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Shift-Cmd-Delete has to be done while a Finder window has focus. Note that you have to have something in Trash, otherwise you get the "error" tone, which really indicates it's empty. It's worked for me ever since I found out about in, circa Tiger? Panther? I don't know, quite a long time ago. I know for a fact it works in Snow Leopard, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, and Yosemite, as I have all of those systems running currently or in the past 6 months Although, now that I think about it, the first thing I do with any mac is install QuickSilver on it. I don't think it affects this though, as I don't recall that ever being a problem on anyone else's mac either. Other than that, I run Caffeine and Fantastical and that's pretty much it for enhancements.

I've tried some other enhancements/replacements such as PathFinder, BusyCal (they have something new out recently) PostBox, and a couple of others, but don't really care for those, at least when I tried them. To be fair, PostBox was only used for a short while, and I am still in the process of getting back to evaluating that one. The drive to replace Mail was removed when I finally debugged my configuration issue with Mail (removing a second Gmail account) although I still have some oddities with it.

Nice on the tests, thanks for posting those. If you try that on a network connected disk in Finder, you'll probably find that the behavior is.... not what you'd like. I do not believe that Finder uses the remote system as a proxy, because if it did, it should be able to delete much faster than it does. Oh well, at least local files work fine.

On the other hand, I could never go back to Snow Leopard after Mountain Lion, and especially not after Mavericks.

Why? (I'm honestly curious)

Note: I'm running SL, ML, and Mavericks, and I have to say, SL is the most stable, followed by Mavericks, ML is "ok", and my brief experience with Lion was only because ML came out and I decided to jump directly to it even though I had had a Lion disk for a year. (Yes, the "bad" stories made me hold off long enough for the "fix" to come out.)

I'm still not 100% happy with the effects of Grand Central, only because the stability has not been returned to SL standards. However, Mavericks is quite usable. The occasional "crash" is mediated by a 500+MB/s SSD, so restarts are sub 15s and used to occur maybe once every 30-45 days. The 10.9.1 patch has actually allowed me to reboot for reasons other than a crash. Oh, and I should mention that these crashes do not come with a dump, just blammo - restart. That never happened in SL, at least you got the infamous crash screen, if you ever had a crash that is. (You will occasionally if you're running a slew of PPC software)

All that said, for me, the main benefit of Grand Central is better handling of messaging and performance for applications that have the ability to be run in parallel. This is a major plus. I have barely changed my interface habits since panther, primarily because I use QuickSilver for launching apps and Cmd[-SHFT]-Tab and Cmd[-SHFT]-` to navigate apps and windows within an app. So all the Launchpad, Mission Control, Expose, Dashboard, Dockbar etc garbage don't even figure in my daily computer use. I minimize and hide the dockbar right after installing QuickSilver, and pretty much never see it again.

QuickSilver is your answer. I go a couple of steps further, since I am a very light spotlight user, I remap spotlight to CTRL-OPT-Spacebar, and then map QuickSilver to Cmd-Spacebar, and I don't look back. I'm a keyboard junkie - I also use Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` (the tilde key above the Tab) to move between apps and move between windows of the current app, respectively. Shift will reverse the order on those last two. I also rarely use Expose, and map my F keys to be real F keys. On my MBP I use the Func key to control the brightness and audio if needed.

Personally, Apple made wrong choices with Spotlight. It is both too powerful, and not powerful enough. I have over 10TB of internal disk space, mostly full, and as I develop software, we're talking millions of files of all types, along with a Gb of mail over many years. Spotlight is next to useless systemwide, although it works well enough within Mail. Maybe the real problem is its integration with Finder. Since I'm adept with shell commands, I've never bothered looking any further.

Other than that - the UI works well enough, stays out of my way, and with QuickSilver, I haven't had to change how I work with OS X since the Panther days.

That's what QuickSilver's primary function for me is, although it is much much more. Spotlight's hotkeys have been swapped out - doesn't do what I want 99% of the time I hit Cmd-Space.

Actually, the searchable menu for OSX is QuickSilver

Display scale factor:

http://secrets.blacktree.com/edit?id=50761

I would actually have to agree that might be a decent improvement in Windows 7. It sounds like they copied QuickSilver. Can't run OSX without it. :) OK, OK, you could, but QuickSilver makes launching apps trivial, and you never have to leave the keyboard.

