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Comments · 7
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Re:iTunes is the real concern..
.. at least, it is for me. I bought some music from iTunes a while ago, when my iPod was still working, and - oh the irony - lost it when I switched over to a Mac Mini. So what did I do? I tried to download the music in question, since I'd paid for it, right? Apparently not - once you've downloaded music on iTunes, you don't get to download it again. What a waste of money.
This is your fault for not reading the terms of service, which are quite clear that you are paying for the rights to the song and the bandwidth to download them once.
When you are selling literally billions of tracks, letting everyone re-download their files over and over again is a great way to burn cash. Apple's bandwidth bill would be simply ridiculous if they permitted it. iTunes isn't like the new version of Windows Media Player which will let you back up your files, but not the licenses that go with them. You can put the files anywhere, on as many computers as you like and request that any computer they are on be authorized to play them, with a maximum of 5 computers authorized to actually play them at any given time. You can individually authorize and de-authorize computers at will, as often as you like, or manually de-authorize them all at once once a year if you reach the maximum number of authorized computers. Not the "You can only authorize 5 computers and if you want to change that you can only do it once a year" misinformation that is always talked about.
iTunes has an integrated backup feature that will sync your entire library or just purchased files to CDs or DVDs.
You are just another in a long line of customers that don't bother to pay attention to the terms they agreed to, only to be surprised when things don't turn out the way they want them to. -
Re:Disappointed
It is just as slow, crashy, inconvinient and annoying as the rest (With a few less annoying "update me" popups than Windows, perhaps).
I've never known anyone to consider OS X as crash-prone as Windows.
Expose is cool, and the smooth movements of some appearing windows (rather than a one-frame screen-update) is also nice. But these are the only 2 serious improvements I've seen. Things are still very slow to launch, programs crash, and things fail for configuration reasons.
Programs are slow, crash-prone and things can be misconfigured? That's obviously the OS's fault!
It doesn't have any easy and useful way of exposing available keyboard shortcuts (as in KDE's readily available shortcut settings dialogs, Emacs's show-keybindings command, etc).
The keyboard shortcuts are listed directly next to the menu option in drop-down menus. Example
For people with a background of both Windows and KDE, who had no troubles with either or with Gnome/etc, it is still very difficult to figure out how to make shortcuts to applications, copy files (rather than make shortcuts), etc.
It's under the FILE menu under "Make Alias" and in the right-click contextual menu under "Make Alias". I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a more effective manner.
All in all, the Mac is yet-another-lousy-GUI, in my opinion.
A computer is not a GUI.
Disclaimer: I'm a KDE fan [though I believe all of today's GUIs, including KDE are very lousy], and not too fond of closed-source applications in general.
I think you mean to say "It's different from what I'm used to and it's closed-source, therefore I hate it."
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Re:Disappointed
It is just as slow, crashy, inconvinient and annoying as the rest (With a few less annoying "update me" popups than Windows, perhaps).
I've never known anyone to consider OS X as crash-prone as Windows.
Expose is cool, and the smooth movements of some appearing windows (rather than a one-frame screen-update) is also nice. But these are the only 2 serious improvements I've seen. Things are still very slow to launch, programs crash, and things fail for configuration reasons.
Programs are slow, crash-prone and things can be misconfigured? That's obviously the OS's fault!
It doesn't have any easy and useful way of exposing available keyboard shortcuts (as in KDE's readily available shortcut settings dialogs, Emacs's show-keybindings command, etc).
The keyboard shortcuts are listed directly next to the menu option in drop-down menus. Example
For people with a background of both Windows and KDE, who had no troubles with either or with Gnome/etc, it is still very difficult to figure out how to make shortcuts to applications, copy files (rather than make shortcuts), etc.
It's under the FILE menu under "Make Alias" and in the right-click contextual menu under "Make Alias". I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a more effective manner.
All in all, the Mac is yet-another-lousy-GUI, in my opinion.
A computer is not a GUI.
Disclaimer: I'm a KDE fan [though I believe all of today's GUIs, including KDE are very lousy], and not too fond of closed-source applications in general.
I think you mean to say "It's different from what I'm used to and it's closed-source, therefore I hate it."
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Re:Disappointed
It is just as slow, crashy, inconvinient and annoying as the rest (With a few less annoying "update me" popups than Windows, perhaps).
I've never known anyone to consider OS X as crash-prone as Windows.
Expose is cool, and the smooth movements of some appearing windows (rather than a one-frame screen-update) is also nice. But these are the only 2 serious improvements I've seen. Things are still very slow to launch, programs crash, and things fail for configuration reasons.
Programs are slow, crash-prone and things can be misconfigured? That's obviously the OS's fault!
It doesn't have any easy and useful way of exposing available keyboard shortcuts (as in KDE's readily available shortcut settings dialogs, Emacs's show-keybindings command, etc).
The keyboard shortcuts are listed directly next to the menu option in drop-down menus. Example
For people with a background of both Windows and KDE, who had no troubles with either or with Gnome/etc, it is still very difficult to figure out how to make shortcuts to applications, copy files (rather than make shortcuts), etc.
It's under the FILE menu under "Make Alias" and in the right-click contextual menu under "Make Alias". I'm not sure how this could be implemented in a more effective manner.
All in all, the Mac is yet-another-lousy-GUI, in my opinion.
A computer is not a GUI.
Disclaimer: I'm a KDE fan [though I believe all of today's GUIs, including KDE are very lousy], and not too fond of closed-source applications in general.
I think you mean to say "It's different from what I'm used to and it's closed-source, therefore I hate it."
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OS X Satisfaction Chart
One of my fellow goons created this to illustrate the mentality of someone going through the Windows > OS X switch, and I thought it was relevant to this discussion, as it perfectly illustrates the joy and agony of moving from one platform to another:
The OS X Satisfaction Chart -
Barebones CDs won't cut it much longer
The problem with a lot of CDs is that very often you get the CD and an often-crap set of liner notes that increasingly doesn't even give you the lyrics to the songs or any other form of added value.
When U2 released their last album, they promoted the hell out of the iTunes version, and released a CD version complete with a snazzy cardboard case, bonus DVD and 48-page hard-bound book. A plain vanilla CD version with just the lyrics was also sent to stores (if you didn't want to pay the reasonable markup on the mini-boxed set). Everyone I know - even fellow iTunes store addicts - ended up hunting down the deluxe version. Even people that don't particularly like the band were transfixed by the whole package when they saw it. (Pics here and here. )
The band went into it knowing people would be tempted to download it for free, but never whined about it. Instead they offered a wide variety of choices and actually did something to make fans want to go out of their way to get the physical product - and the most expensive version of the release, at that. -
Barebones CDs won't cut it much longer
The problem with a lot of CDs is that very often you get the CD and an often-crap set of liner notes that increasingly doesn't even give you the lyrics to the songs or any other form of added value.
When U2 released their last album, they promoted the hell out of the iTunes version, and released a CD version complete with a snazzy cardboard case, bonus DVD and 48-page hard-bound book. A plain vanilla CD version with just the lyrics was also sent to stores (if you didn't want to pay the reasonable markup on the mini-boxed set). Everyone I know - even fellow iTunes store addicts - ended up hunting down the deluxe version. Even people that don't particularly like the band were transfixed by the whole package when they saw it. (Pics here and here. )
The band went into it knowing people would be tempted to download it for free, but never whined about it. Instead they offered a wide variety of choices and actually did something to make fans want to go out of their way to get the physical product - and the most expensive version of the release, at that.
