At Home with John and Debbie

(This page is a work in progress — I will post a blog entry when I consider it complete)

When I wrote my article on the iPod user interface and its problems, I started with an explanation of my history with Apple products, and one of the first comments the article received was one suggesting that having no experience of Mac OS since System 7, I was not qualified to write about UI.

While that is clearly nonsense, it did plant a seed in my mind. I knew that with Mac OS X, Apple had moved over to a UNIX core, so I could see that it might be a little more stable than the virus ridden System 7 machines I had used at university. People kept telling me that things had improved in other areas. I was in a habit of criticising Macs based on experience that was 10 years out of date.

When the Mac Mini came out, like a lot of other people I was wowed by the fantastic form factor. I was in the market for an always-on home machine on which to store my MP3s and photographs. I was in the market for a DVD writer. I was curious about how the iPod experience may become a little smoother in an all-Apple environment. I fancied GarageBand. After years of using mostly Open Source applications and utilitarian commercial applications not known for their highly polished UI (e.g. Lotus Notes), Picasa opened my eyes to just how good a carefully honed piece of non-Open-Source software could be. So, after a little agonising, I bought one.

My Mac Mini arrived about 3 weeks ago. It’s a 1.42GHz version, it came with 256MB of RAM, 802.11 wireless networking (or “Airport” as Apple name it) and a “Superdrive” DVD writer.

I think I’ve spent enough time with it now to write a “first impressions” review, so here goes.

A Proviso

Before we begin, I need to be clear about something. The bulk of my computing experience is with Linux, Solaris, AIX and Windows. This may colour my expectations. However, unless I explicitly say so, nothing in this article is intended as a comparison with any of those systems. If I say I don’t like the placement of some UI element in Mac OS, don’t assume that I mean the equivalent in Windows is ideal.

I have used the Mac enough that I’ve developed muscle-memory for certain operations to the extent that when working in Windows I’m hitting Backspace (the Mac Way) rather than Delete (the Windows Way) when trying to delete a file. This gives you an idea of how much Mac experience went into this review.

“It Just Works”?

Does the Mac “Just Work”, as Apple advertises? Sort of.

I set up the hardware and turned it all on, and sure enough, I was taken to a setup utility which had me set up with a username and password, set up my regional details, wireless networking, etc. in short order. I logged on, and was presented with a desktop. So far so good, although I don’t believe this should be taken as a major achievement — after all this is standard hardware running a preinstalled OS.

Due to the timing of my purchase, the preinstalled OS was Mac OS X 10.3 (”Panther”), but a DVD of Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was provided in the box. I installed this, without incident.

I was immediately impressed by the little gimmicks in the presentation: the way windows get “sucked into” the Dock when they are minimised, the well designed icons, the fancy “because we can” rotating cube transition when switching users. I even sighed a little “ooh” at the magnifier feature of the Dock, where the icons are scaled proportionally to how close they are to the mouse pointer — before I disabled it for the pointless distraction it is.

However, not everything was perfect. In the spirit of Steve Jobs’ invitation for Mac Mini buyers to “bring your own display, keyboard and mouse”, I had bought a rather nice BenQ wireless USB keyboard and mouse set to use with my Mac. Having run the keyboard detection tool, (which asks you to press the key to the right of left-shift, and from that, tells you what keyboard you have), and with the input locale correctly set to “British”, I found that my “@” key typed a double-quote, and vice versa.

It took a search around the Internet to partly solve this: a third party provides an input locale configuration file for British Windows keyboards. This is not the kind of low-level fiddling I expected to need to do. Even now, Mac OS won’t let me set this mapping as the default input locale — I must switch to it manually after logging in. The input locale reverts to ordinary “British” occasionally, for reasons I’ve not established.

The characters \,|,` and ¬ are still wrongly placed — I need to get around to downloading and experimenting with ResEdit — an application that merits its own “Precautions” instructions. Again, not the kind of fiddling I expected to need to do. Remember, Apple explicitly invited me to use any old keyboard I had lying around with my Mac Mini.