"Key board"? What's a "key-board" on His Chosen System? Is that anything like the almighty touchscreen? It doesn't have buttons, you know, which makes it better. Or is...

Oh, wait, I remember. Wasn't a "key-board" one of those heretical things deprecated by Saint Jobs decades ago, which led us out of the Dark Age Of Productivity and into the glorious Age Of Media Consumption? Why are you bringing that old thing up? Are you a heretic in the disapproving glare of Jobs? You know people like that are almost as bad as the heathens who think some part of His Divine Interface can be improved in some way. I'm just glad you're not one of THOSE, else you would need a visit from the Black Turtleneck Squad. Now, what's "QuickSilver"?

I would actually have to agree that might be a decent improvement in Windows 7. It sounds like they copied QuickSilver. Can't run OSX without it. :) OK, OK, you could, but QuickSilver makes launching apps trivial, and you never have to leave the keyboard.

You really sound like someone who's supported Windows for years, learning the little details like hashing together a program to automate your workflow.

Yet you don't have any clue about the Mac, and that makes it hard. Somehow, that's OS X's fault. VPN issues are VPN company issues. Ask them to write the software?

That was his complaint. You had to set up VPNs differently for every version of MacOS. It's ridiculous. I've used a Mac for work for OS 10.4 and 10.5, and have had a personal Mac for 10.6 and 10.7. The VPN setup/connection process is still annoying.

There is full disk encryption. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790 What the hell is launch on startup? Google shows nothing. Launch at login is a user preference that's been around for a decade. It doesn't make the computer slow.

He may be referring to the Lion preference that restarts all of your closed apps automagically after a reboot. It does make your Mac slower. I can attest to that. Even when you don't have any applications for it to restart. My MacBook now takes twice as long to boot into Mac OS as it does into Windows. I can also boot up my old Dell XPS 1530 (core 2 duo) into Windows 7 (from a cold boot) faster than my Sandy Bridge MacBook (i7 quad core) can wake up from sleep. That's with an SSD in the windows machine.

Never had any issues importing certificates across all those versions of OS X. defaults settings are well documented. http://secrets.blacktree.com/

There's also things like radmind that would probably be much better at doing what you want. But your ignorance led you astray.

I agree that the person was definitely not a skilled Mac admin, but they aren't as common as Windows pros.

defaults settings are well documented. http://secrets.blacktree.com/

Oh, the irony!

You really sound like someone who's supported Windows for years, learning the little details like hashing together a program to automate your workflow.

Yet you don't have any clue about the Mac, and that makes it hard. Somehow, that's OS X's fault.
VPN issues are VPN company issues. Ask them to write the software?
There is full disk encryption. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4790
What the hell is launch on startup? Google shows nothing. Launch at login is a user preference that's been around for a decade. It doesn't make the computer slow.
Never had any issues importing certificates across all those versions of OS X.
defaults settings are well documented. http://secrets.blacktree.com/

There's also things like radmind that would probably be much better at doing what you want. But your ignorance led you astray.

They were (one of) the pioneers of graphical interfaces in the 80s, and it took until Windows 95 for Windows to come anywhere near Mac OS (but it was still awful).

Apple still forces you to resize windows from the lower-right corner....In terms of productivity, their interfaces are years behind. They took NeXTStep's dock and ruined its defaults for prettiness instead of muscle memory, for example. And you have to move the mouse farther (and on a large display, actually refocus your eyes) to use the single menu bar. And until OSX, Apple didn't even have minimize/maximize, instead using the same multifinder approach they've been using (annoyingly) for years.

I will agree that this one GUI issue is somewhat annoying. I generally can live with it though, since I generally spend very little time resizing my windows, especially given Spaces. Imagine my surprise and annoyance when the Command Prompt in Vista exhibits the same limitations.

As for the Dock, I rarely use it. I'm a QuickSilver user which pretty much negates the need for the dock for anything but notifications in combination with CMD-Tab and CMD-`. I don't see people's attraction to the dock when with usually 5 keystrokes or less I have any app I want running and never had to leave the keyboard. That includes the hot key sequence for bringing up QS and typing the char(s) needed to get to the app I want launched and the return, which may also be optional.

