What is Digg?136 Comments
- KingLeo, on 10/12/2007, -32/+132OSX is years ahead of Vista.
- aplardi, on 10/12/2007, -3/+76@ Yorn. I am a Mac user and an avid gamer. I like to think of it as nothing more than a choice of vehicle. Sometimes you use a Jeep, van, truck, boat, or a motorcycle. It's a matter of what you like better and will get you where you need to go in the most enjoyable way possible.
I use Windows for when I want to game. I use Mac OS X for almost everything else I do, as well as some gaming. I don't see the point of splitting hairs over an operating system choice like so many people do. You sound a might defensive when you instantly start calling people fanboys. Maybe you're feeling insecure because someone has a cooler Jeep than your Van? Who cares? Nobody (should). - robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -7/+79Right. The idea that Windows has caught up with OS X cracks me up. I was recently reading an interview with Jim Allchin in PC Magazine and he was talking about how excited he was about Vista. At one point, he takes a swipe at OS X claiming that ideas like Spotlight were ripped off from MS, and then goes on to brag about how the new, innovative features in Vista like taking screenshots of selected areas of the screen or single windows.
And he says that totally unaware of the irony.
I think he's a great example of what I see in the Windows side of my life--lots of Windows users totally unaware of what great things are in OS X and what they're missing out on. - WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -1/+58Just wait 'til they discover Automator and Applescript...
Oh, and #5 is called "text clippings". - sinooka, on 10/12/2007, -11/+55@Yorn
Here's an idea - if you hate this site so much, go somewhere else. - eightyd, on 10/12/2007, -20/+60Vista people seem to get frustrated when us mac users tell them we've been using their operating system for five years
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -3/+42Have you ever used OS X's clippings? If not, you have no idea how much more convenient it is that your 5 second tasks. (And what if you have tons of those 5 second tasks to do? Do you want to have to go through those steps every time?)
But that's hardly the point. If you drag text to your desktop, shouldn't a modern operating system just know what you're intending to do? It amazes me that Macs have had the drag-and-drop clipping creation (and not just text, btw, but images, web links and other things as well) since system 7.0 in the mid-90s and Windows *still* doesn't have anything even remotely comparable.
And yes, I'm a Windows *and* Mac user so I know what I'm talking about. I wish like hell Windows had that feature. You don't realize how cool it is until you don't have it. - rick2k, on 10/12/2007, -4/+42you lock yourself down to one os.. then call mac users fanboys when most of us use use mac & windows for work and play??
logic please.
You hardcore "i only use windows anyone else is a fanboy and linux users are geeks" people are annoying! - jongarber, on 10/12/2007, -5/+42http://www.duggmirror.com/apple/5_Hidden_OSX_Gems/
- ThinkBox, on 10/12/2007, -7/+44"Service Temporarily Unavailable"
Nah, I already knew that tip.
Where are the other 4? - brad06, on 10/12/2007, -3/+37Digg is the only place I visit on the internet that the Mac userbase is like that. I just bought myself a 24" iMac and black MacBook and love them, even the mild gaming I do on them. Anywhere else I go on the net whenever you mention you're running a Mac you get the "haha mac sux" from Windows users.
Personally, I like both. As far as Vista vs OSX I don't think either is "years ahead" of the other. - gharding, on 10/12/2007, -2/+31@Yorn:
Some of us, you know, have jobs. As a programmer, I do work for both my fulltime job and freelance gigs on my mac. When I have time for games, I'll play UT or CoD on my mac, but generally, I'm working. - morcheeba, on 10/12/2007, -1/+27My favorite gem is to hold down CTRL while using the mouse (or two fingers on the trackpad) to scroll up or down. Instant, fluid, full-screen zoom! It's great when I don't have my contacts in yet, or want to see some detail.
No need to configure anything, it's all ready to go by default: http://www.apple.com/accessibility/vision/ - turpenine, on 10/12/2007, -14/+40most of us own wiis.
