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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
WiscMUG reviews Mac Annoyances, October 20, 2005
This review was created for the University of Wisconsin Mac User's Group: http://wiscmug.org/
Let me start with an overview of my expectations of this book (based on books of this type), and then I'll get into my reactions to the book itself.
Target Audience:
I always have two reservations concerning books like this one. The first is the target audience. Who is this book actually for? I'd break up the Mac user base (and probably the PC user base as well) into four categories: beginner, advanced beginner, serious user, and advanced user/programmer.
Beginners aren't just people who started using the Mac yesterday. I'd consider my parents to be beginners. They've been using a Mac for several years now, but they still don't know how to move files around or what the key combination for, well, just about anything is. My dad has to use two fingers to click and drag on his iBook's trackpad, and when I recently told him to copy and paste an e-mail message into a web browser window, he didn't even try to copy and paste, he just retyped it.
Most people get past this stage and begin to really use their Mac. They become curious about what their Mac can do. They experiment, start trying out new software, and generally have many, many questions. I'd call these people advanced beginners. (Incidentally, I think that the reason why people like my parents never get out of the beginner stage is because they are afraid to experiment. The computer is pretty unique in that, quite often, you can undo what you just did. Try that in your kitchen.)
Asking lots of questions is good, since the answers allow people to advance to the third stage, a serious user. Once a person knows enough about their Mac to seriously integrate it into their daily life, they can get real work done and be efficient about it. This is really the whole point about using your Mac, or any computer or tool, for that matter.
Some people of course go even beyond this stage, understanding how to control their Mac from the terminal in OS X, programming their Mac and writing their own software. Advanced users don't feel constrained by the software or the user interface(s) (or sometimes even the hardware) that's out there.
So who is this book's target audience? I expected it to fall around the advanced beginner to serious user (and I think that it does). As beginners, this book would be way above my parent's heads. Even books in the "Missing Manual" series are a little tough for them (and this book is not laid out as a step by step guide to using particular programs as those books are). Advanced users may get something out it, although they may already know most of it (depending upon which apps they use on a regular basis). However, no matter how much you know about the Mac, there are seemingly always a few more little tidbits hidden in the woodwork, so probably everyone could learn something from this book.
Books and obsolescence:
But this brings me to my second point: obsolescence. Books that deal with the features of any computer program are usually outdated by the time they hit your local bookstore (or even by the time the ink hits the page). "Mac Annoyances" is written for Mac OS X 10.3, iLife '04, and about two revisions of iPod back. I'm writing this in July 2005, and the book had it's first print run in November 2004. Already the book is one iteration of updates behind, and with new hardware and software updates always on the horizon (thank you Apple and the developer community!), it won't be long until it is multiple iterations behind.
While many of the tips and tricks are still kicking around in newer versions of software (and not everyone updates the software on their Mac right away, if at all), some of the bugs will have been squashed, and some things are simply going to work differently as time goes on.
For example, the iTunes 4.9 update includes the ability to subscribe and listen to podcasts. Very cool, and definitely a feature to mention in a book like this (especially how to subscribe to podcasts from places other than iTMS and why you might want to). Unfortunately, the associated iPod updaters, while enabling podcast support, broke the ability for the iPod to automatically update smart playlists without having to resync to iTunes. Annoying? Yes. But by the time any book or magazine will have had this flaw noted in print, Apple will have fixed it by then. (Apple, you listening?) [UPDATE: Apparently not. While Apple has posted a tech note on their web site about the problem, since writing this review in August, Apple has release two new iPods, two new iPod updaters, and two new verisons of iTunes, and no fix for this problem. Apparently, the new iPod nano and new iPod with video do not suffer from this problem. Does Apple expect me to buy a new iPod just to get back functionality that my old iPod used to have?]
Another example would be the inability of Dashboard widgets to be deleted through the Dashboard user interface in Mac OS 10.4. This was eventually fixed in 10.4.2, but other Dashboard weirdness still exists that I hope will be fixed in future 10.4 updates.
So, presenting the information in this form (as a book) presents certain problems. We now have better ways of presenting the most up-to-date information (namely, the internet). Books have fantastic data stability, but horrible search and update functionality. In addition, because the book takes a Q & A approach to solving specific problems, some information that really should go together winds up being scattered across multiple pages or even sections. The author does realize this and tries to mention associated information whenever possible, but not always.
