What Really Pisses Hugh Off

I am just so racked off with the useless fiddling they have done.
Apart from the known Mail-Exchange bug and the fact that Safari crashes, and now iTunes and Mail are crashing on me…

What is with the Address Book and iCal – they were perfectly good apps; now I can’t see overviews of my contacts on my 30″ screen, and can’t even see the appointment times easily in month view.
And since when did Apple encourage applications with non-standard titles bars?
Jesus wept.
My Mac is not an iPad, just as my iPad is not a Mac.
It is like they actually don’t want people to have large desktop Macs.
I am even starting to use Windows 7 apps (in a VM) as they are sometimes less annoying than the Apple ones.
The interactions should be different between a little 1024×768 screen with touch and a 2560×1600 screen with just a mouse and keyboard.
Oh sorry, they are.
On the iCal on the iPad the Today button is the bottom left; on the Mac iCal it is the top right.
And the “+” is bottom right and top left.
Let’s make sure I can never find anything.
Why not shuffle the buttons all the time so I always have to look for them?

And what is with shaving a few pixels off the scroll bars as a great big advance, making it harder to hit them?
While at the same time wasting huge amounts of pixels in the aforementioned Address Book and iCal.
Yeah, I want pictures of silly bits of torn paper and staples instead of actually being able to hit the right bit of the screen.
And then they even switch off the simple things that I expect in the HCI.
Can I hover over an appointment to get details? No.
I used to be able to right-click on an email address in the To list of Mail to remove it – not any more. Click on the silly little arrow to bring up the context menu.
On and on.
Why would you actually remove things like that? They weren’t harming anyone.

And what about “Restore windows when quitting…”?

I close the document, then I quit.
But it still insists on opening the closed document the next time.

Apart from having to wait while a 10 MB word document opens before I can see the 100K one I double clicked on, it can be entirely inappropriate.
I fire up Excel to show some project plans, and it begins by displaying the sheet with my bank account transactions on.
Not what I would want on the screen in a large project meeting.
Sometimes I can imagine that people legitimately look at documents that would constitute a disciplinary offence if they were to find their way onto a public screen at an inappropriate time 🙂

And all that greyness – everyone knows that colours help to give me visual clues. And actually for some buttons I can’t even tell whether they are active or not, the shades are so similar.

I sort of vaguely hope these things will be sorted in 10.7.2, but somehow I think there will be more of the same for a lot of it.

I wanted to open a Cash ISA.
When I clicked on the Download Application Form button on http://fixed.postofficeisa.co.uk/isaapplication.aspx it downloaded a windows .exe self-extracting archive.
I moved it to a windows box, and it extracted to the expected pdf.

But for dog’s sake!
There are any number of other self-extracting formats that are less platform-dependent.
And for a 1.3M file, do you really need to compress it nowadays?

And it gets worse, it turns out.
If you let the page time out on you you don’t get a nice message; you get a Server error:

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
The resource cannot be found.
Description: HTTP 404. The resource you are looking for (or one of its dependencies) could have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. Please review the following URL and make sure that it is spelled correctly.

Requested URL: /Timeout.aspx

Stunning.