About six and a half years ago, I wrote a review of my opinions on OS X, then version 10.3 (Tiger). At some point, I dropped trying to struggle through using OS X and moved back to Windows. But, now that I find myself in a work environment that uses Apple's operating system and have been using it on a daily basis for three or four months (I initially was working on my RedHat machine), it's time to revisit this. I've changed as a computer user, and the version number has incremented five times, so surely the outcome is different. Despite my hatred for Apple's attitude as a company, I will try to make this as objective as possible.

Stuff I Love

The Terminal - The best part of OS X is having a Unix terminal at its core. I was not very Linux savvy seven years ago, and even bitched about the folder structure in my initial review. While all those directories with periods in front of them can get annoying (and you know I have finder set to show them), I have no qualms moving about in a command line world. In fact, I prefer it in a lot of cases, especially since I remote into machines basically all of the time.

The Apple Mouse - Not an OS X feature, per se, but I always thought this thing looked stupid retarded, mainly for the lack of buttons. But, I have to cave on this one and say that in the short time I've been using it, I've become addicted to the extra functionality you get with the touch surface. Scroll vertically and horizontally, swipe left/right to go back/forward in the browser, two fingers to switch spaces, and most importantly, right and left clicks are recognized. I really only have two complaints about this thing: there's no middle click and the double two finger tap to bring up expose only work about half the time, making that almost unusable.

Stuff That Drives Me Up a Tree

Finder - For all intents and purposes, Finder hasn't changed much since OS5 (except now it's in color). My biggest complaints are:

• Still can't sort leaving directories at the top (pet peeve number 1 about all of OS X)
• No visible-by-default address bar. As I was writing this post and dicking around with the Finder preferences, I did discover the "path bar" and a path dropdown which make me a little bit happier. The path bar is similar to Vista and up's bread-crumb address bar (which I really didn't like at launch), but is actually for visual info only and has no interaction. Still, in finding the settings pane, I eliminated a couple of items on this list.
• Keyboard support still sucks (can't delete by pressing delete, can't cut a file at all)

Application Management - The one thing that really annoys me about the dock is in its inability to let me see at a glance what I have open. Yes, I know what applications are running, but when you have multiple windows open, that can't be gauged at all. There is expose, and I've tried to get into the habit of using that, but it's still frustrating to move my mouse down to the dock, click my application, and never get the window I was expecting. This action should bring back the last window to have focus, but I don't even know what the logic is. For example, when I click Chrome, it always goes to my instance of Chrome running the music page in another space (virtual desktop, whatever they call that shit). It's super annoying.

Window Management - Clicking the maximize button and not having my application take up the entire screen, but whatever portion of the screen it deems it needs is annoying. There's a way around this by holding shift, so technically that base is covered. However, the window doesn't stick there. In messing with tabs in Chrome, sometimes I'll accidentally move the entire window by some pixels and, because it thinks it's maximized, I can't do the shift click trick again to force it back into the viewport proper. That's something that's plagued OS X for as long as I've been using it. The other thing that bugs me is how awesome Windows 7 suddenly got at managing windows, particularly the snapping stuff. Drag a chrome tab to the top of the screen, it would full screen on that viewport (something I do all the time in multi-monitor setups). Make a window take up all the vertical height it can by resizing the top or bottom edge to the top or bottom of the viewport, something I did with Skype all the time. I never realize how awesome that shit is until it's gone, like when I was at Winnercomm and all we had were XP machines.

Calendar - This is another Vista/7 thing that I got used to, but when you click on the time in the task tray, you're given a fully functional calendar. I would often use this to figure out what day a date was in the future, across months or years. OS X's date just gives me view options. If I open up the date and time preferences, I can see the currently calendar month but can't pan through them because auto updating is enabled. Yet another feature that I didn't realize I had become so reliant on until it was gone.

Keyboard - As my final complaint, a couple things relating to the keyboard. First of all, those fucking symbols. Just say command, shift, option, or control for god's sake instead of having things that look like foreign currency characters. Last item is the home and end keys. Now, I was able to adjust some obscure ass setting to get these keys to move to the beginning/end of a line which makes them ~80% usable again, but the other use case was Ctl+Home/End to move to the beginning/end of a document (which were their initial assigned functions in OS X).

So, that's my updated rant about OS X. It may seem like I have a lot of complaints, but they're really all minor annoyances that jam up a workflow I've spent years crafting. I'm doing my best to retrain myself to native ways around these problems, but old habits die hard with a vengeance and even at that, there's not always a solution. Still, in retraining myself, I've taken to a couple of concepts very quickly, namely the aforementioned mouse and spaces. Both of these have become muscle memory in a matter of days.

Concluding, I don't hate OS X. I'm just as productive in it as I am in Windows. There are just a lot of hiccups regarding learned behaviours that, when given enough of them, really get on my nerves.