daver's Profile

Actually, ya know what, I don't want new features, I want refinement of existing features. I want a working office suite. They had one a long time ago called Appleworks, then Clarisworks, then Appleworks. Then they just let it die. Why? Now it's taking forever to get a productivity suite back. And I want improvements to iCal, Mail, Address Book, and Backup. (OK, Time Machine sounds promising, I hope it lives up to the hype.) And I want interface refinement. When is the new improved Finder coming out? I can see the appeal in Apple's strategy of trying to do a little of everything (photog, video, music), but at the same time it seems they're neglecting the basics, consistency in the GUI, for example. The Mac does a lot of things very well, but if they're not careful it can end up like Windows, a bloat of confusing, inconsistent features.

I've seen this before, people who were taught on Windows preferring Windows. Hopefully we'll see that as more and more people are exposed to both simultaneously, they'll tend to prefer Macs.

Dude, you are soooooooooo wrong, and I'll tell you why. Solitaire 'til Dawn is waaaay more polished than Freecell. :-p

It gives me too many spinning beachballs. Yep yep yep! I am a memory hog, too, lots of open windows/tabs, and I frequently find that Safari bogs waaaaay down. Sometimes I suspect that it's trying to keep up with all the activity on all open pages (animated gifs and such), even if the page is not currently visible. Just a guess. In any case, yes, perhaps there are a number of fixes, cleaning out caches and such, but really, these ought to be done behind the scenes, the user shouldn't have to do a bunch of housekeeping all the time to keep Safari running well. I like these ideas, too: Remembering open pages on restart Draggable tabs List all open pages on the Window menu maybe list them in a hierarchy, like: .Window1 . Tab1 . Tab2 . Tab3 .Window2 . Tab1 . Tab2 ...

"Only show relevant file types in open and save dialogs." No, no, NO! That's one of the features I hate the *most* about Windows. When I want to save a new file I often want to name it the same as another file of a different type. But I can't see any other types! Plus, it creates the illusion that there aren't any other files in the folder. People will say "Hey, where's my file?!" A better solution (which is what OSX already does) is to grey out non-relevant file types. As for the problem of clutter, see below: "I don’t want to see all my iMovie, Excel, iDVD etc files." Dude, haven't you ever heard of subfolders? You don't just throw all your docs into one gigantic folder.

Actually, I think bookmarks could be quite useful, if the feature actually worked right. I don't think it's ever synced correctly for me. It gets some of the bookmarks, but never all of them.

The reasoning in this article starts off strong, (iPod isn't necessarily the reason behind rising Mac sales, and it's specious reasoning to say that correlation implies causation), but then the article does a 180 and crashes in flames as it then tries to do what it just demonstrated is fallacious. Just as suggesting that the iPod *is* the reason behind rising sales because you noticed a correlation is a logical fallacy, so is claiming that it is *not* the reason because you noticed the lack of a correlation. You came up with a nice plausible argument: past behavior doesn't show a correlation between the two, so the current correlation must be spurious, but I can think of a simple countertheory: a lag effect. It took a while for the "Halo Effect" to ramp up. Isn't it only relatively recently (last year or so?) that iPod sales really started to explode? And how often do people upgrade their computers? I'm sure most don't upgrade every year, or even 2 years. Maybe 3, 4, 5 years? A Halo Effect could easily take 5+ years to really show itself. I like the inital thrust of the article, but it ends up commiting the same mistake it's observing in others. Really the only way we will ever know what's going on is with some good, long term, empirical data. I personally have no opinion either way, I think the iPod probably helps, but it isn't sufficient, Apple must also make good computers that appeal to people.