Category: the Rant Board
Despite the title, this is a full rant not a post seeking answers to questions. So that's why I put it here. As most people know, I'm not a huge fan of Windows. I could go on and on about it's problems. But lately, my annoyance has been with Snow Leopard. It's so bad that I have to rant about it. Mind you, I haven't had as many problems with Leopard, but as soon as the os was switched, I developed them. So here's the good and the bad.
Good
1. I can now make youtube videos without them being cut off. It used to cut them off, usually after a few seconds or maybe a minute. No matter how many times I reuploaded them, it would do the same thing at the same spot. And it would play them normally in VLC etc.
2. It saves my text in Text Edit, even if the machine loses power. I love that, unlike with Windows, the Mac will make temporary documents of my files so that I don't lose them and can retrieve them as soon as I reboot. This is in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.
Bad
1. "Safari busy, busy, busy" So many times, I'll be reading a page or trying to refresh and it'll keep saying busy. I upgraded and it quit a bit and then started up again. Sometimes, it gets so bad that I have to restart the machine cause I can't quit Safari.
2. force quit While we're at it, I can't properly quit things anymore. It used to just say "do you want to quit Safari" or whatever program I was quitting, I hit yes and that would be it. Now, I have to go through this menu of what I want to quit, so I often just use the power button.
3. "quick nav on" I've grown to truly hate those words. I don't know what the hell quick nav is but it can take a hike and never come back. It fucks up my reading of documents and of webpages and I constantly turn it on by mistake. I wish I could totally disable it.
4. spelling corrections It's nice that there's an option to make a noise when I spell a word incorrectly, though that in itself can get annoying at times if I want to speed read. What I don't like is when it thinks it knows better and starts correcting words when I knew damned well what I was typing. For instance, I can't write i s p as one word cause it'll change it to sip. It changed the nav in quick nav to nave and so on. If I really need to send an e-mail or something it drives me nuts cause it'll totally change my words and many times, I won't see it until the message hs been sent. Go away stupid asshole and stop taking over my system!
5. "html content" Sometimes, I'll be on a page, and instead of reading it properly, it'll just say "html content. Somet times, I can fix it with interacting but sometimes, it won't work at all. Closely related to that is when a page can't be found, but instead of just saying that, it says something like empty html and it won't say anything else. Then, when I tab through things, I just get forward, ace, refresh and the stupid links and things that they include, though I've turned most of them off.
6. interaction One of the, uh, unique things about using VoiceOver is the concept of interacting with things It's not that difficult to do but many times, it really slows me down and pisses me off. I could understand it in certain situations but when I have to interact with the text on a page just to select and to copy it, and half the time, it doesn't even copy it cause I didn't stop selecting or interacting or whatever, it's uncalled for.
7. weird issue with EBay For some reason, I can't ever just type in the EBay site or even click on it using the toolbar or whatever that thing is with all the links. It always closes Safari and brings me into whatever other program that's open. Instead, I have to look for something on there, say laptops bay, on Google, click on that category and then I could go through the site normally, changing links etc.
8. system volume changing I'm not sure how or why this happens, but sometimes, when I use command-option-ctrl left and right arrows it'll not only change the volume of VoiceOver but of the entire system. I've looked to see if that option is there in that menu and couldn't find it. But the one to change the voice is and that sometimes happens. I have mixed feelings on it.
9. Preview I've always hated that program. Trying to read pdfs with it is an absolute nightmare. I've actually learned to tolerate that format a little with the use of Kurzweil, but with the Mac, I've learned to hate it all over again. Why can't people fucking put things in rtf, txt or doc?
10. dot files Like interacting and Preview, I had this in Leopard too. whenever I plug a device, like my Muvo T100, into the Mac and then plug it into Windows, I get all these stupid duplicate files of the ones on the disk/stick/whatever. All have the same names but start with a period. So If I have file1 and file2 on there, I'll have them plus .file1 and .file2 plus a few others like .trashes, .7st or whatever it's called and so on. These are all empty but having them there bothers me and I then have to go through the process of deleting them.
So yeah. That's been my experience with the Mac since snow Leopard. I'm not even including the three times I had to send the machine in for repair, though they say it's now completely fix and a lot of parts were replaced.
I forgot another good one. I can check the history in Safari. In truth, this is something that I will miss when I switch. I could never get it to work with Internet Explorer, WebbIE or even Firefox. I'll go into history but the screen reader, whichever I'm using, won't let me go through the list of pages like I can do with Safari on the Mac.
O wow. I've never heard of Snow Lepord. I think I know why. Lol.