Except for OSX. Unless I'm missing a trick, the keyboard short-cuts available in OSX are few and far between.

As a Mac user, I have to disagree. Under System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > '+' symbol, you can specify any menu item from any application as a keyboard shortcut. Add to that the Full Keyboard Access feature on the same page, and you never have to use your mouse with OS X again, ever, unless you want to.

Also, I highly recommend the free Quicksilver background application, which is a real time-saver. It's a keyboard-based application launcher with a few really neat advanced features.

Yep, every single thing costs money.

And there's absolutely no compatibility with any linux software at all.

You're 100% correct.

I'm curious as to what you're looking for that OS X doesn't allow? It's not that I don't believe you...I've had plenty of instances where I wanted to do something that the OS didn't allow me to do. However in almost every instance I've found some hidden setting or third-party tool that allowed me to do what I want.

OS X offers a lot of configuration options that have no GUI and very little documentation. But there's a bunch of online articles (like this one) that offer some possibilities. Some Google-Fu can yield a lot of ways to customize OS X.

And when that fails, there's always the third party apps. My two favorite are witch, since I never fully got used to the ALT+TAB behavior in OS X, and Quicksilver which gave me the UI that I never knew I wanted and now cannot live without.

The start menu search is something you can add to XP (and is similar to spotlight and quicksilver on the mac)

If you do have to go back to XP, try Launchy. It's an open source start menu indexer that works a lot like the search bar in Windows 7.

As a long-time Mac user, I have the same complaint-- OSX doesn't work well for keyboard-centric users. I miss being able to do Alt-F-Whatever on the keyboard to do things that there aren't shortcuts for.

Quicksilver.

As a web developer, Mac hardware gives me the ability to test code in pretty much any environment I wish. Any web developer that's worth their salt has to, at a minimum, test his or her work in Firefox (Gecko), Safari (Khtml), IE 6, IE 7 and soon IE 8. If they're good developers they would test in Opera and screen readers as well.

I cannot test on the OS X side of things on a Lenovo but I can test the OS X/Windows/Linux side of things on a MacBook.

Are there major redeeming qualities of OS X? For me, yes. One of the main reasons I like OS X is (and it's rarely listed as a Mac virtue) 3rd party software is, in my opinion, superior to 3rd party software for Windows or Linux. Mac developers apply the same polish and attention to detail that Apple does.

I tried web development an a SuSe box and I found that while yes, I could do it the software was missing the polish of software I was used to on the Mac. Take Transmit, an FTP program. FTP? What the heck is so much better about FTP on the Mac? Until you work on a system that doesn't support it, you don't know how nice it is to be able to click on a remote document have it automatically open it up in TextMate and upload it to the server whenever I save the document within TextMate. And it's not hardwired to work that way with TextMate, it does that for whatever text editor I wish to use. Programs like Things for GTD/task lists or Yojimbo for storing random but useful clutter in a single location are unique in functionality, simplicity and quality to OS X. 1Password to manage all my hundreds of passwords and only require me to remember one. Most of these apps have an iPhone equivalent so if I ever get an iPhone, my desktop software will sync seamlessly with my phone. I have yet to find a text editor as powerful yet simple to learn as TextMate. On top of that, I have native access to the lion's share of open source/Linux/Unix software. I don't expect you to accept my argument until you actually experience this "higher" level of software quality. You only notice it when it's missing. Ask anyone that's used Quicksilver. Mac software has Linux and Windows equivalents but not equals.

Would I multi-boot? No. Virtualization is just fine for my line of work and much more convenient. But virtualization for the article submitter may not be viable. My point is, my needs/preferences are different from your needs/preferences which may different from the submitters needs/preferences.

There's a great tool called Nocturne, you should check it out.

...when I was a boy scout I learned that red light is the least damaging to your night vision. Perhaps a red text on black background scheme may work well for you (reducing the intensity of the light coming from your screen and limiting it to the least damaging colors), YMMV. Also low ambient light like the torch style (upward facing) lamps that illuminate a room more from diffusion should work good. I use a little program for my MacBook Pro called Nocturne that helps with the color changing and is quite handy and can be personalized quite easily.

It's certainly more flexible than a search bar, you can pass arguments or file names(with wild cards even) to the application.

Quicksilver gives you all the power of a search bar and gives you the ability to pass arguments to the results of your search.

