Anyone who plugs in a Mac whether it's the proud owner of the very latest version or someone still tapping away on yesterday's model usually finds these machines to be an immensely popular and beneficial tool. Unfortunately, they can also be a royal pain in the neck. Any way you slice it, Macs still have a tendency to induce minor headaches at the most inopportune times. Mac Annoyances feels your pain. Developed precisely for the individual who can't live without a Mac yet can't deal with its fickle temperament Mac Annoyances provides solutions to scores of common problems faced by Mac owners. Contained within its pages are hidden (plus well-documented) tips, tricks, and workarounds designed to drastically improve specific problem-solving capabilities. The result: a significant enhancement of the overall user experience and a tremendous savings of time no matter which version you own. What does Mac Annoyances cover? What doesn't it cover is the more appropriate question. Hassles associated with Mac OS X, iLife, Mac hardware, and Microsoft Office (the mother of all annoyances) are all addressed in sharp detail. Also tackled: how to overcome problems related to specific applications such as iTunes, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Apple's Mail program. Having trouble browsing the Web or searching with Google? Want to make your Mac a bit faster? Keyboard causing you trouble? These and dozens more annoyances like them are all dissected as well. Truth is, if you've experienced it, Mac Annoyances addresses it. Written by top-flight author and renowned Mac expert, John Rizzo, this book is a follow-up to the bestselling PC Annoyances. In keeping with the spirit of O'Reilly's Annoyances series, Rizzo adopts a sympathetic tone throughout the book that quickly ingratiates itself to readers. Rather than blaming Mac owners for possessing minimal technical savvy, Mac Annoyances takes them along for a fun-filled ride as they join forces and outsmart the system together.

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WiscMUG reviews Mac Annoyances - 2005-10-20
Reviewer Rating:
This review was created for the University of Wisconsin Mac User's Group: http://wiscmug.org/

Let me start with an overview of my expectations of this book (based on books of this type), and then I'll get into my reactions to the book itself.

Target Audience:

I always have two reservations concerning books like this one. The first is the target audience. Who is this book actually for? I'd break up the Mac user base (and probably the PC user base as well) into four categories: beginner, advanced beginner, serious user, and advanced user/programmer.

Beginners aren't just people who started using the Mac yesterday. I'd consider my parents to be beginners. They've been using a Mac for several years now, but they still don't know how to move files around or what the key combination for, well, just about anything is. My dad has to use two fingers to click and drag on his iBook's trackpad, and when I recently told him to copy and paste an e-mail message into a web browser window, he didn't even try to copy and paste, he just retyped it.

Most people get past this stage and begin to really use their Mac. They become curious about what their Mac can do. They experiment, start trying out new software, and generally have many, many questions. I'd call these people advanced beginners. (Incidentally, I think that the reason why people like my parents never get out of the beginner stage is because they are afraid to experiment. The computer is pretty unique in that, quite often, you can undo what you just did. Try that in your kitchen.)

Asking lots of questions is good, since the answers allow people to advance to the third stage, a serious user. Once a person knows enough about their Mac to seriously integrate it into their daily life, they can get real work done and be efficient about it. This is really the whole point about using your Mac, or any computer or tool, for that matter.

Some people of course go even beyond this stage, understanding how to control their Mac from the terminal in OS X, programming their Mac and writing their own software. Advanced users don't feel constrained by the software or the user interface(s) (or sometimes even the hardware) that's out there.

So who is this book's target audience? I expected it to fall around the advanced beginner to serious user (and I think that it does). As beginners, this book would be way above my parent's heads. Even books in the "Missing Manual" series are a little tough for them (and this book is not laid out as a step by step guide to using particular programs as those books are). Advanced users may get something out it, although they may already know most of it (depending upon which apps they use on a regular basis). However, no matter how much you know about the Mac, there are seemingly always a few more little tidbits hidden in the woodwork, so probably everyone could learn something from this book.

