iMac Frustration Causes Singapore Man To Go Out For Beer.

My iMac.

Fuck. I shake my head. Really. It is for superficial people, designed by people who were only concerned about the appearance of its features, not their functions, not thinking through about what people would want them to do.

(I am talking about the default programs here, not those brought in by smart, cafe-latte drinking, socially concerned, Moleskine scribbling, third-party people.)

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OK, I have found a way to put Dashboard widgets onto the main screen so that my clock, calendar, iTunes control, local weather report, and address book are all there, all the time. (Well the trick works OK in one direction, not so much in the other.) Like the Google Desktop Sidebar, like the Microsoft Sidebar for Windows. I don't have to click or press a key - the large clock is always there, ticking away. How hard can be it be?

So I look at the large date ticker on the iCal widget, click on it. Out slides a monthly calendar with today's date highlighted. I click again and out slides a list of today's appointments, if any. What about tomorrow? Nope, it won't highlight any other date than today. I can't check whether my schedule is busy on any other days. So I need to open iCal itself. Can I do that from the iCal widget? No.

They never thought of that when then spent hours getting the shiny black surface looking just right. I have to go to my Dock thingummy and find iCal to open it! How useless is that iCal widget except as a piece of eye-candy? Fuckers!

The default iTunes widget. If iTunes is off, will it turn iTune on? No. I click on the invisible Info button and the widget does a cool flip around to show a "Select Playlist" function. Does it actually allow me to select my playlists? No. They don't exist according the iTunes widget. I have to start iTunes and find my playlists from the Dock and from iTunes itself. Can I *start* iTunes from the iTunes widget? Are you kidding, No-ho! Of course NOT! That might actually be useful! All the widget does is allow me to pause, change volume, repeat and shuffle and select next and previous in the current playlist. I have to have iTunes running first, at the same time, if I want to do anything like change who I want to listen to.

The bland grey Address Book widget needs me to type an initial letter before it does anything, which is to drop down the list of all my contacts. Are they arranged by the first letter I typed? No. The letter has to be somewhere in the person's file, is all. The last contact I selected used remains selected even if it doesn't have the letter in the name I typed, which is really confusing. Why? Like I said, because maybe that letter is somewhere in that person's address or their email. Type another letter and it narrows the field, but not in a way you'd expect. Typing "t o" brings up a blogger mate who is filled under "Spike" for example, because his email is "hongkieTOwn@###.com"... Weird. When you do have a contact selected, you can click through all other contacts. Well let's face it, the parent Address Book is a boring and dull application anyway.

The Clock widget. Why not iClock? You can set regional times, but you can't set an alarm from the widget. OK the default clock on Windows Sidebar is pretty lame as well, so I won't get into that aspect of it all. But I want a reminder/alarm function. I can only do it by going to iCal (manually of course) and setting up an appointment, not through the clock function! How shitty is that? WTF?

I have downloaded a third party calendar application from the dudes at iSlayer that works OK, but still doesn't have an alarm. There are quite a few REALLY neat one for Windows, but the list of clocks for iMac is pathetic. To get an alarm, I have to download another clock widget.

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Also my Mighty Mouse will not scroll unless the sidebar is at the bottom of a page. It will then only scroll up, but when the idnicator is at the top, it will not scroll down. I kid you not.

Tofo!

Fuck it, I'm going out for a beer...

E@L

(As I am typing this, the beast, like the id monster in Forbidden Planet, seems to sense I am writing about it, and the keyboard locks up for no reason...)

[Addendum - after five beers, three white wines and a Knob Creek and three episodes of Battlescar Tallactica, came home and re-checked this post. My, I had a big visit from the Typo Fairy there didn't I? That's because I composed that post in Google Docs, which like 99.99% of everything in this non-BG universe is a piece of shit. Most of the day I spent trying to link my OneNote files automatically to GoogleSites. Not gonna work. Think I'll need to get a pirate of MS Sharepoint somewhere. Fucking Windows.]