/li][li]How about the other secret stuff: when I first brought it home, I had no clue how to find an application. No one told me that I have to either burrow down the folders or search for it in Spotlight.[/li][li]There is no such thing as installers/uninstallers for Mac, right? You just drag the “app” into your “applications folder” to install it and drag it to the trash to uninstall it. Here’s a dirty little secret: it’s a lie. Most apps work that way. Actually, most apps have an installer these days and can be dragged to the trash. I installed Divx, then wanted to remove it – I found out that I had to go chasing down individual codec files buried deeply in QuickTime folders. Not a clean uninstall. Other apps are like this.[/li][li]There doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut concept of “home” and “end” keys – it isn’t like Windows where you hit Home and the cursor goes to the beginning of the line; you hit End and it goes to the end of the line. At least on my MacBook Pro, I have to hit some strange combo of keys to do Home, End, Page up, Page down, or Top of doc (MS ctrl+home), Bottom of doc (MS ctrl+end).[/li][li]All Mac apps are not created the same: You got your basic Classic apps, then there are Carbon apps, then you find Cocoa apps, and then finally Universal apps. Each one means a different thing about what framework the app was written for. If you have old Classics, forget about using them on your fancy new Intel Mac.[/ul][/li]I’ll stop now. There’s more where that came from.
Here’s a few things I really like…
[ul][li]It’s running Unix! I can do great things from a command line![/li][li]The eye candy is cool. I like Exposé – if you hold Shift while hitting the hotkeys, you get to see it move in slow mo.[/li][li]Parallels is the dog’s bollocks! I think it’s totally awesome that I can drag a picture from my Mac desktop into a Parallels window with Photoshop running on XP, and Photoshop will open the picture. Gotta have Parallels.[/li][li]Spotlight is a zillion times better than anything I used in Windows.[/li][li]Macs talk PDF fluently. No Acrobat needed. A couple of weeks ago I made a simple workflow that would merge PDF docs – select ten in Finder, right-click, choose “Join PDF”[/li][li]When you print, you can print to PDF, out of the box. They even give an option to “Save to Web Receipts folder” so you can instantly print a web page to a PDF and store it, instead of printing it out.[/li][li]The Oxford Dictionary is built right into the OS: click on a word in any application and then press Ctrl+Command+D and you’ll see a popup with the definition.[/li][li]Dashboard is growing on me. I just hit a hotkey and it appears, with my selection of widgets. It goes away just as quickly.[/li]I shut it; it immediately goes to sleep. A little white LED throbs to show it’s alive. I open it; it wakes instantly, and may take a few seconds before the wireless connectivity is fully restored. Never seen that in a PC.[/ul]