Two Weeks In

10:42  up 8 days, 21:46, 3 users, load averages: 1.56 1.41 1.14

The iMac has been pretty stable, after the first few days of instability. I haven't had many application crashes (only OmniWeb is prone to die) and haven't needed to reboot.

While the iMac experience is generally good, I do have a few minor complaints:

  • It is not as quiet as I was led to believe. It's more quiet than a PC, but not so silent that I don't notice it.
  • I am disappointed with the smoothness of window resizing and other common operations. When resizing a window, a frame only updates itself a few times a second, leading to significant lag between where the mouse is and where the window corner is.
  • Xcode doesn't include any reference documentation for the standard C and C++ libraries. I find myself going to MSDN to look things up. I know Apple would prefer that I use the Core Framework and Cocoa APIs, but it would be nice to have better support for plain-old standard C/C++ programming.
  • Xcode's integrated CVS support sucks. It doesn't handle nib files. That's ridiculous. So I'm using the Terminal for CVS operations.
  • Many of Apple's applications don't follow the Human Interface Guidelines. This is nothing new, but it always bugs me to see applications that ignore the HIG without any reason other than "It looks cool this way". It bugs me when other software developers ignore the HIG, but Apple is the company with the most responsibility for promoting adherence, and is also the worst offender.
  • I'm surprised at how many things are "unfinished". Apple goes to great lengths to create cool stuff (like Exposé), but then they don't get little things working (like FTP support in the Finder). Until they get the little things right, I can't tell anyone that the Mac is better than Windows; it just looks prettier.
© 2003-2023 Kristopher Johnson