Things Apple Gets Wrong

In general I’ve become a fairly big fan of the Mac and OS X. The OS avoids many of the pitfalls of Windows and the hardware is pretty good and not nearly as overpriced as it used to be. But, nobody’s perfect and I’ve got a few pet peeves.

Apple still resizes a window like they did in 1983. Only allowing resizes from the lower right hand corner is kind of insane. One thing that Windows and just about every other GUI on the planet gets right is allowing resizes from any window edge. I’d really love to see this change, but like the next pet peeve it seems to be in Apple’s blood to stick to it because it’s the Apple Way.

The other one is the single mouse button. This actually isn’t nearly as bad. I bought my Mac Pro with Apples’s wireless Mighty Mouse and it actually has four mouse buttons plus a scroll ball. But, out of the box the right mouse button isn’t configured. And, why does the MacBook Pro, a high end laptop have only a single button below the trackpad? It’s something like four inches long. Can’t we sacrifice one of those inches to a right button?

Generally, I don’t mind the menu bar at the top of the primary monitor rather than as part of the application window. To some degree it makes sense and it can actually save screen real estate since the menu bar needn’t be duplicated on every window. But, when you’ve moved your application onto a second monitor, it’s awkward to have to look back to the primary monitor to get to the menu bar. I suppose one could put the menu bar on the display that has the active window or at least where the active window originates but that may have issues. At the moment it’s a moot point because the menu bar is firmly tied to the primary display. With a more ideal dual monitor setup than the one I’m using it might be less of an issue but my monitors are the laptop display and a separate LCD monitor. They really function as two totally discrete displays because of the way they are positioned. So, all the blame doesn’t fall on Apple for this one but if the menus were part of the application window it wouldn’t be an issue.

Still, even with these annoyances, it’s so much better than Windows. Plus there’s Unix underneath! And, for those few apps that I have that are Windows only, there’s Parallels. Still, they so obviously call out for fixing that I can’t believe they are still there after all these years.