A critique of Apple macOS 13.x “Ventura”
Open Letter to Apple
This page is a list of bug reports, suggestions and complaints for people at Apple to read, and hopefully react to positively.
It is the result of switching from:
Big Sur 11.x on an Intel-based Macbook Pro
to
Ventura 13.x on an M2-based Macbook Pro.
Some items were already valid for earlier OS versions.
To make it easier to understand the list, please consider these introductory notes:
I do understand the need to make things simple for the information-consuming but computer-challenged average user, and the need to protect them from malicious attacks. But I just want to be productive. Not everyone is an informatics simpleton!
Don't propose workarounds: I already know them. They just require more typing or clicking than what I'm asking for. For example, I know I can force Safari to download a pdf by clicking the link while holding the option key. That is not the alternative to being able to switch pdf support OFF.
Quite a few settings that improve productivity are now housed in Accessibility. But I'm not a disabled person.
I want no animations of any features anywhere ever, but switching them OFF becomes more and more of a chore.
Disclaimer: I may have made mistakes, overlooked things, or otherwise missed something. Additionally some points may have been addressed in updates sinc I wrote about them here. I apologise for such mitakes, as they would be entirely my fault.
On the new laptops:
The magsafe power cable is back, good.
There is a slot for SD cards and an HDMI output. Good, I give a lot of presentations.
The irritating touchbar has finally gone.
The obsession with thin and light machines seems also to have been dropped.
The Finder was my main reason for adopting the Mac as my platform. It is still what I use most. Some adjustments are in order, see below under “Finder”.
“Numbers” is probably the most productive spreadsheet available anywhere.
Give the user much more control over settings, by making it possible to switch options OFF and/or disabling certain defaults. OSX in the days of Snow Leopard was very productive. Now it takes me several days to get a new version into shape. For some adjustments it is necessary to descend into Terminal and type complex Unix incantations. But for some settings even that is no longer possible!
Releasing a new OS version every year is too often. Most of the changes are restrictions and/or removal of functionalities. The rest are cosmetics. But there are also hidden features that introduce incompatibilities which then break some of the functions I need. Go back to a release once every two years. Obviously in between you can and should patch security holes, bugs and the like, but be careful with incompatibilities and functionalities.
Earlier, the only reason I went from High Sierra to Big Sur is that my bank refused e-banking through the older versions of Safari, and the only way to get a new version is to change the entire OS! Why can I not download new Safari versions like I can with Firefox? The latest Firefox runs on High Sierra.
Make it possible to completely disable iCloud notifications. I never work with any cloud, I run my own server. I will never want the iCloud, but need to be very careful not to fall into it.
Make it possible to completely disable notifications of software updates. Because functions are removed or changed between OS versions, I was always afraid I would accidentally start an update and end up in an unworkable situation.
I'm really fed up with light gray text on a light gray background. Let me have black on white if I so desire. Increased contrast helps but is not the solution. For example, when working in Mail, where I have several viewer windows open, the ones not active are simply unreadable in normal contrast and still not good enough in increased contrast.
Some clicks resize document windows to full width of screen, but there is no way to reverse that. I would anyway like to switch that OFF system wide.
It was much simpler to have Save — Don't save instead of Revert Changes or Delete. I don't want to press a button “Delete” on a new document that I have never saved and don't want to save.
Put the Save as explicitly back in the File menu, instead of Duplicate, and make it all coherent.
Very wide screens are not taken into account: menus in the menu bar are at the very left, there is no way to put them towards the middle of the screen. I work on a PHILIPS 499: at 1200mmx330mm it is more than a metre wide. Fortunately SecondBar still works somehow. The impossiblity to move the menu bar on a very wide screen is a BUG or missing feature.
Paper size is incoherently handled: I can manage custom paper sizes in Safari, but cannot use them in Numbers (13.0). I wanted to make a pdf of a large Numbers sheet, to send it to a friend who does not have access to Numbers. I therefore wanted a very large custom size paper, but it was impossible. BUG.