Books and obsolescence:

But this brings me to my second point: obsolescence. Books that deal with the features of any computer program are usually outdated by the time they hit your local bookstore (or even by the time the ink hits the page). "Mac Annoyances" is written for Mac OS X 10.3, iLife '04, and about two revisions of iPod back. I'm writing this in July 2005, and the book had it's first print run in November 2004. Already the book is one iteration of updates behind, and with new hardware and software updates always on the horizon (thank you Apple and the developer community!), it won't be long until it is multiple iterations behind.

While many of the tips and tricks are still kicking around in newer versions of software (and not everyone updates the software on their Mac right away, if at all), some of the bugs will have been squashed, and some things are simply going to work differently as time goes on.

For example, the iTunes 4.9 update includes the ability to subscribe and listen to podcasts. Very cool, and definitely a feature to mention in a book like this (especially how to subscribe to podcasts from places other than iTMS and why you might want to). Unfortunately, the associated iPod updaters, while enabling podcast support, broke the ability for the iPod to automatically update smart playlists without having to resync to iTunes. Annoying? Yes. But by the time any book or magazine will have had this flaw noted in print, Apple will have fixed it by then. (Apple, you listening?) [UPDATE: Apparently not. While Apple has posted a tech note on their web site about the problem, since writing this review in August, Apple has release two new iPods, two new iPod updaters, and two new verisons of iTunes, and no fix for this problem. Apparently, the new iPod nano and new iPod with video do not suffer from this problem. Does Apple expect me to buy a new iPod just to get back functionality that my old iPod used to have?]

Another example would be the inability of Dashboard widgets to be deleted through the Dashboard user interface in Mac OS 10.4. This was eventually fixed in 10.4.2, but other Dashboard weirdness still exists that I hope will be fixed in future 10.4 updates.

So, presenting the information in this form (as a book) presents certain problems. We now have better ways of presenting the most up-to-date information (namely, the internet). Books have fantastic data stability, but horrible search and update functionality. In addition, because the book takes a Q & A approach to solving specific problems, some information that really should go together winds up being scattered across multiple pages or even sections. The author does realize this and tries to mention associated information whenever possible, but not always.

Thus, this book isn't specifically at fault on the second point as much as the entire genre is. John Rizzo keeps a blog to address this issue; however, it is more focused on Windows annoyances than Mac ones (I'm not sure if that's a commentary on the state of affairs, but I'll just assume so).


Hits and misses of the book:

Now that that's all out of the way, what's actually in "Mac Annoyances"? The book is divided up into sections: Mac OS X, various e-mail programs, using the internet (including iChat), Microsoft Office, iLife, iPod, and some basics about hardware. That covers a lot of territory, while restricting itself to applications that a majority of users probably use.

However, I think they still miss some apps that lots of people use (or should be using). I'd like to have seen more of the standard applications that ship with OS X featured, such as iCal, Font Book, iSync, and the utilities. (Of course, the newest features of Tiger, like Spotlight and Dashboard and, my personal favorite, Dictionary, aren't featured either.) There are also a whole set of media player apps that people use, like RealPlayer and Quicktime Player, that have plentiful, if obscure, features. And some sections feel like they barely scratch the surface of interesting features or questions about the interface. Some of this may be a result of phrasing all of the questions as "annoyances" in order to match the title, but the sections covering the iApps and iPod left me wanting more.

Of course, if you don't use a particular app (for example, I've never had a Mac with a SuperDrive, so I've never ever opened iDVD), the suggestions in the book aren't going to be of much worth to you. On the other extreme, if you use an application extensively, you may already be familiar with all of the ins and outs that are presented.

I would classify myself as a serious user, although I do dabble in a little programming here and there. I was pleasantly surprised to find out some stuff I didn't know about my Mac, and some solutions to annoying little problems that I hadn't bothered to take care of. So here are three detailed examples of things I found useful in the book, and one example of something I didn't.

Spellchecking:

I've pondered upgrading Mail.app's spell checker for a while, since it isn't that smart, but I didn't know how to do it and it wasn't so bothersome that I felt obligated to do something about it. The book recommends an OS X version of a standard Unix spellchecker, a good (read: free) suggestion. But it actually didn't get to the root of my problem with Mail.app's spellchecker.

Spellchecking in general could have been an entire sub-section of the book, because it is something that has to be (or should be) used a lot. But this would violate how the book is set up to some extent. So the suggestion of installing a separate spellchecker for the entire system to use was put in the web browser section.

