We’ve had out family iPad for some time now and whilst it truly is a ‘magical’ device it still falls a little short of being the perfect family computer. For many the iPad is a ‘personal’ device but for others it serves as a ‘shared’ device. Ours is used by all members of the family and often found in the lounge on the coffee table, or in the kitchen, or in one of the kids bedrooms!
What the iPad (or more specifically iOS) really lacks is multi user accounts though. Both my wife and I use the iPad a fair bit – I’d love to be able to check my mail on it but that means giving 3 young children access to my work mail account (hmmm!). By the same token the girls hate having to wade through screen after screen of ‘boy games’ and well myself and my wife can’t both be signed into Facebook at the same time.
The iPad is a social device which lends itself naturally to being shared, here’s hoping Apple makes more of this in a future software update! :)
Having lived day to day with a Mac now for a good few years I thought it was about time I documented some of my pet peeves as a one time Windows user. So here they are in the form of a brief wish list for OS X Snow Leopard. This is in the vein hope that Steve Jobs is a regular reader of my blog (pft – yea right!) and that he will do something about these very minor issues. :)
Fix the ‘Zoom’ button
Seriously what is up with that thing. As a Windows user the expected behavior of a button with a + on it is that it should maximize/zoom the application you are currently running with a single click. With OS X there is no consistency. Clicking + on a finder window reduces it in size (WTF?) and then proceeds to do nothing. Clicking + in iTunes switches between the full and minimal interface. Clicking + suggests to the user that the window will increase in size surely?
Make it easier to email files to contacts
Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but there is simply no way to just option/right click a file and select to send it to a email recipient? On windows this is an item in the contextual menu, right click, send to email recipient, default mail client opens a new message and attaches said file. Easy. Ok so I know I can write an automator script carry out said task but that then requires a ridiculous number of clicks to execute (Right click > More > Automator > Email Files…).
Show Hidden Files
Please give us OS X users a way to have hidden files within specific folders revealed. I need to see hidden files by default on network shares and elsewhere – but not on my desktop. A simple option under Finder Preferences would be a step in the right direction.
A digital filmmaker named Dennis Liu has made an amazing video for The Bird And The Bee’s lovely song “Again & Again”. The set? His Mac desktop. You sort of have to see it for yourself to understand; luckily, Dennis has dropped it on YouTube so that the world can see it in low-reshi-res glory:
This is just awesome. Kudos to Dennis Liu for such a creative approach. (via TUAW and MacRumours Forum).
With my MacBook only being a couple of weeks old there are still a few kinks to iron out in the Nine Four IT infrastructure, one of those being printing to a shared printer on a Windows machine which I affectionately call ‘Oto’.
After having tried a number of drivers that are pre-installed with OS X and had no luck I decided to Google my problem and discovered a Tech note on the apple website which suggested that the drivers I needed could be installed from the OS X install disc. I followed the instructions and ran the installer, at this point OS X hangs completely, no access to the finder, no spinning ball of death, nothing. A few minutes pass with no further activity and I decide to force a hard reboot.
On restarting everything seems fine, I get the log-in prompt, enter my password and up pops my wallpaper, and then after a long wait, the spotlight and then after an even longer wait… nothing. I restart again, I get the same thing.
This is where the power of Google comes in handy, as does having a Windows machine called ‘Oto’ sitting around. I Google ‘spotlight appears doesn’t start up os x‘ and bam the first hit is a blog post by a guy called Philip McClure which talks about the exact same problem.
After a lengthy and very interesting read I take the advice of one of his commenters and download a little shareware app called Onyx. I drop it onto a USB drive, copy it across to the MacBook (To start in safe mode hold down the shift key on boot), install it and then use it to safely delete the Spotlight index, as this apparently is what is causing my problem.
I restart my MacBook, log-in, the wallpaper pops up then after an excruciating wait (which I can only assume is spotlight rebuilding it’s index) everything is back to normal. Panic over!
Update: Argh! It happened again on Wednesday night (11/07/07) but was easy to sure thanks to Onyx.
Update: The Spotlight index got corrupted ‘again’ today (31/07/07) but was again easy to fix with Onyx. Twice in one month is a bit much though. :/
Some time having passed, I thought that I should ‘come clean’ and clarify my position in the Mac vs PC debate. Back in August 2005 I blogged about the end of a short term relationship with a G5.
At that time I was well and truly convinced that I would never again be tempted by a Mac. However, back in October last year I took delivery of a shiny new MacBook.
My reasoning was that working with a number of clients who were Mac based, I needed to be able to verify the compatibility of any code I produced in Safari (The default Mac OS web browser). I had also for a long time been considering purchasing a laptop for use in client meetings and at training sessions. I weighed up the options and originally looked at purchasing a HP laptop and then bagging a 2nd hand Mac Mini off eBay for browser testing.
Balancing up the pro’s and con’s of each option it soon became clear that my investment would be much better made in a single machine and so the MacBook it was.
7 months later and I’m a total convert. I couldn’t love my MacBook more and I’m looking forward to replacing my Dell desktop which I use predominantly during the day with a higher spec Mac later this year.
