My colleague's Mac is TRWTF



  • I have no idea about macs in general, but here is a list of straight-up insanity which results in our paired programming being punctuated by the cause of my reputation for having tourettes syndrome. That sentence is not how I program.

    • The mouse does it's own thing sometimes. You'll be using it, and suddenly, it fucks off and does whatever. I guess the Mac knows better than the user.
    • It won't register her mac-style keyboard often. I thought Mac stuff was good at integrating with other Mac stuff. Maybe it's a knock-off.
    • Command or Control? Place your bets now!
    • F5 doesn't work when running chrome, but works for Firefox. Maybe it's in the chrome config, which I'm sure I'll investigate once I've been able to process the rest of this chaos.

    Maybe it's just because I've never used one or worked with one that I find it to be so intolerable. Maybe I need to do more research, but putting "why does the mouse fuck off up the screen" just gives me pornography (it's not bad pornography, but that's not the point). I wonder what manner of magic Mac people think I get up to on Ubuntu/Windows.

    In any case, I'm holding off getting a Mac until I've had a brain transplant.



  • I've only used OS X for an hour or so and couldn't figure out how anything worked.

    I'm pretty sure it's intentional. If it worked just like Windows and Linuxes do, the artificial "Mac vs PC" distinction would start to dissolve, and then macs wouldn't be special anymore.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Shoreline said:

    why does the mouse fuck off up the screen

    Is it a wireless mouse? Mine on Windows does that pretty often, especially when the battery is low.

    @Shoreline said:

    It won't register her mac-style keyboard often. I thought Mac stuff was good at integrating with other Mac stuff. Maybe it's a knock-off.

    Low battery again?

    Apple's insistence on shipping wireless keyboards and mice, with laptop style keys, for their desktops, is a whole other bucket o' WTF of course. I have genuinely never used a less comfortable keyboard than the one on my wife's mac

    @anonymous234 said:

    I've only used OS X for an hour or so and couldn't figure out how anything worked

    I used it quite a lot in the 10.4 days, around 2005. Using the latest version is extremely different


  • BINNED

    @Shoreline said:

    Command or Control? Place your bets now!

    Try deleting a file using a keyboard shortcut. Then try deleting it completely, bypassing the trash. I resorted to terminal to do that, myself (I was told what to do later).

    Also, beware Gnome Shell on Linux. They seem to be getting Mac syndrome, bad. After latest round of updates Evolution refused to connect to Gmail. Turns out you now have to set it up in Gnome control center, under "Online accounts". Oh, but other IMAP accounts are managed in Evolution itself.

    Note: I don't use Gnome Shell, I just like Evolution.



  • @Shoreline said:

    Command or Control? Place your bets now!

    I have had a macbook for 6 years now, and I still get this shit wrong every day.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Shoreline said:

    Command or Control? Place your bets now!

    Right mouse click? 🚎



  • @Shoreline said:

    Command or Control? Place your bets now!

    Meaning?

    @Shoreline said:

    F5 doesn't work when running chrome, but works for Firefox. Maybe it's in the chrome config, which I'm sure I'll investigate once I've been able to process the rest of this chaos.

    ⌘R is “reload page” in all common browsers, I guess derived from Ctrl+R that, IIRC, goes back to Mosaic rather than MSIE’s newfangled F5.

    @anonymous234 said:

    I've only used OS X for an hour or so and couldn't figure out how anything worked.

    I’ll hazard a guess that that’s because you were trying to do things like on a Windows or Linux machine.

    @Onyx said:

    Try deleting a file using a keyboard shortcut. Then try deleting it completely, bypassing the trash. I resorted to terminal to do that, myself (I was told what to do later).

    That’s because there is no keyboard shortcut for “delete this file and I mean delete it rather than move it to the trash”. Command-Backspace moves files to the trash, as the Finder’s File menu clearly indicates. I assume this is for safety, to stop people deleting things they later discover they needed anyway. You know, what the trash was invented for.

    @NedFodder said:

    I have had a macbook for 6 years now, and I still get this shit wrong every day.

    Swap the keys in the system preferences. (If you only use Macs and still get it wrong after six years, I daresay the problem might be you.)


  • BINNED

    @Gurth said:

    Backspace

    Was my point. Tell me, how does "backspace" as a key make sense in context of a file on the filesystem? It doesn't. So no sane person will even try it, be they computer literate or not. "Delete", however, is perfectly understandable to everyone.

    @Gurth said:

    That’s because there is no keyboard shortcut for “delete this file and I mean delete it rather than move it to the trash”.

