08-19-2010, 10:37 PM
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Executive Editor
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 29,160
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OS X, You Confuse Me
I posted this to Facebook/Twitter: Spent time with a Macbook yesterday, and I continue to find OS X to be mostly baffling. So many illogical, ridiculous things. Hard to like.
A friend asked me what, specifically, I was having trouble with, and here was my response:
Upgrading Skype. So the laptop had Skype 2.03 or something on it, and it alerted me that Skype 2.8 was now available. I clicked to upgrade, and it took me to the Skype Web page where it would download the file. OK, no problems there. It downloaded a DMG (I think?) file to the desktop. OK, that's the Mac installer I've seen before. When I double-click on the file to run it, a window pops up with a Skype icon on the left, and an applications icon on the right. Clicking on the Skype icon would start Skype I think, and clicking on right icon would open the applications window. I didn't understand why the window was there, but I figured it was telling me it was installed. There was a blue Skype hard-drive looking thing on the desktop as well - was it the executable that came out of the DMG? I had no clue, but I thought the update was installed, and so I dragged the blue icon and the DMG to the trash can.
Then I started up Skype and was stunned to see it was still v2.03. Huh? I did the entire process over again, and when the Skype window opened up after clicking on the DMG I saw there was an arrow between the Skype and Applications icons...so I was supposed to drag the Skype icon to the Application icon. Once I did that, it seems it actually installed Skype.
To me, that process was needlessly confusing. Compare that to the process on Windows:
1) Dowload an EXE
2) Double-click on EXE
3) App installs
4) You delete the EXE
So far my observation is that you need lots of "insider" understanding of how OS X works; it's not intuitive for me, and I don't think it's because I'm a "Windows guy". The client who's machine it was isn't very techy but has had the Macbook for a couple of years and she still doesn't understand how basically anything works.
So I'm not bashing OS X here, but am really baffled as to why upgrading Skype was such a baffling process.
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