The Caffeinated Penguin

Posted By matt on March 16, 2004

Overall “Apple Experience” issues:

- Package was missing Panther & iLife upgrade bundles and warranty
cards. (These are being overnighted to me)

- Package was missing correct 3 prong -> wall wart cable. (Haven't told
them about this yet)

- Apple's refurbished site does not specify CPU generation for the
“Refurbished iBook” section. This led me to assume that it was a G4
iBook. It is not. It is a G3 iBook. This needs to be CLEARLY stated on
the website.

Issues Specifically related to the laptop:

Hardware:

- Why is the Fn key silver/grey, and all the Fkeys that same grey (which
are activated when you hold Fn and then press them), but the
home/end/page up/page down that same grey, but are activated by open
apple, NOT by Fn?

- I like separate home/end/page up/page down/etc. keys, as well as
backspace and delete. However, this is a preference issue, and I
understand people who prefer less clutter.

OS (perhaps these should be UI options):

- There should be an option that “closing last Window of an application
closes that application” (except finder, of course).

- If you're trying to close everything that's running, you hit open
apple Q a lot. Until you get to finder windows. Since finder cannot be
quit, it does nothing. You have to do open apple W, then go back to
hitting open apple Q. Open apple Q, in the context of finder, should
close all active finder windows and (perhaps) choose the next open
application

- Delete should move selected items to trash. It deletes things in other
places, why not files on the desktop?

- Why does top report Sherlock running as Sherlock, but ps aux | grep
Sherlock reports only itself? Does Sherlock not actually run as
Sherlock? If so, why does one report it as one thing, and another as
another?

- I understand that, with the menu bar, focus follows mouse is hard.
However, I still miss it, because in order to make a window active, I
must click it, which also raises it to the top of the stack. This is not
desirable in all cases (in FVWM, I have focus follows mouse, click on
window border to bring to top, double click to send to bottom of stack)

- Windowshading seems to have been removed. Why? It allows rapid
application flipping, with minimal mouse movement.

- Anacron should be used instead of cron. That way, if the machine is
off, things are still run.

- There is no pkill type command. Maybe this is true of all BSDen. If so, this is seriously annoying. I need:

pkill -u matt -f “ssh -L”

to kill all my ssh tunnels. Any other solution is more annoying and stupid.

Of course, the real reason is the fact that I can't get enough info on the screen at once to make the thing useful – without an option to do “focus follows mouse” (you kind of can't because of how they do their bar), I can't use my old tricks of being able to half-hide a window but still enter text in it.

- Simple encrypted home directories. I assume this is some type of loopback mounted encrypted file system. It's super simple to turn on and it integrates with the login.

- Their ad-hoc networking (Rendezvous) is quite cool.

- There are other things, but I don't remember what they were off the top of my head.

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