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Saturday, February 23, 2013

My Mac delivers some more unrequested snark-worthy material

As long as I'm in the Mac-bashing groove for a little while, let's get meta. Moments ago, while I was preparing the picture for today's other post about curly quotes, this popped up in my face:

What the...

"This document's file has been changed by another application since you opened or saved it."

Here's exactly what I did with that file. First, weeks ago, I dragged it to my desktop so I could keep it around for a future day when it would graduate to being part of a post. That day turned out to be today.

I double-clicked on the picture. It loaded in Preview (something which is a pale shadow of its former self, incidentally). I threw a box around it and hit CMD-K to crop it down. Then I turned back to my other machine to start writing the actual post.

I was about ready to call up the "info" page on the picture to get its new cropped dimensions (for inclusion in my post) when that box popped up. I've never seen that before. The only other thing I was doing on that machine at that moment was typing into my editor via ssh from another box. That editor (nano) is not going to mess with a jpeg file which is sitting in ~/Desktop. That makes no sense.

I had no idea which one to click. I really didn't care what happened either way since all I had done was a simple crop to a 10 year old image, and I could totally do it again. I decided to go with "reload document" to see exactly what might have changed. I did that, and ... nothing happened. It looked exactly the same.

So now I'm confused. It changed, but it didn't?

This is the kind of buggy, wonky, stupid stuff which is getting worse on the Mac. With all of the attention to polish, they're clearly trying to give the impression of it being a tight, polished, fast, stable sports car. Instead, what's actually happening deep inside is that they have a bunch of tortured squirrels running on wheels.

Yes, squirrels. They can't afford actual hamsters.