What do you think of the font smoothing in OS X? For me, that’s the major reason why I don’t perform a full switch to my Mac machine…”

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Forced anti-aliasing bothers me as well. There’s something to be said about pixel-perfect/crystal clear displaying of text, regardless of what experts say in regards to “font smoothing makes text easier to read”…that’s total BS.

I think this ONE thing alone is what makes OS X **APPEAR** to be so radically different from Windows…everything looks pretty even ugly old bland text that’s been around since day one of computer screens. Too bad smoothed text on screen does NOT equal better readability.

As cool as that is, though, it still feels like lipstick on a pig.

If you’re going to agitate for better file sharing, get Apple to make the default be WebDAV. It’s simple (it’s an application where HTTP actually works, because it’s simply scaling HTTP in a particular direction); it can be made secure (making it impossible to use BASIC authentication would help); and it does what most people want: get/put files.

FTP also does get/put of resources (files), but isn’t simple and can’t be made secure without years of network experience. I keep hoping that the poor old beast will *finally* just *die*.

NFS, AFP, and SMB all suffer the same problem: they’re RPC, squinching their eyes tight shut to pretend the network away. All three also have security models that are … egregious. They fail on all three counts: complex, solve problems users don’t care about, and poor security.

I understand that your point is simply that file sharing ought to be really simple from the UI perspective, but I really really hope that no one takes you up on “share all protocols,” if only because it’s the sort of behavior that reminds me of early Windows, and building complex, fragile, insecure stuff *will* be punished, once it’s deployed to the net in general.

The best part of using WebDAV is that you can access it through a web browser. Hard to imagine easier than that (of course, it’s nearly impossible to PUT using a browser, but Apple could simultaneously address that in Safari, at least).

Amy!

Under Mac OS 9, there was a single folder, which I could arrange alphabetically (or however I wanted). Under Mac OS X, there are multiple groups, whose membership policy is unknown, so I have to scan two dimensions in order to find what I want: alphabetically within a group, then skip to next group when I don’t see what I want. I can’t just scan the whole thing with one alphabetical probe. It’s the difference between sorting by one key or two keys, and I never know exactly what the primary (grouping) key is.

This is also why the System Preferences Dock-menu is better: single-key alphabetical sort.

I also just noticed the search field (I only recently upgraded to Tiger), and tried typing in it. I think I could really appreciate the cool highlight effect it gives for the various matches to the search string. Have you used that feature, or have an opinion on it?