Windows does that same thing sometimes. Something about not letting the user screw with the extensions. Why not? I'd hurt myself at work if I couln't change extensions (txt to csv, anyone?).
I've never had a problem with changing the extension on a Windows machine. It hides the extensions by default, because it is stupid, but that's a single checkbox once per new Windows installation.
Yeh, it's something that only happens in Windows if the extensions are hidden. I had it a few times before I figured out how to show extensions. They're so handy! Especially when you're messing with different files with the same name but that you've saved as different types of image files. But all the icons look the same. -_-
I hate Macs because they break when trying to interract with standard Windows, Linux, and internet things. And, in 2008, they still aren't shipping with a fucking right mouse button.
I hate Apple software in general because it is evil and does not do what I want it to do.
I understand that there are many happy mac users. I do not understand them.
Well, there's no right mouse button per se but the Mighty Mouse that they currently ship with will let you do right mousing if you click on that side, plus three other pressure points besides - it has this touch sensitivity thingy. I do prefer an actual right mouse button, but I love the scroll ball too much to give up my MM.
On MacBooks, they ship with a touchpad with an oversensitive tap function *and* a single gargantuan mouse button. The only way to right-click is to turn tapping back on and tap with *two fingers at once*, hoping that it will think you're wanting to click the right place and not move the mouse then click again.
I despise it.
STANDARD laptops have *two buttons* with which to click. Macs change this to remove functionality.
You don't have to have tapping on. In the preferences, if you uncheck "Clicking," the "Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click" option becomes "For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button." This is how I right-click, as I despise tapping, and I've never had a problem with it thinking I want to click the wrong place.
I know you want a second button and this won't satisfy you, and that's fine since we all have our preferences (I personally don't want another button), but it's not as bad as what you describe.
Break interacting with whatnow? I admit I'm not the standard user, but what is this breakage you refer to, because I've never experienced it and I wander between OSX/WinXP/Linux on a daily basis.
As for the mouse, feh. Buy a mouse, just like you have to with commodity hardware. I did. It's a laptop. I never use the built in mouse.
As for the Apple software, meh. If it doesn't do what you need it to, then you don't use it and you go linux or Microsoft. Right tool for the right job. I can do everything I need to in OSX or linux, but those are my needs and not yours.
I certainly never said that Apple software doesn't do anything dumb, or that their software doesn't occasionally suck. What I did say was that Mac stuff works really well as long as you do things the way they want them to be done. Fight that, and it's all pain, for sure, but play along and it works just fine. Interoperability plays second fiddle to usability, but it's hard to have much of a problem with that as long as you know that's where their priorities are ahead of time.
But I don't have a ton of sympathy for you if file extensions and the lack of a second mouse button is among your chief complaints. File extensions are clearly a bullshit legacy of the DOS file system, so Apple doesn't care much about them. I know, from both empirical evidence and career experience, that the second mouse button is one of the worst design decisions that's ever been made, for example, and Apple knows it too. But if you plug in a two, or three or five-button-two-scrollwheel mouse, odds are pretty good that it will work for you right on the first try, without any other intervention on your part than plugging it in.
I would kill a man for an equivalent to Apple Remote Desktop on a Windows machine. The iWork suite is great, Quicksilver is great, and the fact that closing the lid on a laptop will reliably not fuck you with the bent end of a crowbar is also great. Quicktime is a bit of a stinker, for sure, given that the mainstream competition for it is Windows Media Player it's hard to get all that worked up about it. The hardware is beautiful, the easiest to work with that money can buy.
Stop fighting it, is my advice. It'll do what you want, but maybe not in the way you were expecting.
Let's take as a given here, since it is obvious that neither of you have ever used ARD before, that I am not the one here who doesn't know what he's talking about. It's more than vnc, a lot more, sort of the way emacs is different from notepad.exe.
* Silent observer, one-click to control and one more to return control to the user. One click to turn the channel around, and show the user your desktop if you so desire. One-click "curtain", for when you need to do stuff remotely that maybe they shouldn't be looking at. * Painless, accurate and totally automatic client discovery. "Show me all my computers, please." One-click ARD-client-standardization. * It's still BSD under the hood, so one-click-to-terminal. * One-click software install. One-click hardware, software and user audit and metering. * Seamless drag and drop between the host and client desktop. * Remote desktop thumbnailing, so that you can be looking at and working on a bunch of different desktops at the same time. * Client grouping and bulk drag-and-drop installs. Smart grouping, like smart folders. Remote Spotlight (find this file, could be on any of these four hundred computers), zomg. * Package Maker, which among other things gives you the option of saying "watch what I'm doing to this machine, and when I say so, do the same thing to a bunch of others." * Automator and Task Server, which are terrific tools.
So, yeah, just like sitting in front of their PC, except you can be sitting in front of hundreds of computers at once and, if you're heavy with the Automator, you don't even need to be around.
Just to add, now that I've taken a deep breath: if you have to support more than a half-dozen or so Macs, Apple Remote Desktop is a must-have. It's a huge time-saver. Going without it on the Mac-administration front is roughly like telling a Windows administrator that they can do whatever they want, provided they don't use RDP or anything written by Mark Russinovich. You might as well be doing your job wearing oven mitts and a blindfold.
I know, from both empirical evidence and career experience, that the second mouse button is one of the worst design decisions that's ever been made, for example, and Apple knows it too.