    Delete

    @Gurth said:

    I assume this is for safety, to stop people deleting things they later discover they needed anyway.

    ShiftDelete requires an extra conscious effort to hit that particular combo even before getting the prompt.

    Also, nothing says I won't realize I need the file after I empty the trash. I don't see how not providing a shortcut makes it safer if the computer still allows me to delete stuff. I just have to click twice more instead of kitting one extra key. All the security!



  • On Mac keyboards, what you call "backspace" is labelled "delete" -- or, more concisely, ⌫. What you think of as delete is also labeled "delete", but it's alternative label is more clear: ⌧

    Also, the keyboard shortcuts you indicated are for Windows. Mac Classic and OSX have a different shortcut to delete a file, and no shortcut to bypass the Trash -- only one to empty the Trash afterward.



  • Use a standard windows / 'nix / every thing else in the world as I do when I have to use a Mac,m then keyboard problems go away.

    No... wait, it's a laptop :)



  • @Gurth said:

    I’ll hazard a guess that that’s because you were trying to do things like on a Windows or Linux machine.

    That's the only way I know, so you're probably right.



  • Does it have the recent OS upgrade where they made scrollbars work BACKWARDS?

    I mean, I know Apple's been losing it sanity-wise since about 10.4, but holy Jesus. The scrollbars are backwards.



  • @Onyx said:

    Try deleting a file using a keyboard shortcut. Then try deleting it completely, bypassing the trash.

    Why would you ever want to do that?



  • @Gurth said:

    If you only use Macs and still get it wrong after six years, I daresay the problem might be you.

    I use windows 8 hours a day, the macbook around 8 hours a week. Even having said that, I'd still agree the problem is me.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @NedFodder said:

    Even having said that, I'd still agree the problem is me.

    Because you use a Macbook? I'm asking for a friend.



  • There's this thing which annoys me the hell about Macs and is that you can't turn off all those stupid animations. I remember installing those in Linux some years ago and got tired of the damn thing after five minutes. They probably can be turned off but either all Mac users are lazy or I'm special.



  • My sister has a $3000 MacBook Pro with all the bells and whistles "for school". She uses it mostly for Facebook when she isn't ignoring it completely or listening to questionably licensed music on YouTube.

    I have a $250 dhromebook and I've probably used it for longer and for more things than she has used her MacBook Pro.

    And then I tell her that she should have gotten a dhromebook instead and she says "I could never use a dhromebook because I need all the features of my MacBook Pro. Like the movie editor!"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsqqBsdFPy4



  • ROFL, Ben you are an ass and also that video is awesome.



  • To be fair, I have a video with worse acting on my channel:

    Falskaar Cutscene: Warning Valfred – 07:39
    — Ben Lubar



  • That video doesn't challenge my thoughts and exciting program in the way the first does.



  • After using his mom's computer to download porn.



  • @Onyx said:

    Tell me, how does "backspace" as a key make sense in context of a file on the filesystem?

    My guess is that it’s historical, since early Macs had no Delete key but did have a Backspace key:

    [img]http://www.historycorner.de/CoCo3/Apple/mac128kkeyboard.PNG[/img]

    And since backspace removes a character you’ve typed, I think they probably figured that removing a file is analogous enough that people could make that connection. But I wasn’t using computers this sophisticated in 1984, so this is speculation 😄

    @Onyx said:

    @I said:
    That’s because there is no keyboard shortcut for “delete this file and I mean delete it rather than move it to the trash”.

    Delete

    I was talking in the context of using a Mac, not in general. In any case your supposing that the Delete key is there specifically to delete files from the filesystem is an assumption based on its modern usage.

    @Onyx said:

    Also, nothing says I won't realize I need the file after I empty the trash. I don't see how not providing a shortcut makes it safer if the computer still allows me to delete stuff. I just have to click twice more instead of kitting one extra key. All the security!

    Because putting the file into the trash (or recycle bin, or whatever) gives you additional time to realise you do still need the file. Yes, after you empty the trash, the file is gone — but if you’re in the habit of emptying the trash immediately after you put a file into it, You’re Doing It Wrongℱ. (BTW, there’s a simple fix for that syndrome, that works on any OS: replace the “full” icon by the “empty” icon.)

    @blakeyrat said:

    Does it have the recent OS upgrade where they made scrollbars work BACKWARDS?

