Pixelhum

Since buying my Powerbook 6 months ago, I can’t help feeling that Apple products are currently a bit form over function. Don’t get me wrong — I love my Powerbook, and the Mac OS is well designed, slick and easy to use — but it often seems as though features that might seem fundamental in other apps are just left out, perhaps because they want to sell you a ‘Pro’ version with that feature and many others (Quicktime is one good example) or just because said feature ruins the lines of the suit, as it were.

iPhoto is one such application that appears to have features missing, mainly the ability to view photos full screen (without running a slideshow), and I’ve also noticed that the photo order within a slideshow reflects the order you have them displayed in thumbnail view so if, like me, you like to see the latest photos at the top, your slideshows will run in reverse chronological order, with no apparent way to change this.

iTunes lacks the ability to play most of my music by default — although the XiphQT component is coming along nicely (missing some metadata stuff at the moment) — and doesn’t do gapless playback, which means that mix albums and any other albums that have tracks running into each other end up with little gaps in the music. Quite annoying. There also doesn’t seem to be any way of sorting albums in the browser by any other criteria than album name. I’d prefer to sort my albums chronologically.

On the good news front, I’ve found a solution to the mouse acceleration problem in the form of SteerMouse. This handy little replacement mouse driver allows me to tune the acceleration or even turn it off, which is what I did. The bad news is that it costs $20, but I’ll be paying that $20 without too much complaint because I can now use my Bluetooth mouse properly. Do you think I could send the bill on to Apple?

So far, the one thing that has been bugging the hell out of me with OS X is the mouse control panel. On Windows I used to just switch the acceleration off altogether, as I’m firmly in the camp that believes the mouse pointer should follow the mouse 1:1. In fact, I even had a registry hack that disabled mouse acceleration completely, even when the ‘Enhance pointer precision’ option was checked. While we’re on that subject, who decided on the name of that option anyway?!?

This post was inspired by Michael Heilemanns recent mouse related post, and I completely agree that the mouse control panel in OS X seems to lack a lot of the options it needs. I can understand that Apple probably want it to be simple, so why not include the more advanced controls; acceleration curve etc, behind a button marked ‘Advanced’?

Two solutions appear to be popular, but neither of them support my Apple Bluetooth mouse, and they both cost money. And it seems ridiculous that third parties have felt the need to write software that fixes something Apple should have fixed.

So come on Apple, give me a decent mouse control panel which will allow me to turn the acceleration off!

Just a few notes in this one today. I’m still enjoying the Mac OS experience, but I have a few gripes to make. Mainly things that I’d like to see added, features I’ve got used to on other systems.

Quicktime 7 is great, streamed video’s are sharp and play smoothly with little to no skipping and stuttering. Just one thing really; Why should I have to pay for Quicktime Pro to be able to play my video’s fullscreen? I can understand why they might want you to pay for features like the ability to create, edit and convert video files (although doesn’t iMovie do all that stuff too?). £20 is quite a lot of money to add a fullscreen feature, especially when I’ve paid over £1,000 for the machine itself. Would it really hurt to make Quicktime Pro free? Or at least make fullscreen a free feature.

I’ve been playing my music in iTunes, ripping my CD’s to AAC (which is great for listening on my mobile phone too) and keeping it all sorted and tagged. I just wish for a few extra features really. The ability to play Ogg Vorbis would be extremely nice (as most of my CD’s are already ripped to this format), although I’m pretty sure I’ll have to resign myself to using another player for that. Gapless is a no brainer really, live albums, concept albums, mix albums, in fact any album that has tracks that run together (Green Day - American Idiot for example) all need gapless playback for proper listening, and iTunes doesn’t do it. Nor does the iPod. Big problem. CD’s have been gapless since they were introduced in 1983, Minidisc is gapless, Philips audio cassette is gapless. Why can’t anybody get this one right? And don’t tell me I should rip the CD as one big MP3, that’s not good enough.

Last but not least, I would like to be able to sort my albums by year, not by name. So when I click on Led Zeppelin in my library browser, it would be nice to see the albums listed chronologically, Led Zeppelin I, Led Zeppelin II etc…

I’ll be keeping my eye on Dibrom’s Euphonos player as a Foobar2000 like replacement for iTunes. And I’m using Ximema for fullscreen Quicktime playback.

This has been a bit of a rant, thanks for listening.

I’ve been using my Powerbook for about 3 weeks now, and I’m enjoying it immensely. The OS is slick and quite intuative, although coming from Windows I’ve had quite a lot to get used to! The overall experience has so far been very positive.

I can’t quite decide which browser to use; the choices being Safari, Firefox and Camino so far. Safari is nice from an OS integration point of view, and the RSS features work well. I’ve been used to Firefox on Windows and as such it feels very familiar on OS X but still well integrated. Camino lies somewhere in between, with the same wonderful rendering engine as Firefox and an excellent Cocoa interface it would seem the perfect choice, but I can’t quite let go of Firefox!

Networking just works. The Airport Extreme card just picked up my Netgear router and I was browsing the Net within minutes. I was able to set up WEP encryption with very little hassle, more than can be said for the Netgear Wireless card in my girlfriends laptop!

There are two programs I miss so far though. On Windows I use Foobar2000 for music playback, and so far there is nothing comparable on OS X. I’ve been using iTunes (which is great for making AAC files to play on the mobile phone), but unfortunately lacks the ability to play most of my music collection, which is encoded in Ogg Vorbis. Cog fills the gap quite nicely at the moment although it’s a little bit feature free right now it does play my music and does so gaplessly.

The other program I’m having difficulty finding a replacement for is TextPad. I think text editors are very much a matter of personal taste and it may be that I just have to get used to something a bit different.

Well, I’m sitting here with my shiny new PowerBook on my lap, typing this entry. So far the experience has been good. The machine itself is a great example of minimalist design, and consequently it’s sleek and very functional.

The OS is quite fantastic. To someone coming from Windows it’s a breath of fresh air. Windows fly around the screen in drop shadowed, translucent glory and the Dashboard and Exposé makes things woosh around the screen in a wonderful way.

It’s not without issues however. The keyboard layout is slightly different and the mouse only has one button, but that’s something I’ll get used to. The biggest problem so far is the mouse acceleration. I hate it. I want my mouse pointer to follow the mouse 1:1 all the time, only I can’t seem to find a way to turn it off or even tune it. Maybe it’s something I’ll get used to, but to be honest I don’t want to. It’s the way I’ve used mice from the start and I don’t really want to change now.

So, If anybody knows of any way to turn off the mouse acceleration in OS X, please let me know. It’ll be appreciated. It’ll be appreciated more if it’s free!