My other major “Just Works” issue was that performance was abysmal. I knew when I bought the machine that 256MB of RAM was going to harm performance, and the plan all along was to buy 1GB of RAM from a third party supplier (avoiding Apple’s outrageous RAM prices). I wasn’t prepared for just how bad things would be with 256MB.

Running just iPhoto (the bundled photograph management software) and Finder (the filesystem browser — which is always running), it would often take 20 seconds or more to switch from one to the other. Yes, I timed it. During this time there was often no visual feedback whatsoever that anything was happening. I fell into a usage mode where I would actively avoid switching between applications for fear of the machine grinding to a halt — something I’ve not had to do on any system for many years. Even browsing an application’s Help was painfully slow.

I know that iPhoto is a memory-hungry application, but the application is bundled with the Mac Mini and features prominently on the packaging and in the marketing materials. I think Apple is making a mistake by putting so little RAM in their base configuration — and is making a mistake by pricing their own RAM so prohibitively high. I can imagine many people dipping their toes into the Mac world and being badly put off by an experience like this.

The good news is, once I fitted my 1GB of replacement RAM, all these performance problems went away.

Window Management

Moving and resizing windows, minimising, maximising, and finding them, are all pretty fundamental features of a WIMP GUI.

There are no major surprises in the Mac OS desktop in this respect, but there are some strange features.

To resize a window, you drag a little resizing handle at the bottom-right corner. This means that it’s easy to extend a window downwards, rightwards or both, but if you want to extend the window upwards or to to the left, you have to resize and move it as two steps. I don’t see why every edge of the window can’t be used for resizing, as it is in Windows and in many window managers for X.

The Dock is a combined task bar and application launch bar that (be default) lives at the bottom of the screen, but does not extend all the way to the left or right. Applications interact with the dock in inconsistent ways when you try to resize them so they go behind the Dock. Here are three examples.

• Safari (the bundled Web browser) will not resize behind the dock, whatever you do. This seems like the most sensible approach to me.
• Firefox (an excellent Open Source web browser) stops resizing when your mouse reaches the Dock, but if you move the mouse around the Dock, to the right, it will resize behind the Dock.
• iTunes (the bundled music player) behaves the same way as Firefox, except that it slightly overlaps the Dock before it stops resizing.

In all cases, you are free to move (not resize) the window behind the Dock.

It seems odd to me that this inconsistency should exist: why is there more than one kind of window?

Closing, minimising and “expanding” (Apple’s choice of word) windows is achieved via a set of red/amber/green “traffic lights” at the top left of each window. Perhaps it’s just force of habit from using Windows, or perhaps it’s my strong right-handedness, but it feels to me as if these controls are in the wrong place. It seems more natural to me to put a “main” set of controls on the right hand side.

The choice of colours doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me - red means “stop” I suppose, but the close button is more “go away” than “stop”. Green, I suppose means “Go ahead and be big”, and amber is just there because, well, that’s what completes a set of red, something and green.

When you move your mouse button onto the set of buttons, a “-” appears in the yellow Minimise button and a “+” appears in the green Expand button. This gives a better hint as to what these buttons do, but I don’t see why it was deemed necessary not to display these symbols all the time: it’s not swish enough to justify itself as a gee-whizz graphical trick.

Again, the way these controls work is inconsistent from one application to another. Sometimes the red button quits the application altogether, other times it leaves the application running windowless — a marker in the dock indicates that it is still running, and clicking its icon brings up its window. Even this is not consistent: sometimes the window that comes up is in the same state as the window you closed, but in other applications a new empty document is created.

The yellow Minimise button works consistently — and it uses that satisfyingly gloopy animation where the window gets sucked into the Dock.

The green Maximise button behaves in a way that I have not learned to predict. What I expect from a maximise button is for the window to grow as big as it can — so the left and right edges touch the side of the screen, the top edge touches the menu bar, and the bottom edge touches the top of the Dock. Sometimes, this is what happens. Other times, the window changes size to what appears to be a completely arbitrary size, somewhat larger than the previous size. The maximise button also has a nasty habit of expanding a window partly beneath the dock.

