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One of the most blatent ripoffs that has been overlooked is Cocoatech's Path Finder. It's a slick app and I wonder why Apple didn't do a better job of copying it. Aside from speed - Path Finder just seems better than the new 10.3 Finder.

. OSX is not designed for workgroups (see more of my comments on this).

I'll reply here to your comments, since many of them are either outdated or simply incorrect.

you appreciate Windows' File Manager user interface that lists your folders first, then the files in alphabetical order.

This is simply personal preference, but if you really want it, get yourself a copy of Path Finder, an excellent Finder replacement that does this and much more.

There is no way for your office assistant, however, to enter appointments in your schedule unless he has physical access to the one computer that you run iCal. If that computer happens to be a laptop, you are out of luck.

Or your assistant can have a copy of iCal on his own computer and sync it with yours using iSync.

Moving your address book data from Outlook to Apple was a bit easier than calendric data, but still not as smooth and you would like to expect for an enjoyable "switch" experience.

So there are some incompatibilities between what Outlook exports and what Apple's iApps import - seeing as how this is Microsoft we're dealing with, I hardly find that surprising. However, how does this affect OS X's viability as a "workgroup" OS? This is akin to everybody making a big deal over Linux' install procedure, which is done ONCE and doesn't really affect actual usage of the system.

And, of course, if it really affects you that much, go ahead and just use the Mac version of Outlook.

ou are typing an email and accidentally you tell your program to quit. A pop-up window will ask you if you want to cancel the quit action, save your draft and quit, or quit without saving the draft. The default choice is to save and quite and you can simply press enter to proceed. But if you want to select any of the other two options, forget about using the left or right arrow keys to do so. You must use the mouse, point to the other choice, and click on it. Go figure...

Or you could use the keyboard shortcuts that are there, instead of complaining that the ones you prefer don't work (i.e. enter for save, escape for cancel, or cmd-D for don't save). OS X isn't Windows, and doesn't work the same way - it does things its own way. If you don't want to take the time to learn it, don't complain.

For better or worst Word is a very popular word processor. If you use it to produce merged documents based on Excel files, this functionality is going to be affected when switching to OS X.

An incompatibility between two versions of a Microsoft program? Again, how does this affect day-to-day usage of the system?

Press Apple-K in the wrong context and you will waste several seconds trying to find out what happened.

Heh. Yeah. So since I last used Windows (yesterday) suddenly all applications have consistent keyboard shortcuts, and a common keystroke in one application is never a destructive command in another?

Alternatively, consider the keyboard combination to invoke an application's Preferences menu.

Yes, this is covered in Apple's Aqua User Interface Guidelines (it is supposed to be Cmd-,) but it is a recent addition and many applications haven't caught up yet.

As the story goes, the big names wouldn't jump aboard the OS X bandwagon if Apple could not demonstrate that PowerPlant would be a viable development environment under OS X, since Adobe and all them develop their applications in that environment. PowerPlant can't develop in Cocoa, so Apple needed to show them that a major application in OS X could be developed in Carbon and still be usable.

Unfortunately, the test mule was the Finder, a bastardization of Carbon and Cocoa that seems to highlight the worst aspects of each one. The Panther Finder uses some .nibs for its stuff, but the main browser window is not a .nib; it is stored in the resource fork (you know, the thing that OS X was supposed to get rid of?) of a file in the Finder's package (I assume this is the case, since there is no .nib I could find for the main browser window).

My advice would be to stop over at Cocoatech and buy Path Finder. It's a Finder on steroids. Wait, I take that back. It's on a completely different level altogether. It's so far superior to the Finder that I can't conceive of any reason why anyone who considers himself a power user would ever want to use the Finder.

Here is a link to pci XTREME (which enables quartz xtreme on "incompatible" video cards including PCIs and 2x AGP's).

This thing works with radeons and really makes OS X usable.. but there's word that it might max out PCIs when running too many graphic intensive things at once.. it's too bad a 266 couldn't run anything like that anyway :)

Without quartz xtreme, you almost can't use the file manager.. so of course there's a 3rd party solution: Path Finder. Formally named "SNAX", this extremely fast and effective.. I hate the new name though.

A perfect example of a Cocoa app that uses disclosure triangles is Path Finder. However, this app was written by a 3rd party, not Apple.

Or you could just get PathFinder now:

PathFinder is a cocoa Finder replacement, and is really quite nice.

Yeah, the OS X Finder sucks (hopefully only for now). But there is a decent shareware replacement. I haven't messed with it too much (I gave up on OS X), but it seemed pretty full featured. It's called SNAX. I do remember it being wicked fast, though. And this isn't by any means a defense of Apple or an implication that the user is at fault, just a suggestion to the parent poster to make his life easier with the hardware he already has.