In System Settings, separate settings for formats have been removed for the second time (it happened before, in Tiger). I am reduced to choosing a country and all its formats. But there is no country that has the combinations I need. From the introduction you will understand that I use English, metric, 24h clock, ISO dates, euros and the apostrophe “'” for digit grouping in numbers. Fortunately TinkerTool allows me to set the digit grouping. This is a serious BUG. It would have made all my documents with numbers in them invalid!
Full key repeat is no longer supported: I can set the key repeat rate and the delay until repeat, but that applies only to characters that do not have any possible diacritical marks. Fortunately TinkerTool does allow me to support key repeat. BUG.
In some Apple applications, after selecting some text, why must I hold and wait before I can move a text selection?
How does one disable spelling checking globally? I never want it, because I write in a mixture of English, French and Dutch, often using words from different languages in the same sentence. Now I have to disable it manually in every application. (btw, Portuguese cannot be unchecked in the setup list of
→Text Input→Input Sources→Edit→Spelling→Automatic by language; BUG).
Stickies does spelling checking even per sticky!
There are some places where double spaces are reduced to single spaces. If I type two consecutive spaces, it's because I want them. Please let me switch that OFF.
There should be a global setting to disable relative dates. I never want them. “today”, “yesterday” etc. are just in my way for efficient filing and spotting dates and times, I want it OFF.
I often work offline. Do not ever assume that the user guide or the help for a certain application should be on-line only, as certain third-party applications do.
There are confusing incoherences with some menu items indicating state and some being commands and some both. Example: in Preview the sidebar menu in the toolbar shows the state of the sidebar and is also a menu.
In some applications non-breaking hyphen breaks at line-wraps anyway.
What does “Sleep” now mean? There is nothing about it in the System Settings but it does appear in the Apple menu. In the system settings one can decide when the display is turned off (which is not under Displays but under Lock Screen) or the screen saver starts, but the word “sleep” is not used. “Sleep” should refer to system activity but there is no setting referring to it.
I want to decide which fonts appear in the lists of every application. There are far too many to choose from: the list(s) are far too long.
Disabling in Font Book does not seem to do anything.
The border area where they are sensitive to resizing should be larger. Fortunately TinkerTool allows me to access a setting to do that. Why hide it?
The window manager repositions windows to avoid the dock if the dock is visible, and therefore does not obey the AppleScripts I write to position windows where I want them. Can I switch this OFF?
Incoherences across applications: some applications allow dragging items off the toolbar to eliminate them, in others one has to right-click to select from a menu in order to remove them, etc. It is also not possible to have some items on the left.
Toolbars also take up valuable space on document windows; factoring them out was the primary reason for the menu bar.
There is no setting for default state of the sidebar (I would like “thumbnails”).
Otherwise it is becoming a very good application.
Can only be placed it in the centre of a border. Why not at top, bottom, left, or right? TinkerTool allowed those choices, but can no longer do it. I used to prefer DragThing to the dock, but it is no longer working.
No way to capture actual cursor shapes (e.g. the resizing arrows)
In the menu bar it is ineptly named “emoji & symbols”
There is no way to call it up with a keystroke.
Sometimes it does not remember the last pane viewed, because it remembers per application. Can I switch that OFF?
When adding a character to the Favourites, the pane does not update in other applications until it has been closed in the application where the favourite was added.
It does not give visual feedback when resizing its window. BTW, this absence of user feedback is true in other places as well, e.g. moving the separator in the colour chooser.
Maybe someone is still trying to “minimalise” everything by removing useful features, but it is not appreciated by everyone.
Fortunately I was able to attach the character viewer to the “world key” and to simulate that key with Keyboard Maestro, since my Macbook is on a shelf behind the screen and has its lid closed.
This can fortunately be called up with a single line Applescript: “choose color” so that I was able to link it to a keystroke via Keyboard Maestro. However, there is no way to set the default appearance for it: I have to copy my default again and again for each application. The same applies to the character viewer.
It is incoherent that the “close window” red dot at upper left is not active, and I have to click “Cancel” instead.
It is possible to have several pickers open at the same time! What purpose might that serve?
It is impossible to put a swatch anywhere other than either at the end or in between existing ones, so I have to fill the panel with lots of white ones if I want to keep some order.