Snow leopard is an absolute dream! Best operating system Apple has ever come out wth. You don't have to use Quicknav if you don't want, just don't press the left and right arrows together, and quicknav won't turn on, although if you would learn to use it, you would find out how beautiful it is. As for your busy safari thing, you either have too much stuff starting when you log in to the computer, or you need to throw a little more memory into it, but I run a computer with 1GB, and it's grease lightning.
i've had none of these problems, and i've been using my macBook now for web browsing and the like. are you sure, it's not you're system, or you causing these problems. seriously. snow leopard is amazing. as for interacting, you know it's part of the OS and how voiceover accesses things, deal with it.
Hmm. I've never used it, so....will maybe try it....
On the pdf front. The reason pdf has become so popular is partly that when html and rtf and o on came along in the early 1990s puthe layout of such documents was not controlled by the maker of the document but by the client application. Html clients render material slightly differently based on browser, screen size and other factors.
Publishers did not like this, they wanted a format where not only the content was controlled by them but also the layout. Additionally they wanted a format that culd support security measures and document locking, in case they sent out material they did not want copied.
That's where Adobe stepped in and came up with the pdf format and, in addition to addresing these problems, they made sure pdf was truly portable and playable on any operating system, by developing the client software for the different O.S.s and giving it away for users.
Pdf is here to stay and with its restrictions and problems for a reason. As a blind community it is more important to push on Adobe for accessibility support improvement, rather than trying to always demand documents in alternative format. At least I've had more success that way, and Adobe have acted reasonably well and keep improving pdf.
Basically, no matter what operating system you use you will have a different experience with pdf from a text tile, by the very nature of pdf.
Using Acrobat 8 and above I've had very good luck with pdf files and quite like them for text and simple layout, I've even seen very accessible interactive forms.
Now pdf support might be worse on the Apple side, either in their adobe reader or VoiceOver, but Jaws works well, Hal works not quite as well but still quite well as well as does NVDA.
I got my Macbook in December of 2007 and don't know the specs on it. I'd honestly hope it has more than 1gb of ram. I don't hit the arrows together on purpose. It just happens. So what is the purpose of this feature? I don't get it. How do I check and change the programs starting with the computer? I suppose I understand the reaons for pdf now, since I never really did, but I'd still prefer to just have these documents rendered in txt etc. and think that Kurzweil mostly does a good job of that as does the Accessible PDF Reader that comes with the WebbIE program. But I'm intrigued about the truly accessible ones that you've found with the forms and whatnot. I'll have to try Adobe 8, if only to say I've experienced it. No harm can come of it so why not? But am I not correct in saying that certain txt and other files can be made read only, so that they can't be changed. How can pdfs not be copied? I mean, even in adobe, can't you simply save them and then distribute them to whomever if you wanted?
My only issue with Adobe, at least for me using JAWS with it, is that it tends to read documents really choppy. Minor annoyance, I know, but annoying it is.
I forgot another annoyance with Snow Leopard. Many times, when I go to look something up on Google, it'll chop off the first letter of the first word in the search. So if I'm looking up types of coffee, I'll get ypes of coffee and then have to go, add the t and then search again. I never had this with Leopard and am positive that I'm writing all the letters.
i use my macBook with snow leopard, and have never found that issue, and i do a lot of searching with it hunting down mac versions of some windows programs i use. it sounds to me that you have faulty software, seriously
That happens to me when I use Internet Explorer as well.
Quicknav is designed for people who don't feel like holding down the VO keys while navigating the web. It lets you just do it with the arrow cluster instead, and it's an amazing time saver. As for your Google problem, you need to wait for the page to load before you type into the search box. Wait till you hear the three pops, then make sure the focus is on the edit box. Seriously, you're the only one of many people on this site who use Snow Leopard that has these problems. I don't know how you configure your system, but maybe you should format your hard drive, and reinstall from scratch to solve your problems.
I turned the default sounds off. Most of them just gave me a headache. In any case, I got my IBM today, so I won't have to deal with this on a daily basis. If I were to reformat, I'd installed Leopard again, not Snow Leopard. Things weren't as bad with that os.
what we're saying, is snow leopard may have not installed correctly. it's better than leopard, i've heard the difference and even seen it on the two macs i've used.
When I installed Snow Leopard, I got a speed bump like crazy. Snow Leopard is like Windows 7. The coders got it right this time.
Hmm I have never seen even a Windows user using a Mac complain about the OS to this degree ... not even when I supported that sad excuse of an OS System 7 / 7.1 in the mid-nineties ... and no, it wasn't 'accessible' but the users were all sighted.
