Love hate relationship with Mac OS
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Hate it. We have a mac mini in our rehearsal studio, and doing anything on it pisses me off. Tuesday night I was struggling with basic overdubbing in Audacity because it was mac OS. Need the audio file of that 1 track so you can do a quick edit? Sorry, can't find those. We would have gotten much more done even if we were running audacity on windows (still not my favorite). The lack of a right click/context menu is what I hate the most. In windows, if you want to use new software, you start right clicking to see what your options are. Not on mac.
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@Minion-Queen said:
You can direct where things go. But as you said you have to KNOW where it is to find it.
But not in a clear fashion. There is almost never a box where you can just type in an address and addresses are almost always fake and not the actual address making it that much more confusing.
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@Dashrender said:
Does the lack of extensions lead to the problem of not being able to find things?
Not for me, searching by file type instead of file name is way more powerful.
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@RojoLoco said:
Hate it. We have a mac mini in our rehearsal studio, and doing anything on it pisses me off. Tuesday night I was struggling with basic overdubbing in Audacity because it was mac OS. Need the audio file of that 1 track so you can do a quick edit? Sorry, can't find those. We would have gotten much more done even if we were running audacity on windows (still not my favorite). The lack of a right click/context menu is what I hate the most. In windows, if you want to use new software, you start right clicking to see what your options are. Not on mac.
Yes, slow, poor interface design choices cripple Mac OSX. So hard to get to anything. Everything takes more searching, more tools, more knowledge, more mouse movement, more eye movement.... it's designed for people to look busy but are really just killing time.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@RojoLoco said:
Hate it. We have a mac mini in our rehearsal studio, and doing anything on it pisses me off. Tuesday night I was struggling with basic overdubbing in Audacity because it was mac OS. Need the audio file of that 1 track so you can do a quick edit? Sorry, can't find those. We would have gotten much more done even if we were running audacity on windows (still not my favorite). The lack of a right click/context menu is what I hate the most. In windows, if you want to use new software, you start right clicking to see what your options are. Not on mac.
Yes, slow, poor interface design choices cripple Mac OSX. So hard to get to anything. Everything takes more searching, more tools, more knowledge, more mouse movement, more eye movement.... it's designed for people to look busy but are really just killing time.
I have NEVER been able to wrap my head around why it is (and has been for 2 decades) considered the de facto choice for "professional" audio/video production. I've been multi-tracking on PC since the 90s, never had issues.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the lack of extensions lead to the problem of not being able to find things?
Not for me, searching by file type instead of file name is way more powerful.
I'm lost, you say not for you, but then you say searching by file name is powerful - so wouldn't you say yes you have problems because MAC doesn't save things with file extensions? or does MAC now use file extensions?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the lack of extensions lead to the problem of not being able to find things?
Not for me, searching by file type instead of file name is way more powerful.
I'm lost, you say not for you, but then you say searching by file name is powerful - so wouldn't you say yes you have problems because MAC doesn't save things with file extensions? or does MAC now use file extensions?
Mac does not use file extensions, no UNIX does. The idea of file extensions are unique to Windows and are a holdover from DOS, it's a sad, sad, way to handle file data. I didn't say that searching by filename was powerful, I said that file type was.
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@RojoLoco said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@RojoLoco said:
Hate it. We have a mac mini in our rehearsal studio, and doing anything on it pisses me off. Tuesday night I was struggling with basic overdubbing in Audacity because it was mac OS. Need the audio file of that 1 track so you can do a quick edit? Sorry, can't find those. We would have gotten much more done even if we were running audacity on windows (still not my favorite). The lack of a right click/context menu is what I hate the most. In windows, if you want to use new software, you start right clicking to see what your options are. Not on mac.
Yes, slow, poor interface design choices cripple Mac OSX. So hard to get to anything. Everything takes more searching, more tools, more knowledge, more mouse movement, more eye movement.... it's designed for people to look busy but are really just killing time.
I have NEVER been able to wrap my head around why it is (and has been for 2 decades) considered the de facto choice for "professional" audio/video production. I've been multi-tracking on PC since the 90s, never had issues.
I think it is more the people that you meet that say that and less commonly the professionals themselves. I've supported large AV production houses and they had Macs... but only for show because it was expected. They did all of their work on Windows.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the lack of extensions lead to the problem of not being able to find things?
Not for me, searching by file type instead of file name is way more powerful.
I'm lost, you say not for you, but then you say searching by file name is powerful - so wouldn't you say yes you have problems because MAC doesn't save things with file extensions? or does MAC now use file extensions?
Mac does not use file extensions, no UNIX does. The idea of file extensions are unique to Windows and are a holdover from DOS, it's a sad, sad, way to handle file data. I didn't say that searching by filename was powerful, I said that file type was.
How do you search by file type if not by extension?
Yeah, wrote the wrong word... filename instead of file type.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Does the lack of extensions lead to the problem of not being able to find things?
Not for me, searching by file type instead of file name is way more powerful.
I'm lost, you say not for you, but then you say searching by file name is powerful - so wouldn't you say yes you have problems because MAC doesn't save things with file extensions? or does MAC now use file extensions?
Mac does not use file extensions, no UNIX does. The idea of file extensions are unique to Windows and are a holdover from DOS, it's a sad, sad, way to handle file data. I didn't say that searching by filename was powerful, I said that file type was.
How do you search by file type if not by extension?
Yeah, wrote the wrong word... filename instead of file type.
