Tiger: a rush to market means that it’s full of interface errors
Andrew Orlowski has a nicely-paced and thought-out critique of Apple’s Tiger OS over at The Register.
He gives with the one hand:
If Microsoft had announced that the next version of Windows XP would sleep and wake up within three seconds with near 99.99 per cent reliability, would pick up a WiFi network within 10 seconds with similar consistency, and was now free of viruses, then users would flock to upgrade. But even the first, barely usable version of Mac OS X boasted this when it first appeared March 2001.
And then neatly takes away:
in areas where Mac OS X Tiger does offer impressive potential advantages over its predecessors, these are hampered by poor and often inexplicable interface design decisions. Tiger also loses points by removing features computer users have long taken for granted. Let’s deal with the latter first.Saving an MP3 that you’ve loaded from a web page and played in Safari now requires an additional $29.99 payment for Quick Time Pro. That will be reason enough not to upgrade for many. Roxio’s Toast no longer burns songs purchased from Apple’s Music Store. Right-clicking to download a file from Safari still works, but for how long is anyone’s guess. The trend isn’t in the right direction - Apple has gradually been removing multimedia features from its software products (see Apple de-socializes iTunes).
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Apple now views the Mac as a platform for a closed home entertainment system - based on iTunes and QuickTime - rather than an open computing platform.
He hits the mark over Spotlight:
More seriously, the user interface severely hampers what queries can be made. The dearth of boolean operators (AND is permitted) means that it isn’t possible to query for documents containing “Microsoft” and “Antitrust” but not “EU”.
(Though I feel someone is going to come up with a GUI tool that will let one do this as an app. Come on - there’s a command-line app for Spotlight, and the boolean stuff is now well-known. Get coding, people!)
(Oh, and here are clear explanations of how to do NOT and OR in Spotlight. You can already do the non-exclusive AND by including both terms. Or is it by using AND?)
And he rounds it off:
Spotlight is great technology, but it fails because the poor UI lets it down: its potential isn’t tapped. And Dashboard was only ever about bling.
It’s thoughtful, because it doesn’t take the improvements on face value, but rather asks “How good could this have been, with a little more work?”
Meanwhile I’m looking around for a different browser, as Safari is eating my RAM. Top says it’s got “101M” of my 1GB of RAM. OK, so I have a Java window sitting there, but even so, I don’t think that showing about ten windows in tabs really deserves one-tenth of my whole memory. Already tried Firefox - but it doesn’t have window navigation from the keyboard. Into the trash with you! Next: Omniweb. Next after that: paying for iCab 3. If I’m going to pay for a browser, why not a fast one which has always been on the Mac?
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- The hi pri of wi fi; and another Tiger review (4 May 2005; score: 42.54%)
- Two things for Mac users: John Siracusa on Tiger; and DEVONagent (28 April 2005; score: 41.24%)
- Wait, no, don't stop reading this! (12 March 2007; score: 40.83%)
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May 27th, 2005 at 6:27 pm
He should use Camino as the default browser. Hell everybody should.
May 27th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
I completely fail to understand why Mac pundits are constantly omitting Camino from (a) lists of alternatives Safari, from (b) mention as part of the ‘fresh browser’ movements, and from (c) lists of things they personally think they should try. Camino is as fast as Safari (until just a couple of months ago it was about twice as fast and still no mentions). Camino is faster than Firefox … in fact it kicks Firefox’s behind in all the things people praise Firefox for. Camino has a more mature codebase than Firefox with a fuller feature-set. (It has keyboard-switchable tabs.) Camino has a user-customisable search box, although in the current version you need to manually edit a .plist file to customise it, but complete instructions are given, and once you’ve done it, it blows every other search box on the planet away. Camino is the Firefox of the Mac — a fast, lean, Mozilla/Gecko alternative. Firefox only has any Mac users at all because of the gigantic cultural mindshare occupied by the Windows world, where Firefox is a good thing. On the Mac, it’s an also-ran. And a poor one.
May 27th, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Actually, I do have Camino, and I do use it a fair amount. I guess I’m really looking for something that I’m certain does the lot.
Though having said that, I can’t think of what Camino doesn’t do that the rest do. Thanks Dogger for the advice.