    “Recent” being about five years ago here 
 Not that you’ll agree, but I actually find them more natural: mouse cursor over the web page, swipe upward and the page moves up on my screen. Makes more sense to me than put the mouse curser over the web page, then swipe to control the button in the scroll bar that the cursor is not hovering over.

    @NedFodder said:

    I use windows 8 hours a day, the macbook around 8 hours a week.

    Then you’re probably best off swapping the keys :)



  • One thing I can't get over is how Home and End work. They jump you to the start / end of the entire file instead of row, which is INFURIATING. To get the standard behavior, you need to use Ctrl + Left and Ctrl + Right. Stupid.

    Also, there's no such thing as "maximize". The green button means just "expand", which every app treats as they please. Chrome, for instance, just expands to accommodate the current content, not all the way to fill the screen. So every time you click a link, you could get horizontal scrollbars and have to click the stupid left-aligned green turd AGAIN. I ALREADY TOLD YOU TO MAXIMIZE, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!

    Also, after 15 fucking years, they finally decided to add any kind of tiling support. How the fuck is that gonna work with their braindead expand concept is anyone's guess.

    There's more, but some of these are just baffling. Or, to be fair, too different from the usual PC/Linux setup to ever be fully comfortable.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @cartman82 said:

    Also, there's no such thing as "maximize". The green button means just "expand", which every app treats as they please

    Macheads a few years ago:

    Why would you ever want to maximise a window? The expand button makes it just the right size and lets you have lots of things on screen at once. Using an entire screen is just unnecessary.

    Macheads as soon as the new and magical "fullscreen" button was introduced:

    Wow, look at this, it's amazing. I can click one button and get my application window to use all the screen space. I can't believe nobody thought of this before.

    Me, as a Windows user, when said button was introduced:

    What, mac apps couldn't go fullscreen before? That's a bit weird, especially since I distinctly remember playing several fullscreen games on my old Mac Mini



  • @Jaloopa said:

    I have genuinely never used a less comfortable keyboard than the one on my wife's mac

    ...and having to use chorded combinations to get Home and End gives me hives.

    Mac keyboards: Do Not Want.



  • @Jaloopa said:

    Macheads a few years ago:

    "who needs this"

    Macheads as soon as the new and magical < insert feature> was introduced:

    "omg this is the best thing ever". I can't believe nobody thought of this before.

    This is the standard reaction of apple followers to everything someone else had before apple.



  • @Onyx said:

    beware Gnome Shell on Linux

    I don't have to beware that, because I was viscerally repelled by GNOME 3 from the very first glimpse and will never, never install it again. Reasonably happy with Xfce for the time being, though I have my eye on LXQt.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    BACKWARDS

    I take it you mean "naturally"?



  • windows does that too, since 8 . the only way to switch it back was through touchpad driver settings. then in 8.1 it kicked the drivers out so i had to reinstall them and set it again.
    then in 10 it kicked the drivers out and I didn't bother switching it back, because... i don't know. i've been using a touch phone for so long by now, that i got more used to its scrolling logic.

    (because that's what it is, desktop/mousewheel scrolling logic (drag down to move your viewport down), vs. touchscreen logic (drag down to move content down, i.e. your viewport up)).



  • @Gurth said:

    mouse cursor over the web page, swipe upward and the page moves up on my screen. Makes more sense to me than put the mouse curser over the web page, then swipe to control the button in the scroll bar that the cursor is not hovering over.

    Swipe-up to push up is all very well (that's been the behaviour of the hand-shaped cursor for a very long time) but swapping the direction of actual mouse wheels is just bonkers. It's a wheel. Conceptually, the bottom of the wheel is sitting on the on-screen page; when I rotate the top of the wheel toward me, the bottom should push the page in the opposite direction.

    Anybody who disagrees with this is clearly the kind of completely unhinged lunatic who hangs their toilet paper the wrong way.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    ...and having to use chorded combinations to get Home and End gives me hives.

    Mac keyboards: Do Not Want.

    So get a full-size Mac keyboard. That has dedicated Home↖ and End↘ keys. There's just not quite enough room to put them in on a laptop keyboard without distorting the key layout unpleasantly. (As I know from a Samsung laptop owned by a family member that I very occasionally end up using.)



  • @flabdablet said:

    It's a wheel. Conceptually, the bottom of the wheel is sitting on the on-screen page; when I rotate the top of the wheel toward me, the bottom should push the page in the opposite direction.

    Anybody who disagrees with this is clearly the kind of completely unhinged lunatic who hangs their toilet paper the wrong way.

