inbetween

The operating system itself is very stable. I've been able to grind it nearly to a halt, just by abusing the processing power. That's really to be expected, even with a super fancy operating system like a high end UNIX. Importing a 200MB mailbox file (something like 18,000 messages) to Mail is going to take a lot of time, especially if you're also importing 500 photos into iPhoto and downloading software (all free!) from six different web-sites. That's about the most stress I could think of, although I could have tried to compile a new version of Perl (800 or so files, 800 separate test files, lots of work for a long time) at the same time and really ground it to a halt, but I really don't think that would have caused an actual crash. It would just use up lots and lots of memory and been a little slower.

At the heart of it though, Mac OS X is intended for my granny. I don't like the simpleton interfaces to Mail, iPhoto, iCal, Safari, or the settings for the OS itself.

Mail: Most other mailers (do newer versions of Outlook and Outlook Express include something similar?) can create filters directly from the message. All I had to do with Eudora, for example, was click on a message and select "Create Rule" or something. The mailer would parse the message and provide me with a list of possible rules, or let me create my own. I particularly liked Evolution for this, because it could guess quite well if the message came from a mailing list and present specific mailing list options.

I also don't like the key combinations that Mail uses. Cmd-N for a new message, Opt-Cmd-N for a new Message Viewer Window (the menu option isn't in the View menu, it's in the File menu which seems counterintuitive) and Shift-Cmd-N to check for new e-mail. Better choice of key combinations for those actions would lead to better mnemonics and let me remember them a little better.

iPhoto doesn't have any serious ability to edit photos, although I wasn't really expecting it to. You cannot start a slide show in the middle of an album. A slide show cannot span multiple albums. All albums begin with a default to play "Minuet in G", a default which I can't seem to change. There is no support for nested albums. iPhoto cannot, at least as far as I can tell, open a single photo in full screen mode by all by itself. Changing the settings for a slideshow is very counter intuitive. There is no menu entry that I could find, but there is an icon at the bottom of the iPhoto window.

iPhoto is the only Apple application that quits when you close the last window, which is rather odd.

iCal was not usable at all for me. My only alternative seems to be to use the Palm Desktop, which is nowhere near as pretty on Mac OS X.

Safari should not be called a 1.0 release of software. It can only import bookmarks the first time it is run. This is a serious deficiency in usability. If I later add a bookmark in Mozilla I must revisit the web page in Safari and add the bookmark there.

Bookmark handling in general is strange. I miss the bookmark menu with a complete list of all the bookmarks. Although presenting a separate bookmark window to select an entry has it's uses, navigating through menus to a specific bookmark is much faster.

Mac OS X Settings are insufficient. I don't like the general colour scheme of the title bars, and I really don't like the way the title bars fade when an application is in the background. I have not yet found a way to turn this "feature" off. Again, this is an example of eye candy with no real purpose in terms of usability.

The settings themselves are strangely laid out in the System Preferences application. I changed the home-page setting in Safari, but it kept resetting every time I rebooted the computer. To resolve the problem, I had to change one setting in the System Preferences. That added complexity seems pointless to me. I doubt my granny could figure that one out.

The "Internet Settings," "Network Settings", and "Sharing" control panels all control similar functionality and should be merged. It is difficult remembering that the firewall settings are stored under "Sharing" and not "Network Settings" for example.

I am amazed at how quiet athena is. I only hear her when she is accessing a drive or CD. There is a fan inside her, to help dissipate heat, but for the most part, the fan is inaudible. She did start to over heat as I was over working her (see the third paragraph) and the fan went into overdrive, which was noticeable.

There is some really powerful and interesting open source (free!) software available for the Mac OS X. Apple even provides a section on their web-site with links and descriptions to lots of packages. I installed the X11-beta package, which is really impressive. athena has a full version of the Apache web-server installed by default. Mozilla runs very smoothly, as does every other application I've tried.

The one hardware problem for me, is that there is no function key lock (like caps lock, or num lock). I like to reprogram the function keys in some software (emacs, for example) to do my bidding. In the Powerbook, those keys have been co-opted for specific purposes that the user cannot change. To make F6 really be F6 (instead of num lock) and send the "F6 was pressed" information to emacs, I have to hold down the Function key. Shift and Function don't seem to like each other very much, which makes me very sad. Shift-F6 usually undoes whatever I set F6 to do.

The keyboard itself is very nice. I quite like the touch typing feel. I didn't think I would like the track pad, but it has been very well thought out and seems to be easier to use than a mouse.

All things considered, I am very happy with this purchase. Sure, some of the bundled software is written for people who read the "For Dummies" series of books, but the underlying operating system and hardware are rock solid stable and reliable, which is what I wanted.