Extensions are just part of the name and tell us nothing. You can name a Word document with .jpg and Windows will think that it is an image because it is confusing the name of a thing with the type of a thing. To all other operating systems, they actually look at the binary headers of the files and determine what they actually are, it's actually looking at what the file is. There is no connection, not a direct one anyway, between a file name (extension) and type, that's a human thing that has to be maintained and is not reliable and breaks all standard good practices in data storage. It's a kludge that shouldn't exist.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Extensions are just part of the name and tell us nothing. You can name a Word document with .jpg and Windows will think that it is an image because it is confusing the name of a thing with the type of a thing. To all other operating systems, they actually look at the binary headers of the files and determine what they actually are, it's actually looking at what the file is. There is no connection, not a direct one anyway, between a file name (extension) and type, that's a human thing that has to be maintained and is not reliable and breaks all standard good practices in data storage. It's a kludge that shouldn't exist.
OK I understand that - I wonder if MS just can't move to that situation, yet support the old style for backwards compatibility?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Extensions are just part of the name and tell us nothing. You can name a Word document with .jpg and Windows will think that it is an image because it is confusing the name of a thing with the type of a thing. To all other operating systems, they actually look at the binary headers of the files and determine what they actually are, it's actually looking at what the file is. There is no connection, not a direct one anyway, between a file name (extension) and type, that's a human thing that has to be maintained and is not reliable and breaks all standard good practices in data storage. It's a kludge that shouldn't exist.
OK I understand that - I wonder if MS just can't move to that situation, yet support the old style for backwards compatibility?
You can "have" both but it would cause conflicts and confusion. Windows users aren't good with change and this is a thirty year backlog of "this is how we've always done it." Just look at your response, you accidentally mixed the worlds extension and type because, I presume, in your mind they are so linked that it is surprising to find that they are different things. If you grow up in Windows this can happen. That's a lot of people to retrain in a pretty invasive way.
And yet, it is one of those things that the UNIX users like to point out about just how surprisingly more easy Linux is to use, even for desktop use.
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I know the difference between filename and file type. That was just me being in a hurry. That said, I'll agree that most users of Windows wouldn't know the difference.
I guess I like the human factor that file extensions provide that missing them looses. If I'm on a unix system and look at a file called command I can't tell by looking at it if it's an executable, text file, Word document, etc. I'm sure there are tools in unix that will tell me that, but just doing a list - are there arguments that will tell me?
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@scottalanmiller said:
Windows users aren't good with change and this is a thirty year backlog
I use both Macs and Windows. And have for a long time but I've always had a file management problem on Macs. I think this is also and issue on macs they don't want to change the OS they've built up, they've taken Unix and thrown so much stuff on top of it that it makes it hard to work.
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@Dashrender said:
I know the difference between filename and file type. That was just me being in a hurry.
Or it was Freudian?
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@JasonNM said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Windows users aren't good with change and this is a thirty year backlog
I use both Macs and Windows. And have for a long time but I've always had a file management problem on Macs. I think this is also and issue on macs they don't want to change the OS they've built up, they've taken Unix and thrown so much stuff on top of it that it makes it hard to work.
And HFS+ just sucks too. It is a ridiculous filesystem. Linus was ranting about that recently.
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@RojoLoco said:
I have NEVER been able to wrap my head around why it is (and has been for 2 decades) considered the de facto choice for "professional" audio/video production. I've been multi-tracking on PC since the 90s, never had issues.
It's not as popular now, there used to be times when Mac made sense and you'd be insane to choose windows over it for video or audio work because windows used to suck at font rendering, graphics and audio drivers compared to Macs OSes video drivers and coreAudio. But, now days Adobe software works better on windows, Final Cut Pro 7 went to the consumer grade Final Cut Pro X. and Avid media composer and Avid Pro Tools works better on windows than it does on Mac (not that it works that great on either). Avid even choose to use windows computers for their live audio sound boards, not mac mini's. That shows who they think they work better.
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@Dashrender said:
I guess I like the human factor that file extensions provide that missing them looses. If I'm on a unix system and look at a file called command I can't tell by looking at it if it's an executable, text file, Word document, etc. I'm sure there are tools in unix that will tell me that, but just doing a list - are there arguments that will tell me?
They don't tell you in Windows either. In Windows the file extension is normally hidden so you have no idea without taking an extra step. And the extension might be wrong or be any of a number of things (jpg, JPG, jpeg) instead of just one. In UNIX you can test any single file using the file command.
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@JasonNM said:
@RojoLoco said:
I have NEVER been able to wrap my head around why it is (and has been for 2 decades) considered the de facto choice for "professional" audio/video production. I've been multi-tracking on PC since the 90s, never had issues.
It's not as popular now, there used to be times when Mac made sense and you'd be insane to choose windows over it for video or audio work because windows used to suck at font rendering, graphics and audio drivers compared to Macs OSes video drivers and coreAudio. But, now days Adobe software works better on windows, Final Cut Pro 7 went to the consumer grade Final Cut Pro X. and Avid media composer and Avid Pro Tools works better on windows than it does on Mac (not that it works that great on either). Avid even choose to use windows computers for their live audio sound boards, not mac mini's. That shows who they think they work better.
Like I said, been using PC over mac for those specific applications since the late 90s, which was when it all became even. Mac OS and Pro tools can still kiss my ass, I never believed the hype about "it's what professionals use".
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I think it remains really popular with "entry level" AV people, not the full timers, not the high end shops, it is used there too but I think its big market is heavy saturation in the people who do it at home, as a hobby or are just getting into it. Once you get to the big shops I think you see that drop off and become a secondary player to Windows rather than the market leader. My view of that market is limited but it makes sense and that is what I've seen.
