So, it’s been a few days under the mac-life way, and I’m not half as impressed as Steve Jobs would like, I’m sure. Don’t get me wrong, the OS is mostly OK, but error messages are extremely lacking. It turns out my brand new imac came complete with a broken cd/dvd drive. I was trying to transfer my backed up episodes of Sheep In The Big City, but when I’d put a disc in the mac, it would spit it right back out. At first I’m wondering if the burner on the PC is crap, or it’s a bunch of bad CDr’s, or maybe I’m even putting them in wrong side out…but no, putting them in in reverse results in a quicker ejecting, so it must be something with the discs. But for some cynical reason, I try one more thing, plugging in an external usb CD/DVD drive, and low and behold, the discs are sorta readable. I say sorta, because of the 10 discs written by iTunes-source-machine, 5 weren’t usable at all, failing with “unknown error code” <rolls eyes>. Talk about poor exception handler writing. So much for the vaunted mac programming way.
On the other hand, what discs it could read, it was able to load out of order, with gaps and whatnot. So I’m atleast 50% recovered/transfered, and it automagically reaquired the content licenses, so there wasn’t any pop up interruptions before they started playing.
iPhoto is annoying as all get-out. The complete lack of zoom, unless I’m in edit mode, seems crazy to me. It rather stupidly loads thumbnails without any sort of minimum size exception warning. It’s red-eye remover works OK though. With all the screen real-estate wasted at the bottom of the application, it seems reallly silly that they only put one rotate button, but at least there is a keyboard shortcut for clockwise rotates.
I’m definetly not a fan of the way the top bar is semi-transparent, combined with the stary background. It took me a couple of moments to realize that some menu options didn’t have strange unexplained blue dots highlighting them, but rather it were just some stars bleeding thru from below. Maybe if the top bar had an auto-hide mode.
Network discovery sucks ass. I’ve had to manually enter each windows PC, and it never sees the old iMac in the kitchen. I’ve seen posts about the airport express (which I was thinking of getting) and it’s limitations in regards to private networks build around 192.168 instead of 10.10, and wonder if that has something to do with it. Certainly all the mac help seems to assume that everything will just work.
That’s probably my biggest complaint, is that mac docs and apps seem to assume everything will work out fine, and so have no capacity or information, for dealing with the unexpected. It worries me, because in software QA, if you only test the happy scenarios, you are guaranteed to be missing out on some of your nastiest bugs.
Like the way my apple TV has died. It’s not clear if there’s some conflict between it and the mac, or if it’s just gotten too hot sitting idle for the last 6 months, but it locks up pretty quickly once you try to start navigating the menus. I just went ahead and unplugged it. I only got it to watch Sheep on a bigger screen than my 15.4 laptop, and it of course doesn’t work with my biggest, old skool, TV, only the tiny HD compatible joker.
Tags: complaints, mac, QA