Incredibly annoying Macs. Take 1.

I'm just sorry, but I can't stand them. They are supposed to be the super-usable machines, but they are not. It's fun though how all my UX/HCI/usability friends (that of course use Macs) keep blaming *me* because "you are so used to Windows that you think Macs are wrong". How nice is that? What happened to the the old "if the software model doesn't match the user model, the software is wrong"?.

I switched from Windows to Ubuntu and I didn't have a single usability problem. Full stop*. I had many problems, but not usability related. So here comes the first round of the Incredibly annoying Macs.

Desktops or spaces (Apple's marketing team dixit) work in Linux as you would expect. For example, this is my usual working environment in Ubuntu:

Desktop 1: Working stuff, usually involving Firefox opened with whatever I'm doing.
Desktop 2: Music player kicking plus Firefox opened with GMail opened.

Nice'n'easy. Now, let's go to the Mac. Open FF in desktop 1, switch to desktop 2, click on FF and....... ops! I'm taken to desktop 1. WTF???? How on earth you justify from an usability point of view that opening an application switches desktops? C'mon...

You have to Google the problem to find out that you can go to Preferences > Exposé and spaces > Spaces and click on "When switching to an application, switch to a space with open windows for the application". Fuck me. What about "Keep all application's windows in the same space"?

Anyway. I have a ton more, I'll post them as soon as they hit me again. Of course feel free to blog about "incredibly annoying Windows" or "incredibly annoying Ubuntu" or "incredibly annoying whatever". The difference is that they don't proclaim themselves as the most usable system in the world.

Have a nice day!

* Ok, I shouldn't lie. In Windows when you are on the console both "cd .." and "cd.." work. In Linux (and Macs!) only "cd ..".