Absurdly Slow Aspects of Mac OSX
January 23, 2007 – 10:52 pmThere are a few things that really bug me about OSX. The most common being the “spinning beach-ball of death”
iDisk:
What is the point of keeping a local copy of the iDisk if it takes forever to show the files, as if it was checking the server to get the file list? iDisk is really easy to use, but half the time is very annoying. Additionally, occasionally the idisk mirroring application (the program that uploads new local files to the online iDisk and keeps the two “disks” in sync) will hang, which, among other things causes log-outs to cancel.
Every year before this one, Apple gave away enough cool junk with .Mac to make it worth the money. This last year (Oct ‘05 to Oct ‘06) they did just enough to convince me to hang around another year, but if I don’t get some “free” cool junk (fixing this problem would be enough) then I’m leaving.
Spotlight:
I’m using Spotlight wrong. It is my fault that it is freaking slow for what I want to do with it. Nevertheless, it would be nice if Spotlight remembered what I selected last time I typed “DVD” (DVD Player) or “PS” (Photoshop) so that I could use it for a launcher to replace LaunchBar (who’s keystroke (i.e. cmd-space) they stole)
Open With…:
The first time you right click on a file and mouse over “Open With…” for a file type, there is a 10-15 second pause. This is unconscionable. Say I want to use any of the items lower in the contextual menu and dally too long upon the “Open With…” item… I get to wait for 10-15 seconds while some process looks for all the possible applications that can open that file.
Eject Physical Disk:
Almost without fail, when I try to eject a DVD, CD, or even a Harddrive, the disk is spun up before it is ejected. Why?
5 Responses to “Absurdly Slow Aspects of Mac OSX”
I like that you call it the “spinning beach ball of death.” It’s fitting. Everytime I see that dreaded thing, I take it as a sign to take a breather and see if it was just a temporary thing (sometimes a 15-min temporary thing) or if it’s time to force quit everything.
By Neener on Jan 26, 2007
What version of OSX are you on? I don’t think I’ve had that sort of experience since I’ve gotten to 10.4…
Since then these are the only noticable causes… and they max out at about 20 seconds… (usually 5 ish)
By dwight on Jan 26, 2007
Although, I will admit, one other thing that bugs me is that the programmers seem to have made the beach-ball have a 5 second lag before appearing in some circumstances… Probably because people complained about it, and they figured that cutting five seconds off might get rid of half of the occurrences…
By dwight on Jan 26, 2007
although i like the fact that they moved to a *nix based OS i really am not a fan of the ‘cartoonishness’ of the default icons etc. i saw one users desktop that was like a carnival. i don’t know how he could stand it…
maybe disney/apple was written in the stars ha.
By charles on Jan 27, 2007
Yeah, sometimes the UI can be a little garish… However, I would rank the GUI’s: 1. Aqua 2. KDE/GNU 3.Whatever XP uses 4. Aero
By dwight on Jan 29, 2007