I can't help you out with the MDI thing, but here are two ideas that may help you become more productive with launching the apps you want (ie, less fumbling with the Dock and Finder).

First - check out Quicksilver . It's kind of a dynamic shortcut to your useful applications, files, music, webpages, etc. Many techie OS X gurus can't live without it. There are even youtube tutorials for it.

Second - if you want something akin to Windows-style start menu try this. Open the Applications window in Finder. At the top of the window there's a small icon next to the Applications window title. Drag that icon into the dock, to the right of the separator. With one click you now have instant access to your Applications directory.

However, if that's not good enough, by right-clicking this icon instead it will show you all your Applications in a textual menu form, much like the Windows start button.

If that still isn't good enough, you can make another Useful folder with links to all your commonly-used Applications, then put this Useful folder in the dock.

Sounds to me like your Mom didn't really know how to operate her PC either...

I might make one suggestion for allowing her to avoid using the finder. Even though QuickSilver is very much a "Power User's" sort of tool, it's also a pretty nice application launcher.

Still.... it doesn't sound much like she knew what she was doing to start out. If she knows how to use Windows Explorer, the Finder should hardly be a challenge.

Complaining about the lack of a start menu speaks more of an unwillingness to learn anything new at all. Clicking the finder pops up a window that has more or less the same exact things that you'd find in the start menu. Your documents folder, applications folder, and any drives that happen to be plugged in at the time. Although it's a tiny bit more cumbersome than the start menu, the level of complexity is more or less the exact same. It's really not that different.

If she somehow managed to bork one of the settings, and made the finder's icons way too big, that can easily be changed via the View Menu -> Show View Options. Not something that she could have easily figured out on her own, but I can also think of plenty of examples of Windows incorrectly deciding my folders were full of photos, and providing my with a filmstrip view of a folder full of excel sheets.

Of course, one can resize any window by clicking and dragging on the bottom right hand corner. There's even the textured "handle" there to remind you that this is possible.

Although it won't maximize the window, the green dot should also restore the window to a "sane" size. Unfortunately, the exact behavior of the green dot is frustratingly inconsistent, so your mileage might vary.... However, as long as you accept the fact that there is no Maximize button, you'll come to love OS X a lot more quickly, and maybe actually realize the benefits of a windowed desktop.

or you can give QuickSilver a try. It's free as in free beer. It's a must-have application launcher for control freak. You can even define your own shortcuts to run scripts, navigate albums/artist in iTunes, etc.

Make it, oh, say..... at least half as fast as Quicksilver?

I for one can't stand Spotlight, either as a "find" utility, or as an application launcher - it's far too slow to be useable as either, in my experience (and this is on machines ranging from 450mhz to 4x2.5ghz).

Then you, or your sysadmin, don't know what you're doing. There's no reason for common tasks to require sudo privs, except for the fact that someone didn't know how to setup the system.

For truly common userland tasks, you should never have to see a sudo, or even a command line.

As for the DVD DRM nonsense, I believe that *new* code is illegal under the DMCA, but that existing DeCSS codecs are perfectly legal and part of fair use prior to the DMCA. (or at least that's my perception) I also recall vaguely that all attempts to squash DeCSS failed horribly, because it was such a lame implementation that its circumvention could be described in just a few lines, much like that AACS number....

If Vista doesn't have anything like Quick Silver then it's still in the dark ages.

That's a fantastic post that accurately describes my feelings on my recent switch to OS X. Despite some initial discomfort, I, too, have quickly grown to love my new Mac Pro.

I hate Finder almost as much as I the Dock. They're both useless for any sort of development environment. The Dock is quickly overwhelmed by sheer numbers, as you must mouseover the icons to get any sort of textual description. Worse, you only get 1 icon per application, regardless of how many windows it has open. The result is cumbersome application switching. Finder, on the other hand, just comes across as a bit half-assed. You'll probably prefer the shell for anything but the most basic of file operations. (No cut & paste for files? C'mon, you're going to make me open a second Finder window, browse to the other folder, then come back here and drag the files over?)

Fortunately there are some fantastic pieces of shareware and freeware to (mostly) fix these issues. I almost never even see the dock any more.

If you haven't already, get QuickSilver, NOW. ...seriously, go get it. I'll wait.

