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I think that perhaps you have a differing set of criteria for "window management inconsistency", "finder cock-ups", "bugs", and what the "mass market and corporations need" than a lot of other people.

I certainly know that one thing I treasure about the OS X experience is how much more consistent the window management is over, say, XP....over, say, the junk that shows up in XP.

Safari requires two clicks to activate a control, unless you click on a text edit area (but not the URL) or the Bookmark bar. Mail will let me open a link without having focus, but Safari will not. TextEdit requires two clicks to move the carrot but one to abuse the toolbar, the ruler which is in the toolbar area, and even overflows a bit with the tab elements requires focus to interact. This inconsistency is pervasive throughout Apple's applications.
XP... controls are active regardless of focus.

As for allowing programmers to make rational, conistent, and powerful user interfaces across the board. That's just spurious nonsense, either platform will let you do whatever you want. Whether or not it becomes a noose has nothing to do with the platform.

At this time I'd like to reintroduce Perversion Tracker. ... it gets my cock down quite frankly.

Cock-up has nothing to do with your phallus, nor is this an appropriate time or place to discuss your penis. Frankly, you are disgusting.

And let's just pretend that you didn't mention bugs. Or polish. Just how is it that you never hear Mac users bitching about their buggy OS and how nothing seems to work seamlessly?

Well, except me... And everyone who has ever posted at Macfixit Et al. Let's not talk about it? That's just ignorant, because that's the point...

The iTunes update today for instance. Apparently Apple didn't think anyone would change to/from full screen because it doesn't update the cover in the other view. Performance on a Mini is horrendous, more like "cover slide show". Forget about animation if you're viewing full screen and skipping a song. I can play WoW well enough on a mini to get some trading done but Apple can't shift and skew a rectangle? They must have been in a hurry, and God knows what else they rushed. Speaking of which, considering how much they have riding on iTunes they sure manage to botch a lot of releases. At least this one didn't destroy my library.

I'm skipping the emotional rhetoric, disinformation, and logical fallacies...

At least Apple is producing major releases every 18 months (not five+ years) with six-month point updates that not only fix the broken bits but actually make older machines run faster. If there is one major company out there that is at least trying to get it right, don't choose Microsoft as your answer. And don't think that M$ somehow updates their operating systems for free either.

If you look at the condition Apple released that software in the best adjective to describe it would be "unconscionable". They said it would work on said platform, but the actual product was unusable. There is a not insignificant number of people who feel that 10.0 and 10.1 should never have been released in the first place.

Oh and MS actually does this, service packs and interim patches are regularly released to fix bugs, improve performance, and add features. Which you can read all about in excruciating detail on their website. Which segues nicely...

Refusing to talk about failure? Which company are we talking about? Personally, I think you've got the whole thing ass-backwards.

And now we arrive at the thrust of my argument, and the thing you utterly failed to address in any fashion. Your baseless cheerleading obviously fulfills some kind of need but brings nothing to the table. All large pieces of software have problems no matter how much you want

But Fugu doesn't do FTP - only SFTP.

And it's unfortunate that PerversionTracker ground to a halt a couple of years ago. Much easier to navigate than Versiontracker or MacUpdate, it was at least as useful at steering you towards quality Mac apps (or at least steering you away from the truly bad ones)...

You don't "close" apps. You close windows. You quit apps. And they're two completely different things. Apple-Q has always been the "Quit" command. Apple-W has always been the "Close window" command. In fact, most Windows programs use Ctrl-W as the close window command. (Alt-F4 is the Windows equivalent to Apple-Q, though. Sheesh! Talk about inconvenient!)

Your gripe about the running-app marker is totally off base as well. First, it's quite easy to see the apps that are running at a glance. The little black arrow is pretty distinctive and it's not on the icon at all. It's below it, which makes a world of difference in visibility. Second, running every app on the machine at all times is not going to slow the machine significantly unless the apps themselves are poorly written. That makes it Not Apple's Problem(tm). Properly written apps will be offloaded to the swap space and enter an inactive "sleep" state. Crappy apps will chew CPU cycles to redraw their standard Aqua UI 60 times a second whether they need to or not. Remember, the Mac has an even worse problem than Visual Basic... it's called "RealBasic" and it attracts bad programmers like flies to poop. For examples, see PerversionTracker.

