P.C. Shannon

On Tuesday, I complained about Apple’s Quicktime technology. But my problems with Apple don’t end there.

This semester, I’m taking a class with a bunch of evolutionary biologists (more about this in a future post), who are all way into Macs. I suspect they love Macs for the reason that any group or professional class, like graphic artists, loves Macs—purely an accident of history. But at any rate, I’ve been using Macs a bit lately, and they drive me up the wall.

Bear in mind, I owned a PowerMac all through college, so this isn’t just a complaint of someone who’s resistant to change. The user interface is very pretty, I’ll grant that, but it’s annoyingly inefficient. The biggest problem is this: the mouse only has one freaking button! But the MacOS has the equivalent of a right-click menu. So how do you get to it? You have to hold down a button on the keyboard whilst clicking on an icon. So dumb.

The MacOS X windowing system doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. There’s no way to make a window full-screen. The icon bar at the bottom is transparent, but you can’t put anything behind it, although sometimes a program will open part of its window back there. That means you can’t click on it. But the only way to resize a window is to click on its lower right-hand corner, so if that corner is behind the menu bar, I hope you like your window size.

Plus, closing all of a program’s windows does not exit the program. That’s retarded. And if you want to change between windows in one program but can’t see them all, you have to use the “Window” menu. There’s no list of windows in the task bar as Windows has.

Now, if you want to rename a file, you can’t just do the equivalent of a right-click and pick “Rename” from the pop-up menu. That would just make too much sense. Instead, you have to choose the “Get Info” option and rename the file in there. There are some parts of Windows XP that are like this—getting to an option takes 5 steps versus 2 in the previous versions—but these are very technical items that most users never need to get at. Renaming a file is a basic, routine operation, and it shouldn’t take backflips to get to it.

Apple’s computers have always been slower and more expensive than the equivalent “wintel” machine. Now they’re also harder to use. But gee, the interface sure is pretty. Whatever. Apple has the market share it deserves—there will always be suckers and accidents of history.

QuickTime is one of those Internet technologies that I generally refuse to use as a matter of principle. Until recently, I couldn’t say why I loathe it so, which is not the case with RealPlayer. When I was working in IT, I saw several machines rendered completely unusable by bugs and crashes in the Real software. Admittedly, this was several years ago and on computers running either Windows 95 or NT; I have downloaded and used more recent version on XP and suffered no ill effects. Still, I’m hesitant to give it a ringing endorsement.

QuickTime, by comparison, just seems superfluous. I mean, I already have software on my computer that will play movies on websites. Why should I have to install something additional? But I did just that recently, because Intuit’s support site required it, for no apparent reason.

Of course, you can’t just install QuickTime any more. No, you have to install iTunes, which includes QuickTime. Apple is leveraging one of its “free” technologies to explicitly promote a pay service.

The QuickTime installer also gave me another surprise—something called Bonjour. It never asked me if I wanted Bonjour, it just knew what was best for me. Nice. Bonjour is a network setup technology that “lets you create an instant network of computers and smart devices just by getting them connected to each other.” Wonderful. It’s an integral part of MacOS X, but how many Windows users have it? Everyone with QuickTime, apparently. How many actually use it? Zero, I’d say.

Having this software sitting on your computer, just waiting for another Bonjour-enabled device to show up, seems like a big security risk to me. Considering how widespread QuickTime is, what’s to stop an enterprising virus writer from co-opting the protocol to help his baby spread across LANs, circumventing e-mail virus protection?

Hyperbole aside, Apple is also leveraging its “free” technology to surreptitiously install its own networking technology that may or may not be very secure. (I suspect Apple doesn’t worry too much about computer security because there’s never been a virus written for Apple computers. There just aren’t enough Macs around for it to spread very far or have much of an impact (virus writers crave media coverage). Biologists call this “heard immunity.”)

Plus it broke my installation of Java, which resulted in a moment of panic when my CS assignment was due.

A simple uninstall cleared all of these problems up. Of course, it wasn’t that simple since QuickTime and iTunes are separate uninstalls in spite of being installed as a single package.

Here’s the bottom line: Apple’s leveraging of QuickTime to promote its other technologies and services is an awfully Gates-esque move for the supposed “good guys.” In the age of Google and its “Don’t be evil” mantra, Apple fails that simple test.

I’ve been beating my head against my computer for the last week, trying to get Red Hat Linux 9 running on my older Athlon 750. The install itself, of course, was painless. And much faster than Windows. But there are always catches. It took some work to get Red Hat to dual-boot with Windows and to see the shared data drive on the machine (which uses NTFS). But the real problem was getting my USB wireless network adapter to work. It involved much hair-pulling, desk-beating, and general all-around cursing. Two reinstallations of linux later, it seems to be working.

I installed the OS so I can get familiar with it, since it’s a workhorse in bioinformatics. The take-home lesson really is this: in order to install linux, you must already be something of an expert. This is the real barrier to linux becoming viable and widespread on the desktop, let alone threatening Microsoft’s dominance. It’s its own worst enemy. But as a backend server, it’s definitely powerful and full of potential.