Is now in Accessibility? What about people who need to write in languages other than that of their keyboard? No simple way to call it up with a keystroke, but fortunately that can be done in System Settings. Very difficult to find: Keyboard → keyboard shortcuts → accessibliity → show accessibility controls !
The three palettes mentioned above also go away when switching to another application. I may want them to stay visible whatever I choose to do. Also applies to the Fonts palette. Incoherent, irritating and unproductive.
Who came up with the strange zoom factors?
I thought this was the worst of all Apple applications, but see “Photos”.
I keep regretting the highly productive interface of “Eudora”. Mail needs a zoom factor like Numbers and Pages. An acceptable font size for a recipient (e.g. 12pt) may be too small for the author.
Make it possible to disable link preview. I never want that. Fortunately I found a workaround.
Make it possible to disable the conversation column globally; now I have to do it for each mailbox. I spent considerable time to find a certain message, but only succeeded when I switched grouping by conversation off.
Can I switch "smart" copy-paste OFF?
For filing I have several Mail viewer windows open. They do not stay fixed on the folders I select there. If I open a folder in one window, it often opens in all other windows too. This is a BUG.
When the word “Attached” appears in a message I want to send, but I have not attached anything, Mail asks me if I really want to send the message. Can I switch that OFF?
It seems Mail does not remove downloaded messages from the server even when told to do so.
Worse than anything. Fortunately there is PowerPhotos from FatCat.
Never finds anything I'm looking for. Find Any File always does.
This utility disappears after one shot.
It does not allow capture of the exact pointer shapes.
Positive: this is definitely the best spreadsheet application I have ever used. But there again, features are taken away or change: e.g. at one point the very useful Categories disappeared, thankfully they came back after a few versions.
Some remarks below may refer to older versions of Numbers.
It would be useful to have scrollbars on very long tables (more useful than Freeze Header Rows).
Disable automatic repositioning of elements when a column is resized. I never want this, but there is no way of suppressing it.
Enable positioning without snapping (as it was, holding down ⌘, and still is in positioning the tab stops in the ruler). That is much faster and therefore more productive than having to do it by nudging with the arrow keys. The same applies for resizing column widths, where the only way to get around snapping is to type the width!
Bring back the floating inspector(s). I have a very wide screen because I often use very wide tables. The fixed inspector is then uncomfortably far to the right of the elements that need changing. It is also uncomfortable when I shift a wide window to the right, because the inspector then becomes inaccessible.
It is anyway incoherent that the arrange tools and “adjust image” are floating palettes. Not having a floating inspector is also uncomfortable when adjusting styles in text boxes: since discontiguous selection is no longer available, I have to move multiple times between the place in the text and the formatting inspector.
Especially not having the function browser in a floating and resizeable window is very frustrating.
Why can I not attach keyboard shortcuts other than the F keys to text styles?
Put the formula bar/pane below the cell being edited, not on top of it, as it then often obscures cells that need to be referenced. Note that in the examples on the website, the images show the formula pane where it should be! Bring the old formula bar back, or let the formula bar appear at the place it was last used.
Enlarging the formula pane vertically or horizontally shows the expected user feedback arrows, but extending it from the corners does not use the expected cursor shape, though it does become a hand with a pointing finger. Incoherent with e.g. resizing image, which does show the usual and expected double arrow at 45º
In a text box, deleting a return between a paragraph P1 and P2 gives the style of P1 to P2. BUG.
Allow formulae to be edited by default as text, or else correct many strange behaviours, especially with parentheses. Certainly make the signs for addition and division different (their glyphs: + and ÷ are now visually too close).
Too many clicks needed to “preserve row”, “preserve column”.
Print preview in the '09 version was much better as it allowed adjusting items. I tried to work around that by placing guides at the widths and heights of the paper, but that does not work because there is no way to know what the sizes of the printer's unprintable borders are, and there is no way to tell Numbers to ignore the printer borders.
The default print margins are 2.54cm. That is an inch, not a metric value, though my System Settings are metric. Follow the user's unit settings! Should be 2cm.
Default colour for cell backgrounds should be white, not transparent: being able to set the sheet background colour is an improvement, but currently all cells then show this colour through. Or provide an application setting for the default cell background.