- aeiou, on 10/12/2007, -4/+30@Dumbledorito
I find it amazing that people STILL bash macs for not having 2-button mice when apple doesn't even sell a single button mouse anymore. Wow. - cypherz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+29@Dumbledorito
Macs have supported multi-button mice for years. We HAVE been able to right click and get a context menu, just like Windows. Having that ability doesn't negate the value of these features. - cypherz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+26How good for you that you know all these. Lots of folks have recently purchased Macs and don't know about these features. If it's not new to you, why post?
- cypherz, on 10/12/2007, -4/+26But that's why they do it - to be annoying. Just digg them down or block them and *poof* no more Winders Fanboys.
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -4/+25@Dumbledorito,
I have been using Windows as my primary OS for the last decade and continue to, and therefore I'm happy to call ***** on your comment. You literally have no idea what you're talking about. Right-clicking does not replace this.
You are a fine example of what I deal with all the time--the Windows user superiority complex. You think because Macs can't right-click (which hasn't been true for nearly 10 years) that it somehow invalidates a killer feature that Macs have had for ages? If it doesn't come from Redmond, it can't be better, right? Wrong. Pull your head out of the sand and look around. While Windows has sleep-walked through the last 6 years, OS X and Linux have both caught up and surpassed it. I haven't switched yet myself, but if I didn't have such a huge investment in Windows apps, I would. The time is coming. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+22'Sup Yorn.
http://digg.com/logout - colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20""No, Vista people get frustrated with you mac users when you act like pretentious ***** that have to turn everything into an a-hole contest." --lithuin"
In my opinion, it's the Windows users these days who think it's a contest and can't keep their mouths shut. Usually when you see a Mac story on Digg the first comment goes something like this:
"OMG Macs are gay lol there are no games and the ipod is just for people who are worried about how their mp3 player looks. They only have one button one their mouse because MAC users are so dumb they don't understand two buttons. If Macs were so good then why doesn't everyone use them lol." And so on.
Windows users more mature and less fanboyish? I don't think so. One just has to look at any Mac related thread on Digg to see that's not true. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+20forgot to mention that Image Capture can drive almost any scanner w/o installing drivers
--- along with about 10,000 other little things
but that's OK... - WiseWeasel, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20@strabes: The Mac has much less DRM than Windows. The only place you see DRM on the Mac is in the iTunes Store files (handled by QuickTime), and in pro software with serial numbers. Nothing as entrenched as the 'secure path' DRM in Vista for HD video, or the ever-flexible and fluid Windows Media DRM. Trusted Computing is not implemented, and there is no copy protection on the OS beyond checks to make sure it's running on Apple hardware. Really, it's not nearly as offensive as the DRM situation in Windows. If you don't use the iTunes Store or Pro Apple software, there is as much DRM in OSX as there is in Linux binaries on a practical level...
- elShaggy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+20@brad06 -- just waiit for Leopard, rawr.
- digggggggggg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+15I hope that the resolution independence in Leopard makes the zoom feature resolution independent as well. I mean, wouldn't it be even more cool if you could zoom in all the way and get crisp, anti-aliased text?
- Naga10, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15I never knew what the Services menu was for, but my school work thanks the Summary Service SO ***** MUCH!
- LaughingMan11, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13Image Capture is also able to remotely interface with a camera and allow you to take control of the camera attached to your computer from anywhere with a web connection.
- jake8689, on 10/12/2007, -9/+22@ yorn
i play games on my intel mostly warcraft3 and civ 4 but iam going to get starwars empire at war but mostly use it for video editing in finale cut
i do own a 360 - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+126. Drag any file on to Mail.app (on the dock for instance), Mail automatically gives you a new message with that file as the attachment.
7. Command + click applications on dock to show them in Finder.
8. Opt + click applications on dock to hide/show them. - DonCarcharo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12"It amazes me that Macs have had the drag-and-drop clipping creation (and not just text, btw, but images, web links and other things as well) since system 7.0 in the mid-90s and Windows *still* doesn't have anything even remotely comparable. "
I taught a college level introduction to Macintosh course for several years as a prerequisite for all the design courses in our department. Each semester the first thing I'd have the students do is a scavenger hunt quiz which got them acquainted with the Mac. Without any instruction at all they'd have to perform a series of tasks on the Mac. One of these tasks was to download an image from the web using Safari. Very simple stuff considering this is a college level course. Yet each semester more than half a dozen students couldn't figure it out - and they were always Windows users.