But seriously the guts of Leopard / Snow Leopard are strong, though I have not had occasion to run it as a user. You can, as a blind person, put your DVD in the drive, boot from it, press Command+F5 or Command+Fn+f5 depending on your hardware settings for your notebook, and perform a totally clean install.
I'd first put a thumb drive in and use Time Machine or something to back them up.
As to what starts first, I don't know how to tell you this as a user: We used to turn off extensions in Control Panels which were the same as Startup, but that info is before Leopard. I imagine it's probably your Dock? Use Switch101.com and don't listen to the Macademic accessibility people who claim you have to 'forget' previous operating systems. Apple in main obviously acknowledges that is frivolous, hence switch101.com
There's info on there for how to do most things and informs Windows users on how to do them. If you know how to use your reader, then you can probably just use its commands to click on the dock. I don't know if you can make a context menu pop up there, but if so, you can probably use it to remove the item from the dock.
Another thing for you to consider is that you're using your wireless network, and not someone else's unsecure / potentially low-bandwidth one. I believe they call it 'Airport' if memory serves me. Was helping a friend out (using the abovementioned site) with her network recently, and granted she's sighted so wasn't using a reader as we do, but that doesn't matter. The tools are the same. Faulty wireless can cause innumerable problems with Internet access. This isn't Mac-specific, it has to do with what network you're connected to, and the signals - how good you have it where you're sitting - are performing. Laptop keyboards in general are smaller, more delicate in responsiveness. I too bash my keyboards: I grew up using manual typewriters in school because they were cheaper and didn't require cords, and have yet not broken myself of delivering love taps to the keys. That being said, I've never seen a laptop keyboard break down, it's just easy to type a letter multiple times.
If I'm mistaken on any of the Mac stuff, hopefully Jessie or some other actual mac user will correct me. And as an aside, hopefully Jessie and other mac users on here did not have the misfortune of using systems like System 7 / 8 / 9 ... lol
Thanks so so much for that. It was extremely helpful. I'll remember that trick when I go to reinstall leopard. I've never used time Machine, so it could be faster than my method, not sure. I just copy and paste everything onto my Muvo T100 (my cf card reader won't work with the Mac) and copy it over to whichever other machine I'll be using. The only problem there is those duplicate files.
Most of the problems you're citing here are things that have to do with the way your prefs are configured. The misspelled words thing, for example. There's an option to turn auto correction off, and even for voiceover to say "misspelled" rather than making a sound. When you're in the doc, go through the items you have there and see which ones have "open at log-in" checked. That's probably why Safari is acting the way it is. I got my Macbook around the same time as you did, and I also have a mid-2008 iMac. They're both running Snow Leopard like dreams. I was in a computer lab recently and the Mac there was running Leopard. Wow, so many ittle bugs and annoyances were fixed, I can't imagine going back.
I'm not an Apple fangirl, and I'm totally willing to say "Hey, guys? This was not so great." But I just can't do that with Snow Leopard. It's awesome. Seriously, you are the only person, blind or sighted, I've seen with these sorts of complaints.
How do I get into the dock again? I know I've done it a few times, before snow Leopard was installed, but don't remember how. You'd think that these sorts of things would be in a normal place like system preferences. Still, it would be really nice to fix them. nVDA says "spelling error" and does nothing more, so I'm familiar with this idea. I like that alot, since it lets me know when I've made a mistake but it also lets me keep the word as I wrote it if it's just something not in their dictionary. What did you mean about starting at log-in? If you mean that Safari starts as soon as I start my computer this is not the case. Another interesting thing, though not truly bad, is that now that I'm used to editing text with the Mac, it's trange doing it with Windows. I suppose each has it's good and bad side, though I still think it's easier when the cursor acts like it does in XP.
To get into the dock: vo+D.
To fix your problems, do this.
VO+D
Find the item you want to change in your dock.
Press VO+Shift+M
go down intil you hear open at login. Uncheck it if its checked. Done.
Also, you can switch the way Voiceover interacts with the cursor in Snow Leopard to make it more like XP. To get into your voiceover preferences, and customize a whole lot of things, most of which you couldn't do in Leopard, VO-F7 gets you in. I love Snow Leopard, but still run Windows 7 with a BootCamp partition, so I don't guess I'm necessarily an Apple fanboy, although they do make the prettiest hardware, and in general, very durable. It would definitely be in your best interest to install Snow Leopard clean, and not Leopard, as Voiceover in the older system is seriously lacking in comparison. Definitely get into your VO prefs, and don't be afraid to adjust things to your liking. Most everything is customizeable, and also, Voiceover 3, which comes with SL is scriptable, which the older versions weren't.
