Stupid finder + stupid intellimouse drivers
I got most of my comp problems figured out (no, it wasn't bad RAM) by wiping every single disk. OSX voodoo. Overall, big Yay.
One of the big problems I was having with lockups during file transfers ended up being traced to some files with foreign unicode characters in them. I know they're valid characters, they would display just fine... but displaying was slow as hell, and it'd bomb the finder when copying, and then the whole machine. cp could handle it, if escaped. Why a unicode file character can take down a whole machine during a copy is beyond me.
The other was my mouse- it wasn't registering clicks correctly. I tried everything, but it seemed to come down to it registering a double-click way too fast. You'd click a url, and end up with 3 letters of it selected. The fix? Rip out MS's Intellimouse 5.0 drivers. With those gone, it works perfectly and I'm not registering double clicks half the time.
It also means most of the buttons on it are worthless, so I'm going to have to try USB Overdrive. In talking with someone I know at MS, it came out that they basically just license USB Overdrive for OSX, rip out a bunch of functionality and throw their own brand on it... they just don't update it.
Moral of the story? The mouse thing was just an annoyance, I just didn't uninstall MS's mouse drivers because I'm fairly addicted to some of the buttons in various apps. But OSX is supposed to be a kick-ass unicode beast, and more stable than jesus walking on the water, but a stupid thing like a unicode file name can send it into a tailspin. I really, really detest the OSX finder. Apple just has got to do better, I shouldn't be wishing I was using gnome or konquerer when I'm using OSX.
Posted by drunkenbatmanMarch 12, 2004, at 05:58 AM
Comments (3)
Posted by: drunkenbatman at March 22, 2004 05:52 PM
I have. :) And while I found it to go way, way too far over to the far end of feature creep with a bunch of customizing I was much happier. My problem was with the performance: the OSX finder isn't exactly snappy (altho better in 10.3) but pathfinder is much, much slower.
I had a conversation with the author about it, and his reply was basically "tell apple to make cocoa faster!". So I don't know how much could be improved on his end (c-arrays instead of NSdictionaries or something) but egh.
Posted by: some guy at May 3, 2004 12:07 PM
i had a similar problem with Unicode characters - when i got my Mac i was copying my music library over from my PC via FTP. without fail, the FTP program would choke every time. eventually i realized that it was choking at the same point every time - i had some MP3s by a Swedish band in the library, and the song titles are in Old Norse. i realized that this supposedly world-class operating system would not let me FTP a file with an "acute a" in the filename. just out of curiosity, i tried to transfer the file to a few Apache webservers, and there was no problem.
moral of the story: i eventually cleaned off my FireWire hard drive and did it the easy way...
this is just one of the many hurdles i've faced in "switching" to the Mac platform from Windows 2000. i've actually come to the conclusion that i will not be able to "switch" for quite some time, if ever. OS X (not OSX, by the by) is so excellent in some areas, but downright idiotic in others. in a few weeks i'm going to put up a new website that details all the little quirks of Apple's latest OS. there are hundreds of small notes, such as your post here, that detail these issues... but i want to centralize them all in one place so that they're all there for the world to see. it'd be interesting to compare notes - if you have a moment, put together a list of your un-favorite OS X behaviors and email them to me.
Have you tried PathFinder? It has some very neat features and seems more oriented towards low level geeky stuff, e.g. it's got a shell drawer built into it.