As I bring the hatchet down, milimeters away from my left hand I pause and contemplate... Should I cut it off?

Mind the title but after using a mbp with mac osx and windows vista for a couple of months now I've noticed a few things.

After playing with mac osx i love how clean it is but hate how unorganized I feel when using it. Is it just me or is the filing system horrible. Is there any way to keep everything organized and structured like in Windows? I don't know it might just be me but I prefer the more organized structure of Windows files. Everything lines up, I can rename a batch of files in a second.

Also I hate how Iphoto makes a gagillion little folders, so I end up making duplicates of my pictures for one album, but they get duplicated here, and then each modified picture gets its own folder. I dunno that program just drives me crazy since I don't have the money for photoshop. Are there any programs like Windows Office Image Viewer that alows you to edit and resize for the mac? *contemplating on getting lightroom for the mac

I also hate the photo preview, just having to click the option of having a photo reel and dragging them all in makes me sizzle with anger.

Anyways I've been using both os's for a couple of months now, and see nothing wrong at all with vista since I run my games just fine, all my programs seem to work just fine with it, and it just works better with my college. Mac osx is great but just feels unorganized. So any help on the whole file structure on the mac is deeply appreciated it.

Starting to lean towards just booting up windows on this thing for a while

 

hmm i have to agree with you, if i had the option i would choose windows, it is better for compatibility with universities and will be able to run anything.
but os x is a close second and i have no regrets because there is no equivalent for the MBP in the windows laptop department and im not going to run windows full time on it.

thing i love most about os x: quick boot ups and shut downs
1 thing i dont: not being able to get a nice preview of photos when searching the hdd in finder.

 

Preview of photos will be a big selling point in Leopard.

Finder organization does suck...sort of, but I haven't actually had problems organizing my files.

iPhoto organization is hit or miss with people. Stop trying to micromanage your organization, and most of the iLife stuff will work pretty well. If yo udon't like the way it does it, then your'e out of luck pretty much

My school actually has better compatibility with Apple - or at least equivalent compatibility seeing how 50% of my class uses a MB or MBP.

If you really don't like it though, try selling the MBP (before Leopard comes out) and getting a PC laptop. No sense in using something you dislike.

Organization is a personal thing, so if you made a reasonable effort to try something new and it doesn't work, no sense in forcing yourself .

 

The two things about my MBP that are still grinding on me is Finder & Ctrl + Click to right click. I'm just so used to Windows way of handling folders, but I'm slowly getting over that, even if I'm a little confused on where exactly everything but the executable goes when I install a program. The right click thing is just driving me insane though. There's got to be an easier way...

 

1. Use a 2-button mouse.
2. hold two fingers on the touchpad and hit the button
3. tap two fingers on the touchpad (check your mouse settings to see if this is enabled)

 

I'm another Windows user who prefers the Windows approach to files. I don't think anyone will debate with you that Windows Explorer 1-ups the Finder.

OS X, generally, leans more towards managing things for you with a program that puts an abstraction on top of your files. I prefer dealing with the files.

So, in my case, I put my own folder in my home directory, and everything goes in there. The organized folder structure, combined with some knowledge of Finder accelerator keys, has me satisfied for now. (command click to select multiple files, hit enter to change a filename, hit cmd+O to open it, drag with cmd for move, drag with alt for copy, cmd+1,2,3 change file views...)

There are a lot of programs that will let you edit images on OS X. Are you wanting something that will manage them, or just do quick edits?

For graf1k, go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Trackpad, and start checking boxes. Without the 2-finger click / scroll, I would have thrown this thing out a window ages ago

 

As taelrak said, there's a way around that...

From the Mac Switcher's Guide:

 

Yeah, I've tried all that except the double tap as a right click. The two fingers + click wasn't much better for me than the ctrl + click. I do have to say though, I love the two fingers = scroll on the trackpad.

 

Then you might want to use a mouse then, graf1k. I highly recommend the VX Revolution, awesome mouse for a pretty good price.

 

Both have their quirks but for all practical purposes they get the job done.

 

I didn't really mean "no-one" ... it's just that Explorer doesn't make me cry when I manage my files with it.

 

I would too, except that it doesn't colour-match with the MBP...

And I hate Finder. It should die. Thats one of the more major things that drove me away from OS X - I just did not understand the organization of the files and file system. And then installing programs from an executable - that was a pain in the ass. It took me over an hour to figure out how to install FF....

 

Well that's unfortunate as installing programs on OS X vs. Windows is as easy as doing it with your eyes closed. You almost can't do it wrong.

 

Since i was shown this yesterday by our resident Mac geek at work it has revolutionized the way i use the Mac.

So easy now

 

so does anyone know of any decent free photo editing programs for the mac?

 

GIMP is supposed to be extremely good. I'm a photoshop addict personally so never really got to grips with it, But I have heard a lot of positive things about it both in this forum (in particular the Linux section) and others.

http://www.gimp.org/macintosh/

 

Yeah, GIMP is a good free image editor. Obviously, Photoshop is best. And Photoshop Elements is also good, but that's pretty expensive too. So best bet for a free image editor is GIMP!

 

Finder is horrible no doubt. The idea, however, is that you shouldn't really need to use finder that often. Unfortunately, coming from Windows, it is very hard to get used to the program doing all of the work finding stuff instead of you.

 

Yeah, it seems OS X and its apps were designed so files are organized in applications, and not in Finder. Photos are meant to be organized in iPhoto, for example, instead of in the iPhoto folder.

I'd rather Apple made Finder more useful, as not everyone likes to use applications to manage things.