Telling people to right-click on things is bad. It's counterintuitive, hard to explain over the phone, breaks the mental "tap on something" model (since when does tapping a button with your middle finger instead of your index finger make something different happen?) and just generally confuses the hell out of the average user. Having a single mouse button means your learning curve is that much shorter, and the combination of that and the Apple HIG makes the machine much, much more accessible across applications.
Also: left-handed people.
The reason that I say that I know this from both empirical evidence and career experience is that I worked at a helpdesk for a long time, where I learned that telling somebody to right-click on something had a very reasonable chance of sending that call right off the road and into a ditch, and because people with stopwatches who measure these things professionally report the same results.
Heh, I'm totally feeling this right now because Photoshop just fucking crashed on me and I hadn't saved recently. Grrrrrrrr. Macs are supposed to be so great, and they are, but they're temperamental beasts.
I have a capture of the classic "The application failed to start because: the application started successfully" error that NT, 2k, and XP have all been known to give around here somewhere. Not that I'm defending OS X, mind you, merely pointing out that teh stoopid isn't contained to one company.
I see what it's saying. it doesn't like you typing in an extension as it would rather put that in automatically. But it will use your types in extension PLUS a default extension if you insist.
I had to become a Windows user because I wasn't using Macs right. Apparently, no one else ever has any problems with them, so it must've been my fault.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 01:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 02:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 05:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 05:02 pm (UTC)I had it happen all the time when I worked in Rota. (I'll blame the Navy IT people)
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-20 03:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 01:53 pm (UTC)I'm also hardly a standard Mac user, heh. I use my Macbook for personal+work, and have a couple linux desktops at home.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 02:05 pm (UTC)I hate Apple software in general because it is evil and does not do what I want it to do.
I understand that there are many happy mac users. I do not understand them.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 04:21 pm (UTC)I despise it.
STANDARD laptops have *two buttons* with which to click. Macs change this to remove functionality.
They must die.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 08:52 pm (UTC)I know you want a second button and this won't satisfy you, and that's fine since we all have our preferences (I personally don't want another button), but it's not as bad as what you describe.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 09:34 pm (UTC)I prefer the two-fingers + mouse button click solution, but the above is another option.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 04:44 pm (UTC)As for the mouse, feh. Buy a mouse, just like you have to with commodity hardware. I did. It's a laptop. I never use the built in mouse.
As for the Apple software, meh. If it doesn't do what you need it to, then you don't use it and you go linux or Microsoft. Right tool for the right job. I can do everything I need to in OSX or linux, but those are my needs and not yours.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 05:34 pm (UTC)But I don't have a ton of sympathy for you if file extensions and the lack of a second mouse button is among your chief complaints. File extensions are clearly a bullshit legacy of the DOS file system, so Apple doesn't care much about them. I know, from both empirical evidence and career experience, that the second mouse button is one of the worst design decisions that's ever been made, for example, and Apple knows it too. But if you plug in a two, or three or five-button-two-scrollwheel mouse, odds are pretty good that it will work for you right on the first try, without any other intervention on your part than plugging it in.
I would kill a man for an equivalent to Apple Remote Desktop on a Windows machine. The iWork suite is great, Quicksilver is great, and the fact that closing the lid on a laptop will reliably not fuck you with the bent end of a crowbar is also great. Quicktime is a bit of a stinker, for sure, given that the mainstream competition for it is Windows Media Player it's hard to get all that worked up about it. The hardware is beautiful, the easiest to work with that money can buy.
Stop fighting it, is my advice. It'll do what you want, but maybe not in the way you were expecting.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 05:50 pm (UTC)Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Remote
Turn it on, add yourself to remote users, and use any RDP client.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 06:53 pm (UTC)I don't know why.
It's not like there's anything I can think of that you can't do with it.
But it's JUST NOT THE SAME as Apple Remote Desktop, and hence bad.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 07:18 pm (UTC)But, yeah, go ahead and keep thinking that.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 07:21 pm (UTC)What more does Apple Remote Desktop do?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 08:10 pm (UTC)* Painless, accurate and totally automatic client discovery. "Show me all my computers, please." One-click ARD-client-standardization.
* It's still BSD under the hood, so one-click-to-terminal.
* One-click software install. One-click hardware, software and user audit and metering.
* Seamless drag and drop between the host and client desktop.
* Remote desktop thumbnailing, so that you can be looking at and working on a bunch of different desktops at the same time.
* Client grouping and bulk drag-and-drop installs. Smart grouping, like smart folders. Remote Spotlight (find this file, could be on any of these four hundred computers), zomg.
* Package Maker, which among other things gives you the option of saying "watch what I'm doing to this machine, and when I say so, do the same thing to a bunch of others."
* Automator and Task Server, which are terrific tools.
So, yeah, just like sitting in front of their PC, except you can be sitting in front of hundreds of computers at once and, if you're heavy with the Automator, you don't even need to be around.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-20 02:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 09:18 pm (UTC)Fucking what?
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 09:52 pm (UTC)Also: left-handed people.
The reason that I say that I know this from both empirical evidence and career experience is that I worked at a helpdesk for a long time, where I learned that telling somebody to right-click on something had a very reasonable chance of sending that call right off the road and into a ditch, and because people with stopwatches who measure these things professionally report the same results.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 01:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 06:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-21 06:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 03:44 pm (UTC)Or however the cultbabble's supposed to go.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 09:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 09:38 pm (UTC)Have you considered upgrading to XP?
Wait, that's not the right line...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-21 06:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-19 05:08 pm (UTC)I see
Date: 2008-06-20 02:27 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-20 05:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-06-21 06:48 am (UTC)