Alec Thomas

My other half bought a 17" MacBook Pro last year with 2GB of RAM, and all I hear from her when she's using it is swearing. Reasons for the swearing are many and varied; some as a result of an unwillingness to learn "the Mac way", some due to Mac UX shortcomings. Related here are some of the issues she's encountered and the solutions we've come up with.

One that she frequently hits is massive slowdowns due to the Mac going into swap. This is caused by a combination of a lack of understanding/caring about how RAM and swap work, and the Mac "feature" of not closing applications when the last window is closed. To be fair though, she also has this issue on Windows. Which brings up an interesting point of whether users should have to care about managing their memory. Regardless, this has been "fixed" by upgrading her Mac from 2GB to 4GB of RAM.

Another problem, more related to muscle memory than any technical or UX issues, was the difference in key bindings between Windows and OSX. This fantastic post saved her sanity.

When Christine first started using the Mac, she used it with one desktop with applications layered on top of each other. She found the combination of floating docks and windows with the layering very confusing though, often clicking straight through the application with focus to one in the background. I see this as a UX failure of Mac, and it frustrated Christine enough to switch to using Spaces. Unfortunately, if you've ever used Spaces on Leopard you'll be aware that it will regularly refuse to switch spaces when an application is keyboard cycled to, or selected on the dock. This bugginess makes it very frustrating to use. The solution here was to ditch spaces and solve the original problem by installing Isolator. This brilliant piece of software fades and blurs background windows, making it very clear which windows and docks are active. This, in combination with Exposé, will hopefully result in a much less frustrating experience.