...good.

Now get DragThing. This will replace the dock. You can make sliding drawers, floating panels, or something in between that can hold icons and folders. It also provides panels for a list of all the windows and/or apps that you currently have open, with or without text. I bought DragThing without thinking twice.

Witch is free and crucial for application switching, too.

With these two apps, I'm just as fast moving from one application to the next as on windows. Also, PathFinder seems to be okay as a semi-replacement for Finder. I'm still in the shareware trial period...haven't decided if I'm going to buy it yet though.

You can watch system resources with Menu Meters. I find that OS X does a fantastic job of splitting work up among my 4 processor cores; much better than windows.

Oh, and if you still have to administer windows machines, Microsoft makes a Remote Desktop Client for OS X. Also, Microsoft Entourage is good (maybe better than Outlook) if you still have to use an Exchange server.

I'll try to address these 1 by 1 and see if I can come up with some solutions for you.

1. I have some cheap usb hardware (wireless network dongle, bluetooth, etc). No drivers for mac. (I've spent hours searching mailing lists)

Unfortunately, you are pretty well screwed on USB unless the peripheral is of some standard device class that Apple supports (e.g. keyboard, mouse, hard drive, most cameras) or Apple has provided support for it. As far as I know, most Bluetooth adapters do work, particularly the Dlink ones. Look for an OS X logo on it, although what Mac did you buy recently that didn't have bluetooth built in? The networking situation is similar where most of the time the built-in gigabit and 802.11 support is sufficient for 99% of people. If you really need more network ports it's like any other system really, buy supported hardware.

2. I want to adjust mouse acceleration. I can't figure out how without buying an expensive 3rd party app.

There's a few different solutions. A google search for OS X mouse accelleration will get you to a couple of different macosxhints.com articles, one of which mentions MouseFix. Another article mentions a rebuilt HID driver although I would do that at your own risk. Or you can pay the measly $20 for SteerMouse.

I might also make a suggestion that you may simply be using your mouse incorrectly or using a bad mouse. Apple's mice are designed very lightweight and are extremely easy to pick up when doing long drags. If you're just trying to flick across the screen quickly I don't have any trouble doing that by moving the mouse a mere inch or so to get it from one side of a 1920x1200 screen to the other although admittedly you have to do it extremely rapidly for it to work.

3. I want to be able to launch my apps with one or two-key keyboard shortcuts. I can't figure this one out either.

Most people who want this use QuickSilver .

4. My scrollbar in firefox doesn't work right. Is this normal?

I have no idea. I am not very enthralled with Firefox on Mac. If you just want the Mozilla rendering engine you could try the sister project Camino. If you just want a browser then of course Safari is already there. Granted not all websites work with Safari but if it's something like a banking site I'll go use Camino or Firefox and then simply complain to the site that it should work in Safari. Did that to Verizon Wireless and what do you know, they fixed it.

5. Many open source apps that I love don't have standard maintained OS X distributions (gvim, pidgin, etc). I could try compiling myself, or I've found older versions that other people have built for them, but that's rather a step backwards instead of forwards.

There are basically two ways to get this. One way is to get Fink which is okay but I'm less than thrilled with the way they manage their port tree. Generally, Fink won't work with new OS X releases until a few weeks to a month after official release. The upside of Fink is that they have precompiled packages and use dpkg/apt plus some custom code (Python or PERL, can't remember which) to manage all of it.

The other way is to get MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts). If on Tiger then download the Tiger binary dmg. If on Leopard, grab the source tarball then do the usual configure/make/make install. Either way will stick everything in a new /opt/local hierarchy. From there run sudo port -v selfupdate to make sure you are up to date and then if you want gvim the port is vim and you want either the athena variant or the gtk2 or gtk1 variant. The athena variant is obviously the most lightweight gvim you can build and if you can live with ugly menus and dialogs then I recommend it. Otherwise I'd suggest the gtk2 ve

Oh and install Quicksilver to launch your apps. This is a must have.

Interesting, but you can check the my other response for a large number of tidbits. What's "direct app access" mean to you? You have it if you want it. Linux is a mimic of Windows as far as the GUI paradigm goes. OSX is different.