 

Can you elaborate on that last post, Sam? I have been thinking about a MBP for a couple of months now. One of my biggest concerns are posts like this regarding the OS X file system. I am assuming when you transfer pictures from a camera to iPhoto, they are in the iPhoto folder instead of a generic My Pictures folder like in Windows. But what do you mean when you say "Photos are meant to be organized in iPhoto, for example, instead of in the iPhoto folder." Sorry if this is a poorly worded question. Just trying to understand and assess OS X as well as I can (without having the benefit of using it for a while) before I make the plunge.

 

Well, when you plug in a camera to the Mac, iPhoto opens; iPhoto asks if you want to import the photos onto the Mac. The photos are imported into a folder in iPhoto. If you want to rename the "roll" of photos, you do that in the iPhoto application; not the iPhoto folder in Finder. You can access the iPhoto folder in Finder, and all your photos are there, but there's a lot of weird files too that help iPhoto work and you won't want to mess with those files.

Of course, you can keep and manage photos in the Photos folder of Finder if you want (where you can also find the iPhoto folder). But Apple would rather you manage your photos through iPhoto. And iPhoto does its job well; but for those that hate it, it will be rather annoying.

 

Thanks, Sam. One follow-up question--If you want to use two programs to access the photos, say iPhoto and Photoshop Elements, is it necessary to keep the photos in the Photos folder. Or could Photoshop access them ok from iPhoto? Or how would that work?

 

Hmm...good question...unfortunately I don't have Photoshop on my MacBook so I can't answer right off the top .

I'll let some other Photoshop users answer that. Hope they can help!

 

When you manually organize anything, you're basically assigning attributes that are distinguishable in your mind to the files, and then sorting the files based on those attributes for each level of sort.
e.g. by filename, type of content, etc.

The same basic theory applies to autosort programs like itunes and iphoto. Each file has properties where you can actually enter certain of those attributes (for example, mp3 ida tags lets you enter album name, song name, rating, composer, etc.)or, in the case of photos, iPhoto lets you assign certain attributes to the database of photos (in addition to date and res, there would be "event" for iphoto 08).

However, Apple actually physically moves your file based on an attribute and rearranges them automatically instead of simply rearranging the pointers to them within the GUI). So instead of having a playlist that's autosorted within the gui itself by various methods, your itunes library is auto-sorted into folders by album. To be fair, Apple actually "imports" your photos and music from wherever they were so it doesn't mess up your old organization, but as you can imagine, this means you now have 2 copies of the same music.

The theory behind this is of course - now you're basically stuck using Apple software because your whole means of controlling how your files are organized are from within iphoto and itunes. Sure other programs will be able to read ida tags just fine and you'll be able to rearrange them within whatever program's gui as well, but probably no one wants their files organized in finder the way itunes organizes it, so you'll be stuck having to manually rearrange them the way you want outside of itunes. The same applies to iPhoto - be prepared to spend a lot of time reorganizing your photos and music if you suddenly decide to stop using iphoto and itunes

The problem with this is, of course, some people may not like the way Apple organizes the physical files. For example, physically itunes will only organize your files by album. Well what if I like my music arranged by rating in finder? Too bad.

A more realistic example: I have several songs that are not part of any album. Itunes will simply automatically toss them into a folder named "unknown"...
Well i "know" what they are! And i want them to be in that other folder over there!...too bad...can't happen unless I fill in the album attribute to that file.

Don't even get me started on unicode and foreign language files. I'm just glad I don't have several folders named ????? in my itunes folder

 

Stop getting banned already Sam

 

That was hilarious, my next User Title should be "Formerly Banned Member" .

 

As a long time win user I don't really see the problems with Finder. It's not perfect but it has its strong points and weak points. I haven't had problems with organizing my files at all, and I'm a bit obsessive on stuff like that. Starting to treat my user directory as the lowest part of MY space is different to win, but similar to Linux so no biggie.
Set to open in column view I think the Finder is just pretty nice!
All other views are absolutely useless, but column view coupled with two finger horizontal/vertical scrolling is brilliant.
Add to that mousepad clicking and two fingered right clicking and you get a really nice travel mouse that's never taken out


As for iLife applications messing with organization, I just changed the preferences in those apps so that they don't move/copy my files, then when I add to the library it stays within my finder organization AND the iTunes/iPhoto way.
I have the default directory for iTunes set as /music/mp3 and have under that artist/album/ .
It IS best to manage the files mostly from within the application so that the internal database stays up to date, I find that removing dead tracks in iTunes is unneccessarily impossible (without extra applications) which is admittedly stupid...

 

I agree with arikol, Column View in Finder is really nice to use.

 

Well that's the thing. If you don't allow importing, you have multiple file copies on your system, and itunes won't allow you to directly delete the files from their original locations. A quick way would be to turn on the album artwork view to cursor location and do a quick scroll-through of all your music, which will isolate the missing files. I'm sure there's a faster/scriptable way too.

I've actually just gotten used to list view in Finder and I view everything from the top hierarchy. Column view is too limiting (half the files have filenames that are so long that they take up 3/4 of the screen, which makes column view useless

I'm more worried that coverflow will be more of a gimmick for finder than useful (when would I ever need to see a preview of my file? *note that I don't take digital photos ).

 

Cover Flow seems to be more a novelty than actual efficiency. Its good for say iTunes (although I'd like it better if the album flipped and the tracks from the album listed, like on the iPhone and the new iPods) and photos, but for files? Not much use, if you ask me.

Still nice to show off to your friends though!

"Vista Flip 3D? You ain't seen nothing yet "

 

Vista Flip 3d would be so much better if it didn't include the desktop among the list.

This applies to Finder in OSX too with -Tab when you don't have any finder windows open.