One of the main reasons I use Microsoft Word is because of its AutoCorrect spellcheck feature, something which I didn't know (although it totally makes sense) is duplicated in third-party spellchecking software. So I may actually buy SpellCatcher X, what the book suggests, although I'd like to find out more about how OS 10.4's new, standard Oxford English dictionary has affected the playing field of spellchecking before plunking down $40.

Web browsers:

I think this book gives a very good comparison of the browsers that are out there for the Mac. It isn't exhaustive in the number of browsers (it includes Safari, Firefox/Camino/Mozilla, OmniWeb, even IE, but ignores Opera and iCab) or their features, but is certainly more detailed than what you might find in a MacWorld article on the same topic. It also, as mentioned earlier, suffers from the fact that all of the browsers have been updated since the book was published (some browser development groups even offer nightly builds if you really want to surf on the bleeding edge).

But it does cover the main points: bookmarks, pop-ups and ad blocking, flash, cookies, searching, and printing. There were even some things about browsers that I didn't know about, such as using a browser to see what's on your iPod (or any hard drive). Windows forced this file browser metaphor on it's users, and I think that there are a lot of disadvantages with that, but it can be useful in certain situations, so it's nice to know you can do this in some browsers written for Mac OS X.

It also gives some suggestions for web browser add-ons, such as PithHelmet for ad blocking and Sogudi to add functionality to the Google search field in Safari. I wish that it had listed more of these, or at least more places to look for these (I don't remember even running across a mention of Version Tracker). One of my favorites is Pimp My Safari (www.PimpMySafari.com).

Microsoft Word:

This was actually the most useful section I found from the book, and it makes me want to check out some more books about Word/Office, like those in the "Missing Manual" or "Dummies" series. Page after page I kept reading and thinking to myself "Oh, so that's what you need to do in order to do (fill in simple, obvious thing here that drives you a little nuts about Word/Office)". Included tips covered tracking changes, hyperlinks, several suggestions on spellchecking, the work menu, office assistant, keyboard commands, formatting, selecting non-continuous sections of text, and working with tables of contents and large documents.

Some of the tips provided overviews of the different functionalities of different versions of Word for the Mac (and now I'm even considering upgrading to Office 2004, something that the Microsoft marketing juggernaut couldn't get me to do).

This section made me realize that I am no where near a serious user of Word, because there are tons of features in there that I had no clue about. Of course, this is one of the oft-mentioned problems of the Office suite: feature bloat. But for every, say, ten useless features that I don't know about (and hopefully never will), it sounds like there might be one feature that's buried but would be useful.

Sherlock:

There's a whole sub-section of the internet chapter of the book devoted to Sherlock. Does anyone use Sherlock anymore? Did anyone ever use Sherlock? I used to use it a little but 1) it was slow, 2) the UI tended to be cumbersome, and 3) the third-party channels kept breaking with version updates (and sometimes simply for no apparent reason). I did use Watson, the third party app that did many of the same things and worked better for whatever reason. But more often than not I just used the web to do the same things that I could do in Sherlock or Watson.

I think we've recently seen an evolution of Sherlock's main design principle, that of information-specific search capabilities, in Dashboard. Plus, some of these search capabilities now (finally) seem ready for prime time. For example, Google maps rocks, and the fact that the API is open, so people have created extensions for Google maps, like Workout Tracker at particletree.com/gmaps/workoutTracker.php, rocks even harder.

Some more helpful tidbits:

I can't help but briefly mention a few more little tidbits in the book that I found to be helpful. One thing everyone should be forced to read before they are ever allowed near a computer are the included tips for writing effective e-mail. Most of the things are common sense, which begs the question why do I still get e-mail that is less fun to read than getting a root canal? I remember having to write boring sample letters in my English class in elementary school - I hope that now they are teaching kids how to write good e-mails (but I wouldn't be surprised if many teachers didn't understand the differences between a good letter and a good e-mail).

The book also lists some useful yet surprisingly obscure keyboard commands. There are also a lot of suggested hacks that rely on the Unix underpinnings of OS X, including changing the "Connect to Server" dialog box to allow you to browse your network, folder modifications/management, and changing the functionality of those little arrows in iTunes.