    Awesome as that is, when you've started from moving your finger towards you to scroll the screen downwards, the change raises questions. I don't know who thought of which first and I don't care. I'm more interested in whose dumbass idea it was to switch things around. It's like forcing pilots to change the way they use the up/down control for how they point up or down. You don't fucking do it. It's bad manners.

    Anybody who disagrees with this is clearly the kind of completely unhinged lunatic who reverses the gravity in their house.

    Filed under: #goingplacesnotsurewhere



  • Why is the world so black and white for you "Ubuntu/Windows" users? I just bought a new Macbook, replacing a 5 year old model that just got too slow, which replaced another Macbook from 2007. I also have a laptop and desktop (dual boot with Windows 7) that run Ubuntu. Apparently you're too proud to use another OS.

    F5 is a browser thing, not an OS thing. It's always command unless you're using terminal. Bluetooth isn't great on Macs, I'll give you that. Literally all the other complaints that you didn't list are based entirely on misunderstandings or are straight up lies.



  • @flabdablet said:

    Swipe-up to push up is all very well (that's been the behaviour of the hand-shaped cursor for a very long time) but swapping the direction of actual mouse wheels is just bonkers.

    The current Apple mouse doesn’t have a scroll wheel. You swipe over the mouse in the same way you swipe over a touchpad, which means the page follows your finger movements instead of going in the opposite direction.

    @flabdablet said:

    Conceptually, the bottom of the wheel is sitting on the on-screen page; when I rotate the top of the wheel toward me, the bottom should push the page in the opposite direction.

    I doubt this was the way the scroll wheel was originally imagined to work when it was introduced maybe twenty years ago. I have a feeling the idea behind its scroll direction is that it matches the knob in the scroll bar: you click and slide that up to move your page down, and at a time when that was the only way to scroll, conceptually it makes sense to have the user move their finger in the same direction on the mouse. Once people mainly started using the scroll wheel instead of the scroll bar knob, it conceptually moves in the wrong direction, but it’s become ingrained so nobody was willing to change it — or, more likely, nobody even thought about it anymore.

    FWIW, the annoyance at the wrong scroll direction works both ways. When I had to spend a fair amount of time on a Windows PC a few years back, I was glad to find a program that not only changed the scroll direction for the mouse wheel, but also let me scroll whatever the pointer was over, instead of the widget that had focus.



  • The standard keyboard commands (cut/copy/paste/delete) didn't apply to files on Macs until OS X.

    The way to delete a file was Command-T ("send to trash"), to duplicate a file was Command-D (IIRC). "cut" and "paste" were nonsensical operations for files.

    Applying text commands to file icons and creating those greyed-out "cut but not removed yet" files are actually two of Windows 95's greatest fuck-ups in Microsoft's lame and broken "spatial" file system.



  • @Gurth said:

    The current Apple mouse doesn’t have a scroll wheel.

    One more reason for my fingers to hate the fucking thing. Apple peripherals are for hipsters who think Bang and Olufsen designed good stereos. Give me lumpy, obvious, real physical controls that my fingers can use without help from my eyes and I'm happy.



  • @aapis said:

    It's always command unless you're using terminal.

    You can use most simple Emacs-style shortcuts (C-a to go to the start of the line, C-k to cut everything behind the insertion point, C-l to vertically centre the text in the widget, etc.) in any text field, not only the terminal.



  • @flabdablet said:

    One more reason for my fingers to hate the fucking thing.

    Funny, it’s exactly why I think it’s the best mouse I've ever used. (My previous choice for that being Microsoft’s Serial Mouse 2.0. If it were up to me I’d like the shape of that one with the functionality of an Apple Magic Mouse.)



  • @cartman82 said:

    One thing I can't get over is how Home and End work. They jump you to the start / end of the entire file instead of row, which is INFURIATING. To get the standard behavior, you need to use Ctrl + Left and Ctrl + Right. Stupid.

    That's what they've done since 1984. That is the standard behavior for all Mac users.

    @cartman82 said:

    Also, there's no such thing as "maximize".

    Correct; there's only "make this window large enough so you don't need scrollbars to use it".

    @cartman82 said:

    The green button means just "expand", which every app treats as they please.

    Yeah, well, that's OS X being a really shitty operating system. It worked fine in Mac Classic.

    @cartman82 said:

    Or, to be fair, too different from the usual PC/Linux setup to ever be fully comfortable.