The students with little or no computer use got it. You just drag it to your desktop -text clippings, images, whatever you want. It's drag and drop. But the Windows users were hobbled without the second mouse click (we used the standard Mac one button mice). It wasn't about intelligence (though really for some it was) it was about the conceptual approach of the two operating systems.
Windows, even Vista, is still missing that. It's a great OS but it's still missing all the niceties, the little things which make a Mac a Mac. - morcheeba, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13... if that's what you think, then post something constructive.
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Those who think PDFs are overrated have never worked in publishing. Trust me, they are a godsend to printing and publishing.
- digggggggggg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11@dumbledorito - No, that's saving a link. We're talking about selecting a chunk of text (it can include images) and dragging it just about anywhere.
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11> I can't do anything to the text that I drag to the desktop.
Double-clicking it to open it and presssing Apple+C will copy its contents to the clipboard
Dragging and dropping the clipping to just about any application will copy its contents to the application.
There are loads of other uses, but those are the basic ones and you can apply it to images too. (BTW, you can't select the text in the clipping because it's not editable.) Just open and press Apple+C to copy the contents. - campo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11why are we still touting OS X's supremacy over Windows? I'm a mac fanboy to the max, but really, why should OS X be compared to windows any longer, we should be focusing on what we can improve within OS X and how it can remain ahead of the pack.
- TNHitokiri, on 10/12/2007, -5/+14uhh strabes.. the manufacturers of the hardware usually produce the drivers.. not microsoft
I mean, they made the hardware and all.. - TheCommodore6, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8WOW. I never knew that. That zoom feature is way more gem-like than the article itself (mostly because I already knew most of them)
- cypherz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10It *was* a poorly formatted page, but it is a good summary of some of the most useful features of OS X. I find it interesting that many who try out OS X for a few days, right it off as not having many user conveniences or any "depth". There's a lot of depth to OS X, it's just that it's not so "in your face" as Windows.
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8It's intended for newer users (i.e., Windows users coming to Macs.) I've used both platforms pretty heavily in the last ten years so I know about this stuff, but Windows users have never had these features so don't be an ass. Just accept that more people are coming to your platform and should be clued in to some of the things that make it such a great OS. Isn't that what you guys keep saying?
- robdazomba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8My favorite is control+option+apple+8 to invert the screen. I get eye-strain very easily and that comes in handy at the end of a long shift staring at computer screens. (Windows has that feature too but there's no keyboard shortcut so it's a little less handy.)
- digga, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9@DonCarcharo
*PLEASE* see beyond the MS hype and fancy aero interface. I strongly suggest all Vista fanboys read this analysis of Vista:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
And please, read it all the way through! - colincornaby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"Backups
There's no good way to do backups across the net. You can't dump a live filesystem in MacOS X - it says "device busy". You can use GNU tar but this has other problems. "
I run Apple's backup client to backup to a server, and we use NetRestore and Restrospect at work. Dunno why it doesn't work for you.
"iTunes
Apparently the iTunes player can't play tunes from any random filename. It seems to need to copy them into its own directory first, or at least it needs to build its own pointers to other files that you import. For some reason it doesn't want to import all of my mp3 files. "
This is what Quicktime Player is for. iTunes is for organizing your music. If you just want to play something without organizing it, use QuickTime, or even better, use the preview feature in the Finder.
"Originally it didn't understand m3u playlists, but it seems to be able to import them now. And if the file doesn't have id3 tags it will use the title from the playlist as the title. But it tends to truncate such titles. Unfortunately, if a title appears in an m3u playlist, iTunes will take that as the title in preference to what it already knows, which messes up searching and sorting if the title that appears in the m3u playlist includes the artist or track number or other information. "
It has as long as I have used it.
"Under certain conditions if you import mp3 files it will assign the title of the file from the filename, rather than from the id3 tags that are in the file. It does this even if the file it is importing is already in its database (say, because you imported every song in a directory tree where some of those songs had already been imported) Often the filename is not a good representation of the title - it may contain extra information like the artist and the album, it may be spelled incorrectly because of limitations in what characters can appear in a filename. To make things even worse, iTunes truncates titles derived in this way so even if the filename was the song title, you lose if the song title is a long one. "
I've never had any issue with MP3 file tags, but if this annoys you so much, switch to a different MP3 player. It's not like Apple locks you into iTunes.