Thus, this book isn't specifically at fault on the second point as much as the entire genre is. John Rizzo keeps a blog to address this issue; however, it is more focused on Windows annoyances than Mac ones (I'm not sure if that's a commentary on the state of affairs, but I'll just assume so).
Hits and misses of the book:
Now that that's all out of the way, what's actually in "Mac Annoyances"? The book is divided up into sections: Mac OS X, various e-mail programs, using the internet (including iChat), Microsoft Office, iLife, iPod, and some basics about hardware. That covers a lot of territory, while restricting itself to applications that a majority of users probably use.
However, I think they still miss some apps that lots of people use (or should be using). I'd like to have seen more of the standard applications that ship with OS X featured, such as iCal, Font Book, iSync, and the utilities. (Of course, the newest features of Tiger, like Spotlight and Dashboard and, my personal favorite, Dictionary, aren't featured either.) There are also a whole set of media player apps that people use, like RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, that have plentiful, if obscure, features. And some sections feel like they barely scratch the surface of interesting features or questions about the interface. Some of this may be a result of phrasing all of the questions as "annoyances" in order to match the title, but the sections covering the iApps and iPod left me wanting more.
Of course, if you don't use a particular app (for example, I've never had a Mac with a SuperDrive, so I've never ever opened iDVD), the suggestions in the book aren't going to be of much worth to you. On the other extreme, if you use an application extensively, you may already be familiar with all of the ins and outs that are presented.
I would classify myself as a serious user, although I do dabble in a little programming here and there. I was pleasantly surprised to find out some stuff I didn't know about my Mac, and some solutions to annoying little problems that I hadn't bothered to take care of. So here are three detailed examples of things I found useful in the book, and one example of something I didn't.
Spellchecking:
I've pondered upgrading Mail.app's spell checker for a while, since it isn't that smart, but I didn't know how to do it and it wasn't so bothersome that I felt obligated to do something about it. The book recommends an OS X version of a standard Unix spellchecker, a good (read: free) suggestion. But it actually didn't get to the root of my problem with Mail.app's spellchecker.
Spellchecking in general could have been an entire sub-section of the book, because it is something that has to be (or should be) used a lot. But this would violate how the book is set up to some extent. So the suggestion of installing a separate spellchecker for the entire system to use was put in the web browser section.
One of the main reasons I use Microsoft Word is because of its AutoCorrect spellcheck feature, something which I didn't know (although it totally makes sense) is duplicated in third-party spellchecking software. So I may actually buy SpellCatcher X, what the book suggests, although I'd like to find out more about how OS 10.4's new, standard Oxford English dictionary has affected the playing field of spellchecking before plunking down $40.
Web browsers:
I think this book gives a very good comparison of the browsers that are out there for the Mac. It isn't exhaustive in the number of browsers (it includes Safari, Firefox/Camino/Mozilla, OmniWeb, even IE, but ignores Opera and iCab) or their features, but is certainly more detailed than what you might find in a MacWorld article on the same topic. It also, as mentioned earlier, suffers from the fact that all of the browsers have been updated since the book was published (some browser development groups even offer nightly builds if you really want to surf on the bleeding edge)...
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Tough to pick out annoyances..., December 11, 2004
I suppose it's pretty tough to write a book about annoyances - since what annoys me may not annoy somebody else. However, I did find a few answers that I didn't already know. The book is definately written for someone between beginner and advanced. A good portion of the "annoyances" are things an advanced user would already know (or be able to figure out easy enough) and there isn't enough detail for the beginner.
The section on Microsoft Office annoyances (and fixes) was pretty helpful, but you could fill an encyclopedia with things that are annoying in the Office apps - Mac or Windows. The stuff on browsers is ok, but most of it was "since Safari can't do X, use browser Y". I was also a bit confused by the discussion of the "new, free browser Thunderbird". I suppose you could browse with an email client... =)
The annoyances are all over the Mac spectrum - my guess is you'd be lucky to find 20 or so of the 150 annoyances included that might pertain to your situation.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Various useful Macintosh tidbits, December 14, 2004
This book is organized into small tips that will help you get over 'annoyances' in a wide variety of Macintosh applications. The term annoyances is a bit stretched. In general these are tips on how to get to hard to find, but very useful functions. The content is good and useful, though sometimes not what you want to hear. For example the advice on selective popup blocking in Safari is to switch browsers.
You will want to look at the table of contents to make sure that you are getting enough value for your dollar. If it looks like the applications you use are in here, and they probably are, then I recommend this book for some quick pointers in how to get better use of them.
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