Hmm, I'll check those out. I know that I've been in the preference several times but didn't really explore them completely when the system was changed. I'd need to get/find the os in order to install it, since the tech at Apple did it as a free upgrade cause of the number of problems I was having, and didn't include the disks. But if all of this really is fixable, then I probably won't need to reinstall in any case.
Sounds real buggy. Glad I don't use snow leopard.
Tiff, I'm sure I could hook you up with it, since you legally own it anyway. Still, I'm sure we can help you resolve your problems. It could just be a piece of outdated code in a piece of software on your machine causing the problems.
I'd actually prefer X86. In any case, I have my Thikpad now so probably won't be using the Mac for much anyway.
There is no X86 version of Snow Leopard. It'll run on an X86 processor, but it's optimized for a 64-bit processor, which has several advantages over the old system, such as being able to address more than 3GB of memory, better core optimization with threading, etc. Leopard will actually run slower than Snow Leopard. Check and see if you have a piece of software on your system that's using Rosetta to run, as that will contribute to your problems. It could be something as simple as a printer driver, or as complex as Office software. Either way, Rosetta's bad for your computer speed.
If this helps, the computer is pretty much as they gave it to me. I didn't play around with system settings. The only things I've even downloaded were adium, Skype and VLC. I've also gotten rid of ITunes cause I don't use it and probably will do the same for some of the other installed software. How do I check to see if Rosetta is being used with anything? I'm sorry for all the questions, but these are things that I mostly know how to do with windows and DOS not with the Mac. Other than the fact that it can now use up to 3gb of ram, the other advantages of a 64-bit system were completely lost on me.
removing ITunes? that's insane in some respects. if ITunes worked on windows better i'd switch to it for good. i love the ability to sort music in that not to mention podcasts and all.
i have issues with a snow leopard too, it keeps raiding my neighbour's pond for fish! hahaah
lol.
lol Good one. As for players, I much prefer VLC Media Player. I already sort my own music into various folders etc. and like the way VLC handles things, both in Windows and on the mac. that said, I often use Windows Media Player with XP. Sad that it's Mac version is inaccesible, or at least, it was the last time I saw it.
Windows media player or the yahoo music engine.
I've never even heard of the Yahoo Music engine. I'm talking about Microsoft's Windows Media Player that comes standad with XP, though I'd like to downgrade from 11 to 9, since I like that one better. As I recall, it's based off a DOS one which can still be found in Windows XP, but I forget it's name. I'd like to see if I can find the stand-alone version.
There is no Windows Media Player for OSX. You use Flip For Mac in Quicktime. You may have corrupted something by uninstalling iTunes, you know, as some of OSX's music playback engine is handled therein. It would be like removing WMP from Windows. Just not a great idea. iTunes is to OSX as WMP is to Windows. Get it? Are you running the latest VLC? Without looking at your system, I can't tell you the problem, but the problem is most certainly not the OS.
Well, I got sick of it constantly trying to open ITunes for my mp3s, of there being an ITunes folder in my music folder and of updates for ITunes being downloaded when I never used the thing. Same with Front Row, Widgets and a few others that I can't think of off the top of my head.
Jesse is right...be careful.
Systems have too much crap built into them today. It's honestly ridiculous. I guess they think all users are idiots and can't make up their own minds about what they want to use.
You can change all your associations if you want, but do it the right way. Don't go randomly deleting stuff, and then complaining when your system doesn't work as advertised after you destabilized it. Mac OS doesn't work like Windows. There is no registry, so the software that's on your computer won't slow everything else down, with the exception of perhaps the dashboard, which you can't disable unless you know the proper teminal commands to do so. That can be found on www.tuaw.com. That being said, I think a reinstall of SL is in order, then stop trying to fool with it! It works! It works well! It's not Microsoft! And, for God's sake, don't piss and moan on here after you break it!
It's not my fault that systems are full of stupid bloatware and that things can't be deleted like they should be. It's not like I just deleted the file that said ITunes. I also went into cashes, preferences etc. and got rid of the associated files. I did the same with Leopard and had none of these problems. But I also had these problems with Snow Leopard before I did anything to Itunes, so I highly doubt that's the cause of them.
Tiff, most systems have these associations for a reason. That is just the way we've progressed.
There is not one bit of bloatware in a Mac. Well, leopard was kinda full of bloated code, but Snow Leopard is not. Another possible problem could be the way the guy upgraded it for you. It may not be your fault at all.
Considering that, aside from the aformentioned program, I didn't do anything to it, I'm inclined to agree with you. I'm just happy that I've got my IBM now.