For instance, I like the fact that 99% of apps can be moved from one machine to another by just dragging the app (which is a folder/packaging object). You can also back up an app or move it to another folder or disk if you so desire. Much better than Windows where everything breaks because links/paths/whatever are all hard-coded in the install.

What you might need is to use a multi-button mouse and to download something like QuickSilver and spend about 10-15 minutes learning some of its deeper features (although the default launcher feature was enough to sell me). There's also the Cmd-Tab and Cmd-` hotkeys that make navigating through running apps a cinch compared to the Ctrl-Tab in Windows. Combine those with Expose and you've got just about anything you want in just a couple of keystrokes.

Lastly, I'd have agreed for the most part about your statement with WinXP. At least until I just recently went through 4 Dell laptops, 3 different models, in the past 2 months (new job, Dell only, YUCK!). WinXP is inherently unstable on these boxes and reminds of the days of Win95 and WinME on laptops. I'm lucky if I survive 2 days without rebooting this POS. Is it the Dell hardware? I'm certainly willing to accept that, except for the fact that the problems I'm seeing are the same as those I've seen with every windows laptop I've ever had: failure to go into standby/hibernate reliably, and failure to come out of stanby/hibernate. Re-imaging the drive does not help. Multiple monitors also give XP fits when you connect/disconnect them. This particular box is a brand new decked out Dell D820. The D600 and D610 also had issues, as did some older ones I had a few years ago (2 IBM Thinkpads, another couple of Dells, and a Toshiba) As a desktop OS, WinXP can run reliably provided you configure it correctly (read that as disabling a host of unneeded services).

As a long time user of utilities like Quicksilver, I have to say that I agree 100% with the superiority of the keyboard. It's much faster to find just about anything on my computer by using quicksilver that it would be using the standard interface. For example, if I want to look up a phone number I have two options: 1) Open a new window and navigate to the Applications folder, double click on Address Book, wait for it to launch, and type the name in the search field. 2)Press Ctrl-Space, type a few letters of the name, press the right arrow key, select the number I want, and press enter to make it show up in large numbers on the screen. If I want an action other than the default (large type) I can press tab, type the first few letters of the desired action ("co" for "Copy to Clipboard"), and press enter. Launching programs is even quicker: Ctrl-space, "sa", enter. Safari opens. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you get used to them it's a pain to use computers without easy keyboard access. I consider any Mac without Quicksilver to be broken.

There's plenty of great Mac apps that are freeware and /or open-source. Much of the PC-type shit that's washed ashore lately, on the other hand, is shareware (what the fuck).

Not all MP3 encoders are created equal. If you care about your music and still want to use MP3 format, you owe it to yourself to try LAME vs. the built-in iTunes Fraunhoffer encoding. There's even an iTunes (for the mac) plugin to allow LAME encoding in iTunes: http://blacktree.com/apps/iTunes-LAME/

I made a couple of CD-R's of the same track in it's original form followed by a bunch of different MP3 encodings and did a lot of A-B'ing of them on several high resolution systems (headphones, electrostatic speakers, as well as moving coil speakers). It was very interesting, the LAME encoding sounded as good as the Fraunhoffer encoding at the next higher bit rate (both FBR). At VBR it is harder to make broad generalizations as they seem to change bit rates differently.

I rip my CD's to FLAC files which I serve up to a Squeezebox (then to my DIY DAC's) and transcode from FLAC to MP3 for my iPod and airport expresses.

Sheldon

iTerm is essential to me, tabbed terminals are something I can't live without.

Check out Quicksilver if you haven't yet, it's by Blacktree. I have no affiliation with them, but it's the bomb:

http://blacktree.com/

It's the greatest launcher ever...

http://blacktree.com/

It's like bash completion right in the GUI, just hit ctrl-spce, type a letter or two, and hit enter. I can't live without it anymore.

I don't own a Mac, but I swear that my next laptop will be a Leopard tera-core sexy machine. And one of the reason for that is beautiful apps like Quick Silver.

You seriously have to try to not be able to name one thing that pisses you off. I'm not saying it's a terrible UI (although I don't particularly like it), but you lose credibility when you come across as blissfully ignorant. Off the top of the head of someone who rarely even uses MacOS10:

A casual glance through your posting history reveals you feel the same way about Vista. You claim you're a college student who loves Vista and loves his Zune, and you throw in linux in that list perhaps in attempts to gain some /. street cred. Hypocritcally you've never said a single thing bad about Vista, so by your own logic you're blissfully ignorant yourself.

