What Year Is This?

By Sarah Pike

I’ve been bi-OS for a few years now. Historically, I’m a PC. Lately, I’m also a Mac. There are things I love about my Mac laptop: Its rock-solid reliability and instant resume from sleep. The simple way so many things just work. Then there are the issues that make me wonder what the hell decade we’re in. Like device eject, and the spectral files left behind on every USB device I plug in. But mainly, the eject business.

I can barely remember when we had to use the “Safely Remove Hardware” protocol on Windows machines, but OS X still requires it—and squawks if you remove a device before spending 5 seconds letting it shut down, and the device will often throw errors afterward.

Naturally, once the flash drive or camera or whatever is safe to disconnect, should you change your mind you’ll have to unplug and then reseat it to add more files or transfer more pictures. Then when you next connect the device to a Windows PC, ghost files—.Trashes, .System, and .anything-you-worked-on-directly-from-that-drive—remain.

Which brings me to another point. Both Mac and Windows OSes have had a trashcan metaphor since time out of mind. But once you delete something from a flash drive, it’s gone, for all intents and purposes. There is no trashcan or recycle bin the user can access to get the files back. So why on earth does a flash drive plugged in to a Mac not free up that disk space when files are deleted? Why should users have to empty both their inaccessible flash drive trash and their real, system trash? There’s no way to choose only the flash drive trash—that would still suck, but at least it would be a step in the right direction.

And now, in Leopard, one of my old peeves has been addressed—hallelujah, we can view the desktop as the file directory it is instead of having to shove windows to the side or temporarily banish them to the perimeter with F11. Now it is finally possible to have no Finder window open, so you may minimize other application windows and leave the desktop in focus. Simultaneously, the eject button has become unreliable. Awesome. I plug in my trusty flash drive, the drive appears on the screen. I double-click on it, or just open a new Finder window, deal with the files I need to deal with, then find I have no Eject button to unmount the drive. Around half the time, Ctrl-clicking on the drive yields a working Eject option; the rest of the time I get a message that the drive in question is busy, even though it’s not.

Windows has its share of problems, I know. But it seems as though Steve Jobs decided that this whole “plugging things in to the computer” was just a fad and that he’d do well to persuade users not to do it. There’s some analogy to the new Apple ads poking fun at “PC” for promising each new version of Windows would improve on the last…I just know there is.

Related posts:

1. Stuffit Deluxe 2011
2. What Would Mac Fans Say?
3. Very Bad Things: Vista and Windows 7 Explorer
4. Oblivion Game of the Year for PC and Xbox 360 Now Shipping
5. Verbatim ‘Connects’ Consumers with New MediaShare Mini Sharing Station