May 27th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
There’s one thing, and only one thing, that made me switch from Camino to Firefox: the terrific ScrapBook, which not only saves pages with all their graphic elements etc. but also allows me to search through them, highlighting every occurrence of a particular term. I don’t think Camino can do that, though I’d happily switch back once someone points out how to do *that* on Camino.
I agree that overall, Firefox is clumsy (not to speak of *ugly*) in comparison with Safari and Camino. It’s particularly infuriating when you try to open a few links in new tabs and the address of every page that doesn’t open just disappears from the address bar. And not being able to cycle through tabs with a keyboard shortcut — don’t get me started on that.
May 27th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
I’ve tried all the Mac browsers and regularly cycle round them as they get refresshed. I always come back to Firefox - it allows me to have the same environment that I use when I am using Windows machines and it has extensions that I cannot work without : greasemonkey, web developer, aardvark, flash click to play, pdf click to play and several others. None of the other browsers give me that kind of control over the pages. (Omniweb has the best Javascript debugger though). Safari doesn’t have a button to turn off underlined links - you have to go and edit some css file somewhere. That is just crass. It also doesn’t support fieldsets properly which is even worse. My only bugbear with fox on the Mac is that it doesn’t pick up proxy settings properly, but that rarely causes me a problem.
May 27th, 2005 at 11:06 pm
I recently switched to Firefox from Camino because I discovered a nasty bug which becomes apparent when you highlight and scroll off the edge of the window or frame. It carries on until the top of the document, highlighting as it goes, even if it takes ages. I haven’t found another browser which has this problem, and to be fair it’s been cured in the nightlies.
The biggest problem I have with Safari is editing a Wordpress entry with it. Typing into the Wordpress entry window is often really sluggish.
May 28th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
Getting back to the original post. Andrew may have some interesting and pertinent points, but we seem to have swung from the piss-poor “reviews” we were talking about a few weeks ago, to ones which are so incredibly detailed they result in the reader missing the real point. I certainly wouldn’t disagree that Apple seem to choose some poor interface decisions at times. But I think if you could look back through the years, you’d have the same moanings at each stage in the Mac OS evolution. Any normal person reading AO’s review might really end up both confused and missing the point (I as a relatively sophisticated user am not that worried for instance that Spotlight doesn’t make it easy to do complex searches - I like the flat out simplicity and speed).
The point is that Tiger costs £89 to users with older Macs and is free to someone buying a new machine. For the latter category, Tiger has definitely improved on what was already a compelling argument to buy a mac over a windows machine. Whether that improvement is vast or small may depend on your point of view. But overall Tiger is a significant positive step forward, and I would hate for potential switchers to be put off by essentially semantics.
For users with older Macs the decision may be harder. I think if you have 256MB RAM and don’t want to upgrade, perhaps not. But even at 512MB, on an old Powerbook 667Mhz, I see a general improvement in MOST things. Included in this is a longer battery life too as well as speed improvements etc. If you look at value for money, then £89 for such users is pretty good compared with the cost of the next higher processor machine. And that’s without looking at the features.
Should Apple have made the apps better eg Safari? I wish in a way they would, but what would that do to the third party market, which I think is very important? Apple need to provide a solid level of functionality across the main apps, without making them true “pro” versions which would probably eliminate the competition. For most people, most of the time, those apps will suffice. Let’s face it Safari is pretty damn good (and improved in Tiger) for the average Joe. Those of us who consider ourselves pro users are perhaps just a bit miffed because we end up having to run a few browsers as there is actually no best-of-breed (I’m writing this in NNW).
So, I say to the journos, by all means criticise some of the details and encourage a debate, but ensure the context is right, and that people do see the forest for the trees. Tiger is 10 steps forward with a few half steps back here and there. Most of those things will be ironed out as future point releases come along or other such fixes (eg the boolean search techniques).
Ian
May 29th, 2005 at 12:47 am
People! When using Firefox on the Mac you CAN switch tabs with a keyboard shortcut. Control-Tab to go forward a tab, and Control-Shift-Tab to go back.
May 31st, 2005 at 10:01 am
Yeah, I thought that’s how you cycled tabs in Mac Firefox. Same on Windows, btw.