meaty

The metadata is still not opaque (its not stored with the files making backup/restore hard) and it lags meaning its potentially somewhere between ok and useless at any point in time.

Watermark, thumbnail, rename, move to a directory outside iPhoto, run a gallery script. Hell.

I ended up with ViewNX which has no abstraction and a python script using PIL instead of automator. Neither of which leverage any advantage that OSX portrays. In fact I could do the same thing on any platform.

My point is that we're citably competent all the way through.

I have a 22" 1920x1080 display on my desk which I rarely use as it gives me a headache.

SSD's do fail, sometimes by accident, sometimes by software bugs. Some muppet added a swap partition to one of our build servers with a Samsung 830 and the cells were all worn out dead in 3 months from swapping.

This is a shortcoming of traditional GDI+ based Windows apps however, not of WPF based Metro apps.

I'm rather worried about how Lenovo have gone all experimental. I still want an old fashioned black brick with a clitmouse.

I don't think so. We're a large Microsoft consultancy. We have 2 certified exchange admins who know their shit. it's not misconfiguration. One is an Exchange MVP as wlel. This is a regular problem with all iOS devices connected to Exchange. We've had a large insurance company who is a client ban all iOS devices as well due to this issue. They've switched to Android.

> All the recent "iphone won't play mp3s" query hits were problems with iTunes Match. I absolutely agree that it's had its issues, but it's been running smoothly for quite a while.

Look harder.

> I guess I didn't. So it's like one of the apps listed at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Apple_iOS#Navigating_feat.... then.

Absolutely nothing like any of them. I've spent about £200 on iOS navigation apps and nothing comes close. Only a real piece of dedicated hardware is anything like it for accuracy and reliability.

> "My mailserver is obviously misconfigured because I'm having symptoms that almost no one else is describing. I shall blame my phone vendor."

This is not a mail server issue. By elimination, Android devices, Windows Phone devices, Blackberries, Outlook on desktop all work fine. The only odd one out is iOS.

This is surprisingly common. Most people just don't talk about it as they don't give a shit or don't get annoyed by app crashes etc. They assume that's the status quo, then shout at their ops team who sort it out.

No but doing that when iPhoto stores backups of your images is a pain in the arse.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent

Automator + Photoshop.

> c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Yes but that doesn't deal with folders which aren't indexed. For example if you do an iPhoto import it can lag for a while before Spotlight catches up. Bang - synchronisation problem.

This shot me badly.

The whole solution is just bad.

Try PowerShell ISE v3 if you want a shell for windows. That's actually a pretty scary powerful bit of kit:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/4...

I think you are trying to hammer a nail in with a screwdriver by expecting it to be the same. Embrace the platform's strengths, not try turning it into UNIX and whinge when it doesn't work.

OSX POSIX Certified? That means typically "buggy as fuck but the API is complete". That's as far as the certification goes. They couldn't even get rename(2) to behave properly for about 8 years. Google it. So many little bugs like that shot me for ages. That and the fact the whole damn CPU architecture changed one day.

a) talking to the library from the command line - the mapping between the UI and the filesystem was completely abstract.

b) talking to the library from apps - the UI was horrible and inconsistent.

c) metadata was entirely non transparent and hard to get at.

Bearable was removing iPhoto and installing Nikon ViewNX which came with my D70. This has no abstraction - the filesystem is the abstraction.

(I know how to access the source files BTW).

Yes this is it. But I wasn't getting that with OSX. In '06, it was pretty good compared to say Windows XP but since '08 it's been declining rapidly into whack-a-mole problems.

OSX is a bastardised version of UNIX under the hood which is "even worse than HP-UX when you haven't paid for the compilers" to deal with I found. Getting a reliable toolchain up that worked properly was a PITA.

Yes in contrast of iOS. That reputation is bullshit. Regular crashes of Mail, Safari as in multiple times daily. I've had the device freeze at least 2-3 times a week as well. In the year I've been using Windows Phone, IE mobile has crashed twice and the device hasn't failed once (Lumia 710).

