Some elementary suggestions for people just arriving to Mac OS X. (Mostly written around the Tiger era.)
Things that make the user less safe:
- Leaving the status bar in Safari off by default
- It makes phishing people a lot simpler, alas.
- Fix it with Command-slash, or in the View menu.
- Hiding file extensions by default
- Yes, it is prettier, but also makes it easier to dupe the user into opening or running something that looks harmless.
- Fix it in Finder -> Preferences -> Advanced
Things that are just strange:
- Defaulting to Cardiff
- I realise it is lexically first after you choose UK, but Cardiff is a slightly dopey default. This would be less irritating if it was presented on first setup, when you are choosing language and so forth.
- It's great that it flows through to the default Dashboard widget, but instinctively I started fixing it in the widgets before changing it in System Preferences / Date & Time / Time Zone where there is a 'Closest City' widget.
Things that are ugly or wrong:
- Too blue
- Tiger (OS X 10.4) is very shiny, and very blue. However, it reuses the blue-ness in ways that are quite confusing. In particular the progress bar in Safari's address bar - which is a nice space-saver - is hardly distinguishable from selecting the text of the address. Changing the select colour to a pale green or purple makes it much easier for me.
- Return in Finder edits the name
- It's
apple-o to open, which seems brain damaged. You open things a lot more often than you change their names.
- No way to selectively delete things from the Trash
- Performing the 'delete this' action from inside the trash should blow it away. I end up up with quite a lot of things in the trash and often just want to delete the five biggest things. Instead there is just the all-or-nothing 'Empty Trash'.
- While we're on the trash, you can't restore things to where they came from, just explicitly move them out to somewhere of your choosing. Hell, I can't even see a way to list their original location. BeOS really spoiled me.
- Address book phone numbers
- Defaults to something quite American that mangles UK phone numbers. I've put in:
- 07### ### ###
- 02# #### ####
- 01### ### ###
- +44 7### ### ###
- +44 2# #### ####
- +44 1### ### ###
which cover most of the numbers I happen to have in my phone. Of course you need to figure out how to type a bloody # first. If you have an Apple UK keyboard, it's on alt-3, folks.
- Imagine if Apple shipped it with something that would cope with international numbers directly, and a set of rules for each country to handle the national numbers.
- Safari's toolbar
- Safari is lovely. A good search box, clear address bar and simple old-Netscape-style drag and drop bookmarking. All that means the default + (for add bookmark) icon is far better off replaced by the Home button. View -> Customize Toolbar… to sort it out.
- Dragging and dropping a picture out of Safari is shiny (sometimes too shiny).
- You get a lovely, large, translucent thumbnail and it works nicely to save to arbitrary locations. However, if things are a bit tight on memory it can sit there for 10-20 seconds figuring out the thumbnail, then maybe not being able to and giving you a generic icon. If it can't manage it in the first half-second, I'd like the icon and to get on with my day.
- Safari's feed handling
- It's great that it makes RSS feeds more accessible, but…
- I wish it talked about feeds rather than 'RSS'; especially since it does a bang up job of Atom feeds too;
- I wish it didn't hack perfectly good HTTP URIs into something beginning
feed://
- I wish you could drag and drop the location - which works so nicely out of Safari's address bar. Coupled with the previous one it makes getting the location into a terminal or my feed reader of choice a real pain.
I imagine these things will improve over time, and they're still doing a decent job just making a feed display usefully in the browser at all.
Good stuff that's off by default (for a geek):
- Anti-aliasing in Terminal
- 10.4: Terminal Menu -> Window Settings… -> Display
- 10.5: Terminal Menu -> Preferences -> Settings… -> Text
- You probably want to pick a decent sized font and tick Anti-aliasing
- Terminal lives in Applications / Utilities. I dislike this approach where Apple have put it so far out of the way, then made it look pretty ugly - both the font and the fact that the default prompt is some mangles string of the first user's name (which is how it names the machine on setup). It suggests to people that there are dragons in there, rather than that it is a fairly simple thing with which you can do little things quickly.
- Terminal quitting
- By default you exit a Terminal and it just sits there like a lemon saying '
[Process Completed]'. You can fix this in … Settings -> Shell.
- Page Up and Down scroll the history
- To me they should be sent to the terminal app you are using. You can fix this in … Settings -> Keyboard, but the interface is a bit odd. The 'string to send to shell' to choose is
\033[6~ for page down (\033[5~ for page up). By default they are bound to shift+PageUp/Down.
Other handy software
Some things I install on basically every Mac I own:
- StartupSound.prefpane
- However cleverly designed the Mac's startup sound is, I never want to hear it during someone's presentation.
- TinkerTool
- Very handy for setting lots of little hidden options that the OS has options for, but that there is no UI to tweak them.