Monday, March 02, 2009

Pure Mac intuitiveness


I think I've had the worst luck with Macs in general; what you see here is a picture of Firefox on my iMac. Every single time I open Firefox, that's what I get and I have to grab that little window somewhere between the red and green little icons, drag it over to the left of my monitor, then make the window bigger. I think this started happening after I removed a monitor from the iMac.

Maybe it's just me, but I just don't see how that's intuitive.

By the way, I wanted to edit the image to add some more context but I didn't find an obvious way to edit the picture, neither from the context menu, or once on the preview, there's gotta be a way (you know, like in Windows, just right click, edit), is just doesn't seem to be all that intuitive.

7 comments:

danio said...

What has a bug in firefox got to do with mac intuitiveness?

It seeems strange that apple don't supply a simple image editor. The situation on windows is not really better though. Right click, edit may open paint or MS office picture manager depending on what is installed. And if office is installed, it is not straightforward to open a file in paint. Editing the extension application associations is just a complete joke...

BlackTigerX said...

Why should the application have to worry about such things?

If a monitor has been removed, the operating system should relocate all windows to the available monitor, end of story.

About the image edit, Windows also provides the "open with", and gives you the option to change it to always open with that app without having to open the file associations.

danio said...

Yeah would be nice if it would move windows to a visible view but neither Windows nor MacOS X do this.

The whole open with in windows is seriously flawed. As soon as you modify it you can no longer add custom actions. You have to click restore to put things back, and only then will you have access to the advanced dialog box. There is also no way to directly change the associations using the advanced editor from a file of a given type. You have to go to tools, folder options, file types, and scroll down to the file type. Which doesn't even group files - JPE, JPEG, JPG all need doing individually. And you can't even resize the dialog so that there is some chance of having a decent view of the huge list of file extensions! Like I said a complete joke. I hope MS will improve this area for win7.

BlackTigerX said...

I don't know anything about the API in OS X, but to me it seems like a deficiency in the API/event model of the actual operating system.

After all, it does know the other monitor is gone.

The whole open in Windows may be flawed, but it just works for most of the cases, whereas in the Mac is no where to be seen.

rb3m said...

Windows doesn't do it? I recently lost a monitor in my Vista system (yes, that Vista) and all windows were moved to the remaining monitor. No lost windows at all.

danio said...

@Roberto: It is the responsibility of the application to check its position against screen geometry when restoring. Most apps behave well in this regard now that multiple monitors are common, but there are still a few with problems: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/bring-misplaced-off-screen-windows-back-to-your-desktop-keyboard-trick/ http://www.opentechsupport.net/forums/archive/topic/36624-1.html http://proreviewer.com/2008/08/25/recover-hidden-off-screen-windows-with-this-simple-tip-and-freeware-program-forcewindowvisible/

Justin Wilson said...

OS X also has 'Open With' and it's also in the same spot
RClick->Open With

There's also the nice little Command+i (brings up the info dialog) which allows you to change the 'Open With' application and also permanently change it for all files of the same type.

I did this yesterday because I moved from OpenOffice at work to NeoOffice and had to update .doc .xls etc. to use NeoOffice instead of OpenOffice.

Firefox is not a native Mac application and I too have also had weird issues with it occasionally. But I've also had issues with non-native Windows apps as well (including almost all Java UI apps). So the Firefox issue may be more related to Firefox than OS X