Won't play mp3s - this is rife. The ID3 parser on iOS devices is a piece of shit: http://www.google.com/#q=iphone+wont+play+mp3s This has been known for literally YEARS and plagues all apple devices from iPod, to touch to iPhone to Mac.

Nokia Drive - do you even know what this is? It's not a Skydrive/DropBox clone. It's a fully blown 100% FREE offline turn by turn satellite navigation and mapping platform akin to your average satnav. It's pretty amazing and is a deal breaker for iOS:

http://vr-zone.com/articles/nokia-lumia-smartphones-get-maps...

Regarding Apple and Google native maps, see above again.

iOS's ActiveSync is a piece of shit. It doesn't work properly, duplicates my emails, mailbombs people etc. Now whoever's fault this is I don't know (it may be Microsoft?) but I'm not concerned about this - it just doesn't work properly.

I'm on a 2007 built Lenovo T61 which I can actually see lasting until 2020 as well the way it's going.

My first encounter of this was the stupid filesystem abstraction iPhoto decided to enforce upon me. After removing iPhoto, it was bearable. This slowly cranked on until I ended up with basically OS-X as a window manager for a terminal emulator, browser, ViewNX and Apple Mail connected to GMail (which didn't work properly either and ended up just being done in a browser). As iWork was shit and corrupted documents left right and centre, I had to use Parallels with Windows Vista + Office 2007 as well. Granted I could have used Office for Mac but it was the 2004 version which was a POS that relied on Rosetta.

As for the iPhone, ugh that was hell. Nothing worked properly and each iOS release was literally scary. My pregnant wife actually begged me not to upgrade my iPhone in case it knackered the battery more and she got left without being able to communicate with me (I'm dead serious there). I actually bought a shit Nokia with a GiffGaff SIM in it to carry around in case the iPhone died.

I've fallen in love with Windows again. It just works. Power management rocks, battery life is good (8 hours on my 2007 Lenovo T61!), the hardware is damn cheap, the licenses cost me virtually nothing, literally everything I plug into it works, the tooling is pretty damn good, utils I wrote for Windows NT4 literally 14 years ago still just work flawlessly. My Linux machine is just a VirtualBox VM.

Yesterday I bought my second Windows Phone (Lumia 820). This also just works. Email is the same everywhere, all the apps just works, plays any mp3 without complaining (my sodding iPhone never did!), Nokia Drive just works, maps actually work (again something my iPhone shot down), talks to exchange without problems, is exactly the same as my old Windows Phone 7.8 device (no who moved my cheese), opens all my documents nicely, reads any pdf fine.

Seriously, it's just all boringly functional and uneventful these days.

Bear in mind I am coming from a background on hardcore UNIX machines (big Solaris, HP-UX machines), through FreeBSD to Linux to OS-X.

The worst pain I had was with Solaris (on Tadpole SPARCbook) and just about everything Apple, particularly their unreliable hardware (4 Macs returned for repair!), app compatibility problems, piss poor battery life on iPhone 3/4, shit crock of a POSIX environment and shoddy attempt at online services.

Perhaps it's just I'm getting old and set in my ways, but I still find perl very useful on a daily basis.

I was forced by employer to learn powershell recently and it made me appreciate perl a lot more as well.

They won't win a rematch, even if they do.

One of the great freedoms of open source software is to go "fuck you disty, I'm off to another one". When all your stuff is coded against Mir, Upstart and Unity, you no longer have that luxury.

Also, beauty is only skin deep.

For example, the *BSD's have a completely different init system and dependency chain resulting in a large "WTF" moment now that everything suddenly has crap loads of dbus in it as a core dependency.

I've had so much Apple kit pack in on me it's unreal. It got to the point I dumped it all and switched to a 5 year old Lenovo unit which has been flawless.

While they look pretty, I'm not sure the engineering is sound or you're getting good value for money.

LaunchPad is a testament to the shit state Ubuntu is in. All the windows are broken so we'll knock half the building down and rebuild it. Doesn't work.

Canonical are turning into a 1990's style Unix vendor. We haven't forgotten that crock of shit yet.