    There's no point in bitching that Macs aren't enough like "PC/Linux" (are you afraid to say "Windows"?) when they're consistent with past Macs and Macs have a significantly LONGER GUI history than Linux and most of the things you mentioned are older than Windows, too.

    It's not Apple's fault that you're so closed-minded that you only ever learned one OS. (Practically speaking, since every Linux window system is a blatant and unapologetic rip-off of Windows.)



  • As someone who actually knows what Emacs is, I struggle to understand how this information is useful to literally anyone who uses computers and isn't already a software developer. Maybe you can do that stuff but for everyone who uses Macs, it's command unless you're in the terminal.



  • I've pontificated on this subject before, and have found no reason to change my view. All hail the One True Mouse

    and the One True Keyboard



  • @Gurth said:

    You can use most simple Emacs-style shortcuts



  • @flabdablet said:

    Give me lumpy, obvious, real physical controls that my fingers can use without help from my eyes and I'm happy.

    QFFT



  • QFFT and not :giggity:???

    Also Boomzilla's falling behind.



  • I only use macs to delete folders while attempting to merge them.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    That's what they've done since 1984. That is the standard behavior for all Mac users.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Correct; there's only "make this window large enough so you don't need scrollbars to use it".

    @blakeyrat said:

    Yeah, well, that's OS X being a really shitty operating system. It worked fine in Mac Classic.

    @blakeyrat said:

    There's no point in bitching that Macs aren't enough like "PC/Linux" (are you afraid to say "Windows"?) when they're consistent with past Macs and Macs have a significantly LONGER GUI history than Linux and most of the things you mentioned are older than Windows, too.

    All your points come down to "that's how Macs' have always done it, therefore it's correct."

    Bullshit. You'd laugh in the face of a Unix graybeard who gave you that shit.

    Macs do some stuff right, but not these. "Expand window", no tiling and stupid fucking text editing shortcuts can go die in hell.

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's not Apple's fault that you're so closed-minded that you only ever learned one OS. (Practically speaking, since every Linux window system is a blatant and unapologetic rip-off of Windows.)

    Well we can't all be paragons of open mindedness and acceptance of different UI paradigms as blakeyrat.



  • @cartman82 said:

    All your points come down to "that's how Macs' have always done it, therefore it's correct."

    Yes.

    Except maybe the Home/End one; the original Mac didn't have a Home key, so that one was a more "recent" (but probably still pre-dating Linux entirely-- when did the Mac II come out?) development.

    @cartman82 said:

    Bullshit. You'd laugh in the face of a Unix graybeard who gave you that shit.

    Macs were being sold in stores before those Unix graybeards even began to think about making X11. Lisas had been sold for like 2 years already by that point.

    I don't think you fully understand how early Apple was in GUIs. They invented all this shit.

    @cartman82 said:

    Well we can't all be paragons of open mindedness and acceptance of different UI paradigms as blakeyrat.

    Correct; but you could at least stop thinking, "well Windows does X, therefore anything that doesn't do X is wrong."

    Liquify your brain, do not solidify it. Understand the history before judging. Like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel...


  • BINNED

    the most annoying (after this) is it keeps zombie applications in Alt+Tab jump-list, applications that are closed show up there! If any application wants to open multiple windows (like plotting non-inline figures), they all show up with application name, it is annoying to select from tens of python-titled icons in an Alt+Tab screen, including closed figures!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Yes.

    Except maybe the Home/End one; the original Mac didn't have a Home key, so that one was a more "recent" (but probably still pre-dating Linux entirely-- when did the Mac II come out?) development.

    Having home jump to the start of file instead of start of line is madness. Whenever they added it, they fucked it up.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Macs were being sold in stores before those Unix graybeards even began to think about making X11. Lisas had been sold for like 2 years already by that point.

    I don't think you fully understand how early Apple was in GUIs. They invented all this shit.

    I don't think you fully get the point.

    Just because Apple decided to do things one way in 1980-ies, it doesn't mean we have to do it the same way in 2010-s, if there's a better way. Which is what you would tell Linux people stuck using CLI.

    @blakeyrat said:

    Correct; but you could at least stop thinking, "well Windows does X, therefore anything that doesn't do X is wrong."

    Liquify your brain, do not solidify it. Understand the history before judging. Like a circle in a spiral like a wheel within a wheel...

    There's a little kernel of Blakeyrat stuck within all of us; struggling to break free and blossom into a beautiful flower of acceptance and wisdom, if we would only let it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    I don't think you fully understand how early Apple was in GUIs. They inventedripped off alla lot of this shit from Xerox.

    FTFY


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