The curse of the persistent bugs
by moose
DISCLAIMER: I love Mac OS X, I really do.
Pfew, that’s it, hate-mail deflective shield engaged. Or not. Since most people know that when you start a sentence by “I love Mac OS X, I really do.” it means you’re gonna bash it like hell in the following lines. Which I’m not going to do. Well, OK, a bit, but I’ll be gentle.
Well, there are many things you can say that don’t work in Mac OS X, or that don’t work the way they should do or the way people would like them to. The point of this post is not to rehash what’s been posted everywhere, but to tell you about a couple of tiny bugs that have been, well, bugging me since quite a long (too long) time.
You see, there is this tendency in Apple to not consider users that are not part of the mainstream user base. Yes, I can hear the clamor raising “What? Apple is all about non-mainstream etc etc”. True but not exactly. I’m talking about people who are not in the mainstream APPLE user base. Like me: I’m French so I run my OSX in French. I’m fairly computer-savvy so I like to see invisible files once in a while. I live in a remote place where dial-up 56K still rulez, and about $80 (that’s eighty, yes) a month.
So, what’s the story?
First, there is this bug that has been is OS X since version 10.0 (and even the Public beta which I remember buying, although the localization wasn’t complete anyway): if you run OS X in another language than English and turn on “display all file extensions” in the Finder preferences, OS X stops localizing the high-level folders and apps. Let me explain. In French, the root folders of OS X are labeled Applications, Système, Bibliothèque, Utilisateurs and within your home directory you have Bibliothèque, Bureau, Images, Séquences etc. (no, that’s not UNIX /etc you geeks). Well, turn on file extension display and bang! all your high-level directories are displayed with their English names: System, Library, Desktop, Movies… Same with Apple’s applications: Carnet d’adresses becomes Address book, Lecteur DVD becomes DVD Player, iChat becomes iChat (erh, forget that last one).
So, that’s not a terribly bad bug, but it is still really annoying.
Another bug related to localization (and don’t start me on the quality of the French localization of iLife5/iWork) is that whenever you launch an application that does not have a French localization (no French.lproj), the Apple menu TURNS TO ENGLISH! Yes, all the content of the Apple menu is now displayed in English. Well, it’s not because I use an English app that I want my Apple menu to be displayed in English. Maybe Apple thinks it a feature so as to avoid confusing the users? Well, it has been around since Public Beta so maybe people like it and I’m not normal.
The third bug is the following, and it has been around for quite some time, I’d say since 10.3 but it might have been there before. Here it is: I have a snow Airport base station which (apart from being in the direct beam of an Island-wide 802.11b transmitter which causes all sorts of interferences to my home wireless network) works fine and is plugged to a telephone line so I can use dialup on the 4 macs at home via Airport. It DOES work fine. Although whenever you wake up a Mac from sleep, the menu you get from the Airport menu extra does not propose you the Connect… submenu. That’s right, you get the name of the Airport network, but there is no arrow indicating the submenu where the Connect option should be to tell the base station to dialup. If you want to have it back (which is nice since it avoids you to have to open the Internet connection app each time, you have two solutions.
1) open said Internet connection app, uncheck “show Airport status in menu bar” and check it again. Bingo there you have your “Connect submenu back”. And it will stay there until the next time your computer goes to sleep.
2) disconnect your machine from the Airport network and reconnect it, using the Airport status menu.
This is extremely irritating. Really.
Fourth and last bug, and that one is a real pain in the a**, but it has only been introduced by 10.3.8. Login to any user account while having Airport active and a base station using dialup NOT CONNECTED to Internet. Well, just go have a cup of coffee and wait while enjoying your beautiful desktop picture and dock icons, because that’s all you are going to see for the next 5-6 minutes. Oh yes! and the spinning beachball. That’s right, the finder just hangs there for 5-6 minutes. After which it just pops-up like usual. Funny enough, you can launch and use any of the apps you have in the dock. Turn off Airport, logout/login again and boum! the Finder appears as snappily as ever.
So, what do these bugs have in common? Well, they affect only a minority of users, which are in fairly non-standard situations, at least for an Apple user, and which are mostly in low tech situations (dialup). I understand that Apple has limited resources and that they have to dedicate them to ironing out major bugs that affect lots of users, but bugs that have been around since 10.0 should have been squashed at some point. I’d hate to shell out $149 for Tiger and have the same disappearing Connect… submenu bug. I’d hate it.
C’mon Apple, innovation doesn’t mean you have to leave people on the side of the road.
That said, I really love Mac OS X, I really do. Promise.
