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Why I hate OSX

March 14, 2008

My hard drive crashed on Wednesday so I’ve been without my Dell laptop for a couple of days now. I have a Mac mini that I use to test my webpages in Safari so I’ve been using it (sparingly) while I wait on my new hard drive to arrive.

Normally my interaction with OSX is limited to starting Safari , testing my page, and closing Safari. I’ll admit that my experience with OSX is quite limited. For this reason I’ve never been that critical of the software. However, my recent catastrophe has led me to really dislike using it. My main complaint is that it seems too hard to accomplish the most basic tasks. I usually end up searching Google for things like “How do I make a short cut in OSX?” or “How do I connect to an FTP site in OSX?”. It’s just not very intuitive to me. I blame most of this on my heavy use of Windows, but that last question brings me to my second complaint:

Why no error codes in OSX? Every time something doesn’t work in OSX I get an error message that is long on friendliness but short on information. In Windows when something doesn’t work I usually get an error code or a specific error message that I can then Google and find a solution. In OSX I spend most my time sorting through thousands of articles and forum posts that are irrelevant because users get the same error message for a variety of reasons.

For instance, I decided to upload a new picture to my website today. So I fired up my Mac, found the picture, used Fireworks, saved the altered picture and was ready to upload. Whoops…no FTP. No problem even Windows has ftp, I know OSX can handle it. After searching around for a bit I came across several third-party software programs (ick I have to install a third-party product just to use FTP?) After a bit more searching I found this method:

http://www.creativemac.com/2002/09_sep/tutorials/ftposx020924.htm

Which suggests using the “Connect to Server” wizard built-in to OSX and I can hook it up just like another drive. Awesome! I can’t do that in Windows without third-party software. The steps are simple enough, unfortunately it doesn’t work. I don’t know why because the only message I get is:

"Could not connect to the server because the name or password is not correct."  Try Again / Cancel.

I’m never prompted for a username or password, but being computer “savvy” I tried to add it to the server string:

ftp://username:password@ftp.someserver.com

No luck.

What am I supposed to do with that error message? Is it an invalid server name or is it my username and password? How about one or the other?

The short of this rant is that once again something doesn’t work in OSX and I can wait until next week to upload my picture or I can spend a couple of hours trying ten different solutions to the same error message.