You say you rarely use OS X, and frankly it shows in your lack of understanding of the system itself.

1) How much information do you get on each instance of each application you have open by glancing at your screen? Open 15 Word documents, 27 instances of Safari, 32 PDFs, and you'll get three tiny, black triangles. That's it.

You have more than 3 triangles, if you want instance information you've got 15 Word windows on your screen, or if they're minimized you've got 15 Word window minimizations on the right side of the dock. The dock minimizations are mini copies of the window itself. Or you can use Expose (F-10 in this case) to view all concurrent instances of the application you want. Can XP do that? Perhaps I don't really understand what you are complaining about here.

2) What happens if you don't have a shortcut on the dock for an application you need to open? Count the clicks you need to make for this, and don't forget your large back of counting beans.

Firstly, you should put a link to the Applications folder on the right side of the dock itself. Right-clicking on this folder icon will launch a Windows-esque start menu of all applications, complete with nested applications and directories. I've seen people make their own folders here with links to only their commonly-used apps.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, go get yourself Quicksilver and then read this tutorial.

3) While on the topic, how much space do you waste by having the dock display *every* application you regularly need at all times? Yes, you can make the dock miserably small. Yes, you can have the dock auto-hide. But yes, there are many better implementations of this functionality in other interfaces (Gnome/KDE/Windows, for example).

See my answer for #2 above. You are correct that there are better implementations, Quicksilver is just such a thing. And with the applications folder on the dock, you have your Windows-esque start menu, so what is the problem now?

4) If you have a dual-head system setup (as I think many of us on /. do), and you have an application open on the secondary screen, where is the menu bar? It's still on the top of the primary display. To click "file" (or whatever menu you'd like), you get to sling your mouse across displays. I do hope the second monitor came with some wrist guards to protect against carpel tunnel.

I've never used a double-head display, so I don't know if there's any other ways. But you can use Ctrl-F2 to get keyboard access to the menubar.

As I said, I rarely use Macs, and even I can spout off a few major UI irritants when prompted. No UI is perfect, but you can't claim to "love studying the various aspects of UI's that make [your] life easier or harder" and have nothing negative to report without coming off like a complete fanboy.

Interesting that you've been Microsoft fanboyish in nearly all your posting history on slashdot, yet you accuse others of coming off like a fanboy for preferring OS X. Yet you don't hesitate to bash Macs and OS X when you can, especially in light of you saying you rarely use OS X.

Currently, I hardly use Spotlight on my iBook G4 800 MHz. The application launcher capability is what I need most, and I find Launchbar to be far faster than Spotlight for this. Launchbar even does a decent job for many of the searches I need, at the same speed as application launching, but Spotlight search for the same can take very long.

Can't Apple employ the technology used in Launchbar or Quicksilver along with their existing technology to make the searches faster? I know Spotlight is lower because it has to index far more data as it searches inside files. However, most searches perhaps don't need the data that is inside files, but merely the same metadata that is indexed by Launchbar/QS. So, why not have a two-step search: first search the data that is not inside the file and give results as quick as Launchbar/QS, then search inside the files to give other search results?

I understand this may be a non-issue for the latest Intel Macs, and so, Apple may not bother.

Or install Visor and have a quake like terminal available using a hot-key

Install QuickSilver - about 100x better for application launching than Spotlight & way better than Windows-R. You'll never look back.

QuickSilver will solve this problem. Check it out:

http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/

That refers to Quicksilver , which in a nutshell, is a super efficient way to launch your applications, and also get at your files, music, oft-viewed webpages, etc.

It's like all the power of the CLI with the visual interface of a GUI.

Install Quicksilver. It' makes a world of difference -- soon you'll have a "Window Key + R"-esque experience for all of the apps on your machine.

try Quicksilver: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ beats the crap out of any start menu u'd ever think of =p

these guys have a business plan or is this a sign that we've officially arrived back in 1999 via some wormhole? not only is this not a new idea, there is already excellent software that does this, and for free.

sounds a bit like quicksilver, except fewer features, and less cool...

*insert obligatory 'but then this is an OS X program, and the advertised is a Windows program, so no surprises there' quip*