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Submitted by reeses on Sun, 2003-10-05 03:23.

I'm a Mac owner in his third day now, and I have some issues.

You have this great metaphor, derived from two great houses of computer interface design: Macintosh, and NeXT.

So, with this great metaphor, you have the problem that you see with Windows and Weenix all over the place: application inconsistency. It's not as bad as the random Gnome app, but it's annoying in little ways. Mostly because there's this expectation that things will work in a certain way.

Take Transmit, for example. It's apparently one of the elite (S)FTP clients for the Mac. It has cute icons, and the two-pane thing is pretty familiar. You can drag things back and forth between the panes.

One thing you cannot do, as far as I can tell, is drag something from the remote pane to the desktop. You have to retrieve it to the right pane (which, admittedly, could be your desktop), and then drag and drop to the desktop.

The more I use this, the more I want to take the next couple years off and write Mac software. I'd say "again", because it's basically NeXTSTEP 2003, but it's been so long, I'd have to learn all over again.

There are these great NS metaphors that are woefully unexercised by the seeming majority of Mac software I've snarfed so far. No one seems to expose Services, for one. I'm dealing with the inevitable TNEF/Winmail.dat issue with a nice little piece of shareware, and I have to save the attachment, THEN drag and drop the file onto the application, which will do the conversion. WTF? Slap that baby in a Service, and let me pipe it over directly. It'd be even cooler if you could rewrite the message in place, but I'm not sure how the abstracted store would handle that.

It's almost like the Macintosh community is much happier integrating applications with AppleScript (which, admittedly, works pretty darned well) than using Services or judicious NSProxy intervention.

I still frickin' love this thing, though.

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