Sunday, April 10, 2005

As I wrote in this space just about two years ago, OS X took a while before it was ready for prime time in the audio and music arenas ... And yet, there are things about OS X as it stands today -- whether you call it Panther, Jaguar, Hyena, Hippopotamus or whatever -- that drive me absolutely nuts. I don't mean they're irritating: I mean they make me want to throw my computer out of a third-story window, which is a feeling I've had before about some equipment, but never my Macs.

The proliferation of library directories in OS X would make a pregnant sturgeon blush. There are libraries at the root level, libraries inside the system and libraries for each user account. There are ones for audio and ones for plug-ins and ones with different developers' names on them. How do we know what lives where? The answer: We don't! Not me, not the folks who write your support documents and, most dangerously, not the developers.

I'm told this is in the nature of UNIX. Well, guess what? I didn't buy a Mac to run UNIX and neither did 95 percent of the other Mac owners. And you know that, Steve: You've worked really hard to hide some of the more onerous aspects of UNIX behind all that groovy-looking Aqua stuff, so why couldn't you do something about this nonsense, too?

Who decided that from now on you can only move a window by grabbing its top? When you have as many windows open as I usually do, the last thing you want to do is go searching for a title bar when you're trying to move something out of the way.

And what's the deal about non-standard characters in file names? I know there are rules in UNIX about this -- how they can't contain slashes or question marks -- but why are they enforced so inconsistently? If I copy a bunch of old files from one disk to another, sometimes the process will stop dead when it finds a file -- inevitably, deep inside some sub-sub-sub-sub-folder so it takes five minutes to find it -- with a slash in it (I have a lot of these as I like to put dates on things), but sometimes it just pushes it on through like stewed prunes. And sometimes when I'm copying, the thing will hang up on some invisible file called "_Icon." What's up with that? If I can't see it and the system can't copy it, why the hell is it trying to?

And how about while you're wasting all that time with that "optimizing" thing you do, you take care of that "fix permissions" nonsense so I don't have to do it manually every time I start a studio session? Because I know if I don't, all of a sudden at a crucial point, I'll be denied access to some critical file and everything will grind to a halt. And why the hell do I have to deal with "permissions" in my home studio anyway? It's my machine, no one else uses it, so why can't I just do what I want with it?

Steve, I love your machines and I can't imagine life without them. And you know that I'll keep buying them as long as you keep making them. But a lot of us creative types bought Macs in the first place so we wouldn't have to deal with this horsesh#*, and for a good many years, we didn't. You'd make a lot of us happier if you could make it smell nicer or, better still, sweep it outta here.