I agree with this. It annoys me to have to resize every window each time. There should be a setting for “automatically size this window so that it always takes up every bit of the screen.”
Hell, yes. Whatever it is that came up, put it underneath the window I’m currently typing in. Even if it’s my fault for starting multiple applications at once, let me decide which one I want to deal with right now.
What jovan said about Windows search. In addition, I find that Windows search often tells me no matches were found when I know damn well a match is in there somewhere. I’m a software developer and I often find myself searching through several folders of code files looking for specific text (a function name, stored procedure call, etc) and it will come up empty on the search, so I wind up having to open a number of files manually and search for the text I’m looking for until I find it.
Here you go: http://www.blazingtools.com/mac/RightZoom.zip
(direct download link, freeware).
Dear Windows User,
There is in Mac OS X 10.5
Sincerely,
Smug Mac User
All of the Windows searchers should give Google Desktop a shot. I hit <Ctrl> twice and type in a bit of a SQL statement that I know is buried somewhere on my machine and in an instant I see fifteen hits from different code bases across my system. Almost as spiffy as Spotlight on the Mac.
And Angry Lurker, you are right about the OS X spell check, but not all apps use it :(.
And the dictionary doesn’t care a whit about the internationalization settings and vice versa—
I added English and Portuguese to my i18n settings and a little flag appears on the menu bar, with either the US flag or the Brazilian flag. Cool.
Now I click the flag and choose the Brazilian flag.
I go to edit an email and find that OS X still is using the English dictionary even though the flag doesn’t agree. I now right-click my message, go to “spelling”, pop up the spell checker, and pick the language there (totally unintuitive).
Now my email can be in Portuguese and the spell checker works.
Later on I go to Safari and start filling in a SD post, but it’s drawing squiggly lines under all common English words. Oh yes…I have to change back.
I try for the little US flag, to no avail. I have to switch this within the weird spell check window again.
In other words, the i18n setting and the dictionary are totally unrelated, and the dictionary setting isn’t remembered per app. And if the dictionary setting is system wide, why is it only accessible from a context-menu dialog?
God bless regular expressions.
Beats out Windows search each time, every time.
Thanks, beowulff
OK, i’ve thought of another one for OS X, because I just had to use it: MacOS X Help.
Oh, it’s helpful enough, once it finally arrives. But yeesh, you could download and paginate the entire unabridged man pages of every Unix build since 1971 using a 14.4K modem and print it on a daisy-wheel printer and bind it in heavy green cardboard in the time it takes OS X Help to launch!
Man, spell-checkers are a prime example of PEBKAC to me. Learn to spell, you fuckers! I don’t think I’ve used a spell-check since about 1995.
Windows:
Almost everything that updates/installs requires a reboot.
It pretends to be usable when the desktop appears, but takes a loooooong time for background loading to cease.
The default “productivity” apps are intentionally crippled/limited without native support for common file types and have not been improved/upgraded since Windows 3.1 (paint, wordpad, calculator, works, address book)
Hideous annoying interface delays when opening simple things, like menus, explorer, etc. Control Panel is the worst offender.
When a network resource is not responding, the whole OS grinds to a halt. “multitask” effectively doesn’t exist when waiting for a network resource.
Why the hell do I have to use tweaks like the registry and mcsonfig to control my startup tasks, that applications and windows constantly undo my tweaking of?
Why the hell can’t I name a folder anything I want? “AUX” and other command words are forbidden, some special characters forbidden, etc.
Quit with the nag alerts. Yes, I know updates are turned off already.
You didn’t mention Write from Win3.1, probably because it did get a major upgrade with Windows95: WordPad, which (as of Windows98 at least) opens .doc files.
Unfortunately, they also killed the greatest feature of Write, which is that it would open non-text files (like .exe and .dll files) and let you read sometimes very helpful info for determining version number and the like in the file headers.
Unless you use a 64-bit version of Windows, which Google Desktop still doesn’t support. That honestly is the biggest gripe I have about Windows XP x64. (And no, I don’t want to switch to a 32-bit version - I use 64-bit versions of scientific and engineering software, which really do take advantage of the larger available memory space.)
Drag & Drop file copying/moving in Windows XP - a couple of things about it.
First, if one file in the middle of a group cannot be moved or copied (maybe it’s locked by some other process), the job ends, leaving half of your files in one place, half in another. There’s got to be a better way.
The other thing is the focus/highlight - in the left pane of Windows Explorer, I navigate to c:\foo\bar - in the right pane, I select all of the files in that directory and drag them to c:\lorem\ipsum in the left pane, the highlight/focus helpfully follows me, until I drop the files, then it snaps back to wherever it was before, leaving me with horrible doubt as to whether I dropped the files in exactly the right place. The copying progress dialog also doesn’t often make the source and destination very clear.
As an i18n pioneer who happened to be lamenting the other day how i18n went from important to afterthought with seemingly (and wrongly) no new innovation possible, I urge you to shout this from the hilltops where apple and other product managers hang out.
And encourage everyone else to do the same.
Right now i18n (and its cousin l10n) are treated like the paint on a car, not really part of the car itself. I am in no small part responsible for that, and haven’t been involved for a long time as a result.
But I do have some big ideas where it could all go next, and anything to kick start the awareness of the otherwise mundane process right now is a good idea to me.
Do not be shy in seeking out those product managers who ultimately make the call on features such as this.
That is probably google taking a swag at what Microsoft might see as its future. It forces people to decide - MS or Google on the cutting edge, and that can only help google. I use 64 bit Fedora for similar reasons and google desktop works fine.
There’s a little more to the built-in OSX dictionary than mere spell checking…
I don’t call them spell-checkers. I call them typo-checkers. Thank you.
To keep with the theme of replies so far…
You’d appreciate the spell-check if you have a presentation in front of 500, and you can’t exactly remember how to spell “scissor”. 
Also, to the comment about bash on Linux: Many Linux distributions come with graphical user interfaces installed automatically, like Windows and Mac. You can install (and conversely, uninstall) it with one simple command
I use Ubuntu here. My biggest gripe is that Synaptic (the touchpad people) haven’t released a decent GUI application for configuring it.
Most unix users would say “use the command line”, but believe me, I’ve tried, the option I want (palmcheck) just ain’t there… 
Ubuntu’s iPod support is pretty much just plain shitty. Half the time it doesn’t work.