"I think it's so cute that Delphi users consider themselves "developers.""

More so than RealBasic users.

Good point. I've never seen something like http://www.perversiontracker.com/ for Windows. (Then again, I haven't looked either, but I didn't look for Perversiontracker to start with.)

Sucks to be wrong, eh buddy?

p

Perversion tracker?

I guess it really is so when you see the last user comment on your example application.

While it might be unfair to any decent REALbasic shareware developers*, I basically run whenever I see the REALbasic logo.

Have you ever been to PerversionTracker? Amusing site that slags on useless and poorly designed Mac shareware, especially those "applications" written in REALbasic, like this one. Proof that MS doesn't have a monopoly on bad shareware. =)

*existence of said developers is highly theoretical

While it might be unfair to any decent REALbasic shareware developers*, I basically run whenever I see the REALbasic logo.

Have you ever been to PerversionTracker? Amusing site that slags on useless and poorly designed Mac shareware, especially those "applications" written in REALbasic, like this one. Proof that MS doesn't have a monopoly on bad shareware. =)

*existence of said developers is highly theoretical

While it might be unfair to any decent REALbasic shareware developers*, I basically run whenever I see the REALbasic logo.

Have you ever been to PerversionTracker? Amusing site that slags on useless and poorly designed Mac shareware, especially those "applications" written in REALbasic, like this one. Proof that MS doesn't have a monopoly on bad shareware. =)

*existence of said developers is highly theoretical

I'd just like to quote PerversionTracker and say, "OH GOD IT BURNS!"

That seriously has to be the worst interface I've ever seen. And I've used a lot of crappy custom VB-app Windows software. Hell, I've made some, along with some crappy old-school Mac stuff. But damn that is ugly.

Quick! Someone get this guy a Mac!

Is there a lamest products ever list?

Only thing like that I know of is a list of the worst Mac software ever. Completely unrelated, but awfully amusing.

If candy rots the teeth, BASIC rots the brain. And R---B---c has BASIC as its roots...

Windows Media Player is so bad it merited a Perversion Tracker Review. (Perversion Tracker is a site that primarily pokes fun of inept shareware applications).

Looks to me like Apple is beating Microsoft at its own game. Certainly the QuickTime player is a pleasure to use, and Windows Media Player is not.

I find Microsoft's comments about integration into the operating system to be bizarre. The reason other browsers have passed IE have nothing to do with their integration with the OS, or lack thereof; features like tabbed browsing, popup blockers or superior font rendering have absolutely nothing to do with tight OS integration.

In my opinion, the only way a browser should be integrated into the OS is in the help viewer, which can use the same rendering engine. I believe Apple is in the process of doing this with Safari, and I think it's a great idea. But it does nothing to prevent other companies from making a better browser, if they can do it.

D

By the way, you haven't seen my red Swingline lying around anywhere, have you?

This one? :)

Well, the URL is very safe - it doesn't work! Try this one instead.

To get an exmpale of the RealBASIC horrors that await you Windows users get over to perversiontracker. The URL is safe - it's a play on versiontracker and not some fetish update site...

" Most Windows users (including myself) are afraid of what we lose when moving to Linux."

What do you lose? The ability to play games? Big loss. When I was using Linux I never felt I'd lost anything. If anything I felt I'd gained. Gained an enormous selection of what was arguably free, as in "free", at no cost, software. But I'm not a gamer.

Now I use OS X. Again, nothing lost. Well, not as much free software, but less is more in the Mac world since you don't have to wade through as much crap to find a gem. And for fun, check out Perversion Tracker, especially the entry on Opera.

Don't get me wrong though, Windows is fine as long as you don't try to install and uninstall a lot of different kinds of software on a machine you actually plan to use. Registry bloat and file system fragmentation will soon render your screaming 2.5 GHz system slower than an old lady on thorazine.

Command-option-H didn't work for you? Wow, no wonder people think that the Mac OS is a goldmine for lazy developers.