And here: Why many developers are not switching to mac.
1. Abysmal window manager, not replacable. Pixel waste, clumsy (long list here)
2. Mandatory Click-to-Focus and Click-Raise. Showstopper.
3. No home/end keys on apple laptops and other wierd layout choices.
4. Nasty BSD gang-rape under the hood. Yes, OSX has it's own "windows registry".
5. Idiotic shareware culture that makes you pay for the smallest things. $10 for a sane Macbook trackpad driver that should be in the OS in first place.
To clarify what is being said here (a lot of people seem confused by this)...
A lot of these seem to be the difference between the Mac "This is ours, you can use it" philosophy, and the BSD/Linux "This is ours, WE can use it" philosophy.
There are things about macs that, while they are probably obvious to mac users, are completely non-intuitive to everyone else. Devs don't want to spend time learning the quirks of a window manager, we don't care; we care about....DEVELOPING! When you've got something, like aqua, that just seems to continually get in your way, it sucks.
A personal example:
A few years ago, my parents had just moved into a new house. It was a really cool house, and they were really excited about it. I thought it would be fun to create a spoof of that show that used to be on MTV called "Cribs" (Athletes and singers walk through their houses and show them off with some slow motion/fast motion transitions and some hip hop music). A friend of mine helped by filming me walk around their house and host our fake cribs show.
When it came time to offload the video onto my PC, we ran into trouble, I didn't have the right firewire port for the cable we had (it was his camera). "No Problem", I thought, "I'll just plug it into my friend's laptop (a mac), copy the video to his machine, then SCP it to mine." Hooray, "Unix-Under-The-Hood!".
We imported the movie to "iMovie" (i think that is what it was), but I could NOT figure out how to save the video file. There was no "save" or "export". Nothing. I could "save to quicktime" or "save to the internet" or "save to $foo mac app", but no "Save to /home/scott/video.mpg".
I finally had to "export to quicktime", then do a find. |grep *.mpg to find the thing.
THAT is the sort of "getting in my way" that seems to be not only acceptable at Apple, but standard and required.
Another example is iPods. Ever try and take a song OFF of your ipod? Yes, you can do it, but Apple tries to get in your way as much as they can.
you say tomato i say tomato. the things you've listed aren't deal breakers for me. i've developed for a number of years now on all three systems and so far mac laptops take the cake easy. that's just me situation, though.
also, -1 for use preformatted text that ruins this whole discussion for everyone (without a wide browser window).
also, -1 for use preformatted text that ruins this whole discussion for everyone (without a wide browser window).
Sorry for that one. I found that the quickest way to format a list in a half-bearable way and didn't notice the width (big screen). Maybe PG can be bothered to add some kind of list markup one day...
2. Try typing in an obscured terminal window without raising it.
7. Yes, kind of. But saving in the wrong place because you can't quickly perform an operation on an obscured window and be sure focus is restored to the one you had before. (Or can you? I recall intermittent behaviour and am quite sure that at least keyboard focus is lost)
8. Last time I checked the laptops all had one button.
I know I'm just feeding the troll here but if you re-read the thread carefully you might notice that I am not the one posturing. In fact, maybe show it to someone else and let them judge. Thanks for playing, this conversation has ended.
1. Abysmal window manager, not replacable. Pixel waste, clumsy (long list here)
2. Mandatory Click-to-Focus and Click-Raise. Showstopper.
3. No home/end keys on apple laptops and other wierd layout choices.
4. Nasty BSD gang-rape under the hood. Yes, OSX has it's own "windows registry".
5. Idiotic shareware culture that makes you pay for the smallest things. $10 for a sane Macbook trackpad driver that should be in the OS in first place.
6. Inconsistent keyboard shortcuts, meta-key nonsense, Apple+Q.
7. Menus only on context-sensitive titlebar, sub-problem of #2
8. Single mouse button idiocy.
9. Finder.
10. Equivalent PC hardware can be had for 60% of the apple price