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This may be slightly off-topic for this blog, so I'll say up front that if any Mac blogs (or Mac-related web sites) would like to pick this up and republish it, please feel free. Having said that, I've been using a Mac mini for a little over a month (alongside a Windows box) and there are a few annoyances I've discovered that don't appear to have easy resolutions (and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of these!). These have all been observed under Leopard. Listed in reverse order, starting with the least annoying and progressing to most annoying (to me, anyway):

1. Finder won't save FTP passwords - you may not realize that you don't really need an external FTP client to connect to an FTP site. Finder lets you do it (while in a Finder window, use Go|Connect to Server from the top menu bar, then specify the FTP address as you would in a web browser, starting with ftp://). It will pop up a box asking for your user name and password, and that box includes a checkbox that offers to remember your password on your keychain - except that it doesn't, at least when I tested it. Once you've done this, the site opens in a finder window, and (assuming you have the proper permissions on the server) you can move files back and forth just as you can to or from any networked drive. The annoyance here is that you have to re-type the password each time. My solution? I use muCommander (a cross platform, twin-pane file manager, somewhat like the old Norton Commander program) for FTP transfers - it will remember the passwords, works very well, and it's free!
2. Unexplained program crashes - sometimes, for no apparent reason, a program will just crash, and a box pops up asking if you want to restart it or ignore it. This seems to happen frequently when I'm actually trying to quit a program (some programs are worse than others in this regard) but at least in those cases I'm actually wanting the program to quit. More annoying is when it happens for no apparent reason while trying to do something perfectly normal, like opening a file. This happens with both Apple-supplied apps and third-party apps. The saving grace is that this rarely happens in a way that you actually lose data, so it's just annoying that you have to restart the program (or click a button to ignore the error when you really want to quit).
3. Firewall blocks incoming connections only - Leopard provides a firewall, but it only blocks incoming connections, and seems to allow or disallow connections on a per-application basis only (in other words, if you allow one incoming connection to an app, you allow them all). It has no way to prevent rogue apps from "phoning home", and third-party Mac apps seem much worse about phoning home without express user permission than PC apps (although many do ask first, and in some cases the only reason for "phoning home" is to check for new versions). There is a third-party add-on that provides outgoing connection blocking but it costs money, and some users have reported problems after installing it, which is why I'm not naming it here. C'mon, Apple, one of the reasons people buy Macs is because they perceive them to be more secure than PC's, so at least give us a firewall preference panel that doesn't look like it was thrown together in a single afternoon, and actually allows flexibility in blocking both outgoing and incoming connections.
4. No simple way to paste plain text - Let's say you want to do a copy and paste of some text from your web browser to an outgoing mail. You'll get different results depending on the browser you are copying from, but under no circumstances will you get plain text. On a PC, using Eudora, I could always do Control-Shift-V to paste plain text. Try using Command-Shift-V in Apple Mail and it does change the formatting, but also pastes the text as if it were a quote from the message being replied to. The ONLY way I've found around this is to use a utility called Plain Clip, which sits in the dock, and when you click on it it changes whatever text is in the clipboard to plain text. But that's cumbersome to use when you are in the middle of a keyboard operation (you have to move a hand from keyboard to mouse to perform this operation). I can't believe there's no keystroke combination that will simply strip the formatting from text and paste it as plain text, but if there is, I sure haven't found it. Edit: Would you believe that pressing Alt-Command-Shift-V (or in AppleSpeak, Option-Command-Shift-V) sometimes works to paste plain text? Yes, that's a FOUR key combination. Wonder what genius came up with that one?!
5. No way to delay outgoing mail - While on the subject of the Apple Mail program, I'm the type of person who frequently composes a mail, clicks Send, and then realizes that I should have added something (like a URL to a web page) or perhaps included another recipient. Sometimes, infrequently, I realize I shouldn't have sent it at all. On the PC, in Eudora, I could set it up so that it only sent out mail in batches at predefined intervals (I used 20 minutes), which let me catch most of my "mistakes" before they were actually sent. With Apple Mail, you click Send and boom! It's gone, with no "cooling off" period whatsoever. I would be oh, so happy if someone would come out with a "delayed send" plugin for Mail, that you could click and it would delay sending until 20 minutes into the future (or some other predefined period) - and if you then reopened and edited the message, the clock would reset. There are, of course, times when I really do want the message to go out immediately, but most of what I send is not time-sensitive and I'd really appreciate the opportunity to have an automatic delay on sent e-mail (and one that does not involve clicking around and making an event in iCal, or something that's more difficult than it should be).
6. iCal can't set a recurring alarm for the exact time of the event - And speaking of iCal, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem to have a fast and elegant way to set up a simple recurring reminder (such as, I want an alarm to pop up on my computer at 9:00 AM on the third of every month). You have to create an event, and then you can specify that it's a recurring event and then specify the popup alarm, but annoyingly you cannot set the alarm to the exact start of the event - it can be one minute before or one minute after (if you manually enter those), or 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after if you take the defaults. But sometimes you don't want to create an event in the usual sense of the word, you just want a simple reminder at a specific time, and iCal makes this more difficult than it should be. Bonus iCal annoyance: If you enter someone's birthday in the Address book, an entry shows up on that day in iCal, but there's no way to associate an alarm with it. Didn't anybody at Apple consider that you might want to have a popup reminder a day or two before the birthday?
7. This is the one that really bugs me. On a Mac mini, you can plug in any USB keyboard, or just about any keyboard if you get a cheap PS2 to USB adapter (these are easy to find on eBay), so you can still use all those free-after-rebate keyboards you stocked up on several years ago. A minor annoyance, at least for me, is that if I simply reboot the computer without powering it down completely for a few seconds, it doesn't recognize the keyboard at all. But, that I could live with. What's really annoying is that the geniuses at Apple decided that the numeric keypad should only be a numeric keypad - the NumLock key is disabled, and there's no way to get the directional keys or Ins/Del keys to work (please note I'm talking about the keys on the numeric keypad, NOT the keys between the alpha keypad and the numeric keypad, which for the most part work fine though not always exactly as on a PC). The reason this is a HUGE annoyance for me is that I learned to type on a manual typewriter and when I want a number, I use the numbers in the row above the QWERTY line of keys. And for that reason, ever since there have been numeric keypads on keyboards I've always released NumLock and used the numeric keypad for navigation only. Do you have any idea how hard it is to unlearn a quarter century of habit? And there is simply no good reason that Apple could not have allowed PC keyboards to work as expected - their OS is built on Unix, after all, and I'm sure that most Unix-based operating systems don't disable the NumLock (no version of Linux does that to my knowledge). I hope that when whoever made the decision to eliminate the NumLock switch gets old, they are forced to change some longstanding habits just to accommodate some idiot designer's idea of how things ought to work. Can you tell I'm REALLY PISSED about this one? You would be too, if you hit the wrong key about 300 times a day (in my case it's the Delete key on the numeric pad), then had to backspace and find the right one. Yes, I finally did find a hack that works in a few programs (Apple Mail for one) but for whatever reason, it doesn't work in Firefox (such as when entering this post). Edit: Help is finally here! The program KeyRemap4MacBook now has the ability to fix the numeric keypad (even in Firefox). Be sure to get the latest release version (3.1.0 or better). In that program, you will want to enable "Use KeyPad as Arrow (PC Style NumLock)" and (optionally) "Use PC Style Home/End (Command+Arrow)" and/or "Application Key to F11" (the "Application" key is the one between the right-hand Windows/Command key and the right-hand Ctrl key on PC-style keyboards).