"It won't let you specify tunes by filename; it wants to use its notion of the title for everything, even though those are often bogus. "
First you complain about it not using ID3 tags, now you complain it does?
"It incorporates everything it plays into your 'library' - even if it's just some random audio clip from a web page that you'll never want to hear again, and even if the file is stored on some temporary directory or removable medium.
The idea behind this player seems to be that it will manage all of your music. Never mind that you might want to use other tools with your music files, or you might want to share your music files with other systems that don't organize their files the same way. Apple thinks they know what is best for everyone, and that everyone should do things their way. "
Already covered above.
"Mail.app
The mail client keeps popping up a window..."
I'm not going to bother with dissecting all of this. Both Microsoft and Mozilla make mail clients for OS X, you can use one of those if you are unhappy with Mail.
"Networking
The 802.11 card has such poor antenna placement that it often fails to work in areas where other laptops work fine. I'd be happy to work around that problem by using a PCMCIA 802.11 card, but MacOS X doesn't support any of the cards I have.
It's way too easy to enable 802.11 peer mode without understanding what you are doing and how disruptive this can be. When you do this it will use whatever ssid you had specified that you were looking for. "
Any 802.11g card should work with OS X.
"In a network with poor reception and/or a lot of contention, the 802.11 driver will happily rebind to a peer network with the same ssid, even if that's not what you want, and there's no way to keep it from doing that."
Yes, if you tell it to automatically rejoin a network if it is available, it will. Duh?
"In Jaguar, IPv6 worked, but wasn't supported in any of the GUIs or in the apps. You had to install your own apps. Panther is much better - the GUI even supports 6to4 but it's sort of hidden.
In Jaguar, the 'Internet' panel in System Preferences has a lot more to do with Apple proprietary crap (such as .Mac and iDisk) than Internet (Email and Web). On Panther they've renamed this to Network, which is a bit better. "
Network and Internet have always been two separate preference panes. I don't know where you got confused. Network preference pane has been there since 10.0.
Anyway, I'm done, you're generally either a) Making up stuff b) complaining that a piece of software doesn't fit your needs but apparently you didn't simply adjust by using different software, or c) You don't know what you're doing. - jgtg32a, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Just so you know I logged in just to digg you down
- noahhoward, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@dorito: Screw mice, I can do more with my trackpad and no mouse button than you could do with a 10 button mouse. I can right-click without using the button, I can scroll without a wheel and, holy hell I can zoom in and out as if I'm using mind powers. When someone comes along and comes up with a user interface so advanced you control it with your thoughts, are you STILL going to be bashing it for not having mouse buttons? Computers have evolved genius, catch up.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9So, "Summerize" turns winter into Summer then ?
- Gryffydd, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9And text clippings have been in the MacOS for how long? Mac OS 8 I think? Maybe System 7.5. It's been so long I don't remember.
Oh, and unlike the rest of you jokers abusing the reply system, I'm actually replying to the parent. - flipmeat, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6"This Mac user thinks this list sucks ass."
Then post something good.
If you use CMD-Tab to switch programs, and hold CMD to keep the program icons up, you can switch tasks by:
- tapping Tab like you'd expect
- Using the mouse's scroll wheel/ball
- Dragging the mouse pointer over the icons - there is no need to click, although that works, just let go of CMD when the desired program icon is highlighted. - demesisx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I'd disagree there. I'm manageing to keep my G4 and use it for Pro Video even though I have had to add most of the components (USB 2.0, Faster Video Card, Serial ATA card, Firewire 800, Bluetooth, DVD-DL burner w/ lightscribe, wifi, 2 GB of RAM, etc).
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6'H' works to hide applications in app swticher too. Very handy
- Kyle660, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Nice list here. It doesn't go out of its way to make superlative comments. This is just about the facts. I converted to OS X about a year ago and am constantly amazed at the intuitive design. What is key for me is the features that I don't use aren't intrusive in any way. Also, it may not be classified as a hidden gem, but the screen capture feature is extremely handy.
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