When a table is copied from a file with different colour panel, the colours come across; this is especially true copying from a sheet imported from Excel. How can I set the colour panel's choices?
Cell borders are still a mess: they should be independent of the cells. The border of a table is also not a really existing object. “Allow border selection” has gone; I want it back.
Scrolling should allow overscroll of an extra full width and height of the window, so that it is possible to work on the rightmost and downmost item more easily by scrolling it to the top left. I get around it by placing a small graphic (usually a diamond) very far to the right and bottom, away from all useful items on the canvas. Since I almost never print, it has no importance, but it is not a good solution. BBEdit allows an “overscroll” choice of none, half window, full window.
Pasting any item should always happen in the centre of the window, not at the first free place (which then makes the viewpoint move).
There is Paste, Paste and Match Style, Paste Formula Results, but not Paste Formula Results and Match Style. I do agree however that so far I have never really needed to paste results preserving the format of the source cells.
The toolbar has choices Icon and text — Icon only but not Text only.
When copying and pasting a run of text, any spaces at the end are removed. This does not happen in Mail but is worse in Pages where a space before is added. Can I switch OFF this sort of “smart” copy-paste? Especially tedious and irritating if it behaves differently in different applications.
I cannot clear the recently used fonts, or remove items from that list, i.e. there is no “Clear Recent” option. I managed by editing the preferences file.
Propagating values: if a text cell ends in a single letter or in digits, those are “incremented” when copying down. No control over when this happens and when not. Can I disable that? BUG.
It is no longer posible to find where in a sheet there are formulae.
Switching display of a table title on/off makes the entire table shift up/down, and of course all tables below it. BUG
When pasting a tab-separated text into an existing table, or when importing a CSV file, the cell data format is decided by Numbers and overrides any existing format. This makes it extremely tedious to import text that contains strings of digits with meaningful leading zeroes, or strings that start with a quotation mark. BUG, and a serious one! At the very least I should be able to switch all data interpretation OFF.
I run an SQL data base of people. For several persons their name starts with an apostrophe, e.g. 't Hart. This apostrophe then disappears when pasting into Numbers, even if I explicitly set the data format to text.
French postal codes can start with a leading zero (my own postal code is 01280). Thus, to retrieve from this data base, I have to first put an unused, non-digit character in front of every value (e.g. “|”), then import or paste, then remove the unused character. This automatic altering of cell format depending on interpretation of a value is a BUG.
Similarly, if a text is pasted that contains two consecutive double quotes (e.g. "") only a single one is pasted. Let me switch OFF any interpretation of data!
Updating a paragraph style causes all individual style stretches in the corresponding paragraphs to be removed.
Adding text to a text box sometimes extends the box towards the top instead of the bottom. BUG.
The Find function is far too simple. In addition, it does not distinguish between straight and typographic quotes and other similar cases (hard space and normal space). Additionally it goes left to right, across all tables and text boxes instead of going element per element.
Find and Replace should be restricted to the selection if there is one.
There is still no visual feedback of the entire row/colum a selected cell is in. Holding the option key only works after a delay and not when editing the cell. Should at least be an option I can switch ON.
The column and row indicators that appear when a table is selected are too large and way too far from the table's borders. This prevents correctly viewing a table that is close to the top of a sheet. When header rows are “frozen”, it is impossible to edit cells in the first row, because they will get hidden as soon as they are clicked.
When selecting a range of cells the bottom bar shows sum, average etc. but not the number of rows/columns selected, a value which is often the only one I need.
The template chooser is a disaster: there is no obvious way to manage templates or ordering them, and no way to save a document as a template except by creating one on that as yet not saved template. There is no way to get rid of the ones I don't use, and the chooser always comes up showing everything. BUGs.
Discontiguous selection of text has been removed. This should be brought back and be a default for any text field in any application. It is often useful for changing the style of several bits of text in a single operation.
It would be very useful if the conditional highlighting of a cell could be dependent on the value of other cells instead of just its own value. It has been implemented to a certain degree.