Well, that's my list of Mac irritants. Now, please don't get the wrong idea, there's a lot to like about the Mac, and some things are definitely easier on the Mac. Even my list of irritations are for the most part small stuff, but that's part of what makes them irritating - I have to think that none of the things on my list would take considerable effort for the coders at Apple to fix (except maybe the firewall thing), and many of them might only take an hour or so, maybe less. What I don't know is whether these things annoy anyone but me, or whether others have found acceptable workarounds.

One thing that might have been on this list a month ago, but isn't now, is a lack of good freeware and open-source software for the Mac, compared to what's available for Linux and the PC. It turns out that there's a wealth of Mac freeware out there, but you have to find the sites that list it, and they do exist. The annoyance, if you can call it that, is that on several of the Mac-based forums they just don't talk about the freeware much. It seems that there is a certain contingent within the ranks of Mac devotees that has the attitude that free software can't be good software, which is a myth long since discarded among Windows and Linux users (and I think the Mac folks are coming around, but some of them are doing a lot of kicking and screaming about it). Here are links to a few good Mac freeware sites that also have RSS newsfeeds:

http://www.thriftmac.com/

http://www.freemacware.com/

http://www.myosxfreeware.com/

Edit: Also see this blog post: 20 Resources for OS X Freeware

There are probably other good Mac freeware sites (feel free to mention them in a comment, but be aware that I'll actually check the link, so don't try to spam!)

This article republished from  http://michigantelephone.wordpress.com/

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