4 posts tagged apple

Dear Apple,

WHAT THE HELL!

Like always, your marketing led me to believe that Lion was going to be greatest version of OS X yet. I was SO looking forward to the new version of mail.

Like always, I waiting until 10.7.2 was released before I upgraded. You know, to make sure you’ve smoothed out all the little kinks.

However, unlike always, I’ve now made my mind up and have my Snow Leopard DVD sitting next to me waiting to wipe & re-install my laptop. Writing this is the last thing I do in Lion before I dump it and hope that whatever 10.8 is addresses the grave oversights & mistakes you’ve made.

Here’s the short version of my gripe list:

1. Why on earth does the new window animation take 1.5 seconds by default now. 1.5 seconds for a window transition is such bad interface design! It literally adds up to minutes per day (hours per year!) of lost usability. Granted this can be turned off with a hidden preference, but you shouldn’t need to in the first place.

2. Natural scrolling. PUH-LEASE. The reason it works on a mobile device is because the orientation is different and you’re not dealing with decades of computing precedence. This is not NATURAL, my mouse is not my finger.

3. Where did spaces go!? Why couldn’t you have kept it and still added mission control? You took away all the nice little things about spaces (wrap around, multi-rows, etc) and made it SO slow because of the awful slide animation. Maybe if windows received focus early on in the slide it would be somewhat OK, but since you have to wait for the slide to finish it’s just unacceptable.

4. I think the thing that I’m most disappointed about is Mail. It looks like its going to be awesome, but now after a week of splitting my time between Lion’s mail and Snow Leopard’s mail it’s definitely not. Again, what’s with the awful animations when composing emails? (Again, you can turn it off but you shouldn’t have to.) The new threading view has the potential to be great, but it’s way too early in its life. There are so many problems with long threads and it causes the app to lock up for seconds at a time when switching between them.

Please Apple. Don’t try to cram things from the iPhone into the Desktop. Just because they work in one place doesn’t mean they work in the other.

Sincerely Disappointed.

-E

Dear Apple: Are you serious? After 4 major versions of your mobile operating system I STILL can’t set different alert profiles for different email accounts?

In my case I want certain email accounts I have setup to provide different feedback. See, I get a lot of email, most of it is just informative messages coming from automated systems that don’t necessarily require a timely response while others are alerts that I want to be informed of immediately. This seems like such a trivial thing, yet has a huge impact on my workflow productivity.

When Apple first released the 3G I left my Blackberry Curve behind and joined the masses in coming to iPhone. After 8 months I asserted that the iPhone was not a productivity device and returned to Blackberry and the comfort of a physical keyboard and a multitude of configuration options where I happily remained until this week when my BES crashed and I had enough of fighting with it.

I considered going to an Android device, but recently FatBox has started building iPhone apps and while my iPod Touch and the simulator have done me well during this first development cycle it really behoves me to have an iPhone now that we’re getting REALLY close to releasing our first app into the App store (stay tuned for a release announcement that should happen in the next couple weeks!).

I digress. The point is here I am with my shiny new iPhone 4 facing the same problems I was facing back with my 3G. However, this time it’s a little different. This time I can do something about it, so I did…

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