In formulae, spaces are taken into account, except if they are at the end; e.g. "difference: "&(E4-E5)&" " leaves two spaces between "difference:" and the number, but no spaces after the number, not even if they are entered as hard spaces. BUG
In formulae, it is not possible to specify a format. In addition, sometimes strange things happen:
shows the desired number format but
"Différence: "&((RIGHT(J$67,10))*1−(RIGHT(J$68,10)*1))
does not, despite the fact that both formulae include numbers. However, if the first one is a cell containing a formatted number instead of an extracted string, then it works as expected, i.e. the format is taken from the first number. This irritation can be avoided by allowing the specification of a format, perhaps easiest to do by naming a format already specified by the user in the cell format list.
I don't care about “stunning” or “beautiful” spreadsheets, I just want to be productive.
No longer plays .mov files! iMovie is too tedious to transform video clips into other formats. The old QuickTime was much more useful for adapting videos. Luckily I kept the old machine where I can do the conversions.
QuickTime has otherwise become fairly useless
It is no longer possible to switch off pdf handling. I never want to view a pdf inside the browser window, I always want them downloaded. Holding the option key is an extra manipulation I now have to do because
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool YES
no longer works.
Filing and naming documents correctly is a very important and necessary part of producing content with computers, and it takes almost as much time as producing them. The Finder is the best tool I have seen for that. “Column view”, which came over from the NeXT system, is a great help.
But Column view still does not have a way to set the width for the folder whose files are displayed. Resizing columns all the time, just in order to be able to read the file names, is very tedious and irritating. TotalFinder gave this option, but does not work on Ventura. It automatically resized the column to accommodate the longest item name. But better is to let the user decide how wide the colum for a given folder should be. This is not difficult to implement as a property of a folder.
The font used for the Finder's item names should have fixed-width digits at the very least. Better is to let the user choose the Finder window font (I would prefer a mono-spaced font). Digits do not line up in a list if they have proportional widths, and this is annoying and visually troubling.
When finding an item, what does "Name matches … " mean? Match by which criteria? Also: for searching by date, the date format does not correspond to the user's System Setting.
Computers on the local network do not show up in the sidebar until they have been connected to first.
Backup with Time Machine no longer shows the amount to be backed up (only percentage done is given, but is misleading, and wrong)
In Appearance I cannot set the highlight colour to anything but a pale, unsaturated colour. I need a saturated one.
Adding a keyboard shortcut for a chosen application: the GUI for that is terrible. It is not obvious where to type as there are no fields outlined and the black text is where you have to type whereas the explanation is gray (which is where typing is expected elsewhere.
Units are set to centimeters, but margins still come up in inches: 2.54cm. Then the increment/decrement buttons move to other fractions or multiples of an inch.
Margins should be proposed in whole centimeters if metric is the user's preference.
Zoom factor 100% corresponds to what? 150% in Numbers and Pages is roughly, but not quite, wysiwyg. The connected screen can tell you what its resolution is (pixels per mm) so it should be easy to calculate 100%.
Despite never using Siri and disabling it where possible in System Settings, it still operates in the background somehow: a mail message containing an address will lead to a message of the kind “Siri found a contact… ”, or other stuff like:
Let me disable that.
These I never use: Automator, Books, Calculator, Calendar, Chess, Clock, Contacts, FaceTime, Find My, Freeform, GarageBand, Home, Keynote, Launchpad, Maps, Messages, Mission Control, News, Notes, Pages, Photo Booth, Photos, Podcasts, Reminders, Shortcuts, Siri, Stocks, TextEdit, TV, Voice Memos, Weather, Audio MIDI Setup, ColorSync Utility, Console, Digital Colour Meter, VoiceOver Utility.
Occasionally I need to use Pages or Keynote to display a Word or Powerpoint file sent to me, but I never use them for production.
As we run our own server, we use BusyCal and BusyContacts for calendar and contacts.
To make my documents as future-proof as possible, I use web standards: HTML5+CSS for most text documents, SVG for drawings, jpeg for images, MySQL for data. My presentations are prepared in HTML5, displayed in Safari and controlled by JavaScript.
Work would be impossible without BBEdit, Keyboard Maestro and LiveCode.
en
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