The Mac user interface retains the menu bar placement of the original Mac OS, where a single menu bar occupies the top of the screen, its contents changing according to the currently focused application — and even with what’s currently happening within that application. I’ve always found this odd, but it has not been a major irritation, once I got used to it. The only real problem is when an errant click on the desktop, en route from application to menu button, switches focus to the Finder, so I have to return to my application to reactivate its menu.

A major irritant in the pre OS X Macs I used to use, was the difficulty in interacting with one application while another application was on screen. For example, when writing code in an editor while viewing documentation in a Web browser, or (as we frequently would at university) using an application and writing about the experience in a word processor. What made this difficult was that Mac OS would group every window associated with one application, so that clicking on one would bring all of them to the foreground. The window you clicked on may not obscure the window you wanted to see, but one of its siblings was likely to. I’m happy to say that this is mostly not the case any more. If I click on a window to bring it to the foreground, its siblings to not come with it. Clicking on the application’s Dock icon or command-tabbing to the application still brings all the windows to the front, but I can live with that.

Click-to-focus is the order of the day on Mac OS X, and your first click on an unfocussed window does nothing but get you focus. I’m finding this hard to get used to. For example, I’ll click and drag to select text from an unfocussed window, then wonder why it’s not selecting. This is just something to get used to I suppose.

Exposé

In a multitasking OS, it doesn’t take long to fill your desktop with an awful lot of windows, and it can be difficult to find the window you want at a given time. Apple’s solution to this is Exposé. This feature allows you to bind function keys, or “hot corners” of the screen for your mouse pointer to hit, which cause various window management events to occur. By default, hitting F11 causes all your windows to rush off the screen, so you can interact with the desktop — hit it again to bring them back. Hitting F9 causes all your windows to shrink down into thumbnails small enough to arrange themselves onto your desktop without overlapping. If you click a thumbnail, they’ll all revert to full size, with the clicked window in the foreground.

This does work very well. It also has the wow factor thanks to the fluid way the windows whizz around the screen. I do think that Mac OS would benefit from a virtual desktop system, alongside Exposé (3rd party virtual desktop applications exist). Exposé is quite a new addition to Mac OS, and it’s welcome. It’s quite common to need to access the desktop, and without Exposé it would have been a real bind to shuffle windows around to expose (!) the part of the desktop you needed before dragging.

On a related note, I’m glad the wastebasket is now on the Dock, where it’s always reachable, rather than on the desktop, where it was possible to hide it under a window — although of course Exposé now makes that reasoning obsolete!

Spotlight

Spotlight is a new feature to OS X 10.4, and it’s been the subject of much crowing by Apple. It’s billed as an instant search of every file on your system (similar to Google Desktop Search, Linux’s Beagle, and some foilware from Microsoft).

It does almost exactly what it promises, but no more. Type a word into the ever-present search field, and it will give you a list of items matching that string: files with that word in the filename or in the file contents, folders, applications, etc.

For Spotlight to find individual items held by an application, the application must somehow encapsulate that information in a single file per item, although the application may then provide plugin support for Spotlight in order to index on information which is external to that file. It seems that Apple’s own applications don’t do this to the fullest extent. In a review I read elsewhere, a user was blown away when Spotlight matched a piece of text in a layer in a Photoshop file. This is impressive, yet Spotlight is unaware of iPhoto albums or rolls.

Nonetheless, it’s obvious that Spotlight will be very useful, especially when one considers the iniquities of the Finder…

Finder

Finder is the Mac file and folder browser — like Windows Explorer. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, or how it could be improved. I just know it feels a little clumsy. I know I’m not alone in this: apparently “FTFF” is a common refrain in the Ars Technica Mac forums, standing for “Fix the Finder”.

The Finder is cleverly integrated with the filesystem: changes to files are instantly reflected in the Finder, no need to refresh. I have managed to break this on one occasion: when transferring my MP3 collection to the Mac using its built-in FTP server, the Finder stopped noticing new folders as they were created. The files were visible in a terminal window “ls”, but it took a logout and a login to get the Finder to show the folders in a window.

Configuration

The system preferences editor is quite easy to use, and in many cases changes are instantaneous, not requiring an “apply” button. In particular, TCP/IP settings a very accessible, and services such as FTP, SSH etc. are very easy to set up indeed.

(TO BE CONTINUED)