David R. Poindexter

Mac developers: your automation and convenience is killing me

Hey, don't get me wrong here. I'm all about automating repetitive tasks. That said, there are a few things that I don't want automated. For example, software updates, to name just one thorn in my side.

I got a little note via Pownce from Leo Laporte a few minutes ago. It read:

Why did I say "email me???" I should have just said, "download Merlin's Mannerisms," instead. Sheesh! Now my inbox is filled with requests. And the Leopard Mail autoresponder is useless.

I'm thinking, hey, im a Leopard Mail user, maybe I can help Leo here. So I go to fire up Mail. Oops, Safari won't let me, because it's still trying to open a pdf in the browser, and is "requesting" my attention first. Okay, lets take care of that.

I move over to Safari (I say "over" because I'm a heavy user of Spaces) to see what the hell is going on. It's asking for my default pdf reader. What? Safari has always opened pdf's in the browser using, I'm assuming, the same engine that Preview.app uses. Okay, well, I'll choose the reader...scroll down...Preview.app is greyed out! WTF?

Okay, well I run Adobe CS3 Design Premium on this machine, so I'll just choose Adobe Acrobat Pro. No dice. It needs "repaired" for some reason or another, even though I open, compose, and edit PDF's with it just fine.

Well, at this point, I'm thinking "yeah, this Mac just works, huh?" Okay, download Acrobat Reader, go through the install, it opens the PDF.

Then I get ready to reply to Leo's note with some, hopefully, helpful information about Mail.app's auto response capabilities. Ah, Safari won't let me post the note. Again with this, Safari? I'm already screwed on commenting over at Digg, and now on Pownce? Thanks to both of you, Apple and Kevin freakin Rose.

Fine, at this point, I'm livid. Open Firefox. I don't really like having to fire it up, but whatever. Oh, goody! Firefox is installing updates. For the love of god, Firefox, how many damn updates can you possibly roll out in a week? Every time I fire it up its installing some kind of update for this, that or the other.

So, now I'm pruning my system. I want to de-automate everything. I'll pick and choose what gets automated. To me, automation on the Mac is not really automation. Its permission-less nagging. Plug in your iPod to charge for a few minutes...now iTunes stalles because it's auto-syncing to your iPod. Hook up a digital camera to copy a single pic from the card....now iPhoto launches and wants to go through the import process for the whole card. Open NetNewsWire to copy a story to email to a friend....now its sitting there refreshing/downloading all the new stuff from your feeds.

At some point we have to sit and think about something here. All of these automation things are nice at first. You're thinking, "hey, I don't have to remember to do all this stuff." But on the other hand...you're at the whim of your computer while it's running all this crap. There is no longer any real quick "hey ill just open this up and take a peek, or grab something quick." No, it becomes a whole damn workflow that has to complete before you can do anything else.

Sigh...tech sucks sometimes.

Posted by MtheoryX on 12/08 at 12:02 PM