In conclusion, if you use several of the apps listed above and still have a lot of questions about using those apps on your Mac, this book might help. There are certainly a lot of other tips and tricks out there on several web sites (check the WiscMUG links page for starters), and this book won't have the hottest, newest information (nor will any book). But I did find some very useful pieces of information in here, especially those about spellchecking and using Word. Thus, I think that the question to ask yourself is "Based on the above description, does it sound like this book could answer many of my advanced-beginner questions about the Mac?" and if the answer is "Yes", then it's time to pick up a copy.

Some annoyances, many tips - 2005-01-15
Reviewer Rating:
Mac Annoyances is full of useful tips. Some really do banish annoying behaviors, such as the Microsoft Office Assistant and Microsoft Word's autocorrect features (and some that are not, in fact, from Microsoft), but others are just useful, such as option-mute-speaker-key bringing up System Preferences and information on how to keep the iTunes library on an external drive. Macs may not be as annoying as PCs, but there are enough non-obvious settings and tricks that a book like this is useful.

The book is aimed at an intermediate level, for people who are competent Mac users but who might not feel comfortable figuring out Terminal commands (there are a few, but it's at a cookbook "cut and paste" level) or using the Developer Tools.

I think it's a good book for intermediate Mac users who want to know some of the hidden tricks that can help make their Mac experience easier.

Tiger users beware! - 2006-01-31
Reviewer Rating:
It wasn't made clear in the listing that this is essentially out of date -- Panther was an interim OS and this book is written from a Panther perspective. Tiger has been with us for more than a year, and the listing for this book should make it clear that this is out of date. A waste of my $$.

Reviewed by a novice Panther user - 2005-01-11
Reviewer Rating:
The author covers methods of dealing with a wide assortment of quirks and interesting default settings that the wizards at Apple chose to use in the building of their sophisticated new OS. Some of the annoyances Mr. Rizzo helps the reader fix are fairly basic, but most are for the serious user who will find a small nuisance to be a true headache if they are a heavier user of their machine than I am of mine. There's a note near the beginning of the text that recommends a couple of books for the novice with OS X. I suspect they are a good idea. I found much of Mac Annoyances difficult to follow until I watched the first two discs of the Mac Academy program for OS X.

Mr. Rizzo is very qualified to write this book, and he is phenomenally generous with recommendations of web sites, software, and books that the reader can visit or acquire to solve glitches that aren't just a matter of knowing how to find and change some well-hidden settings. The annoyance fixes that I tried worked as advertised, and so I assume the more technical fixes that I didn't need will work as well. I have to make the same assumption concerning the ones requiring downloads or purchases of additional software. Pleasantly, almost every graphic of the computer screen that accompanied the text of an annoyance was visible without having to turn a page. There are also excellent explanations to accompany the annoyances. Even as a novice, I leaned a great deal from what Mr. Rizzo has to say about various settings and set ups. A great example is why one should have one's e-mail not accept HTML material.

While the material in the book is very thorough, I thought it's physical presentation on the page could be improved on. There didn't seem to be a standard way of listing the steps to correct an annoyance. Typically, you have to read the verbiage carefully and notice what's capitalized and pull the steps out of the text. Other times there were set ups with arrows between the names of icons or tabs or whatever had to be clicked on. At the very least some bold type and/or a different font would allow an easier time seeing and reviewing the steps. Even better might be a box with the steps nestled in the text. Lastly, a light green ink is used to indicate which figures to refer to. My half-century-old eyes have trouble seeing it.

What? You Mean The Mac Isn't Perfect As Is? - 2005-01-17
Reviewer Rating:
I am not a Mac user, so I can't comment much on whether or not I agree that the annoyances addressed in the book are the things I would find annoying.

I can say that, contrary to the hype, I found the Mac to have just as many quirks and annoyances as Windows when I was supporting both operating systems. The annoyances might be different, but the operating system was not as perfect and intuitive as one might be led to believe. Suffice it to say, I believe a book like this will be just as welcome to the Mac audience as similar books in the PC and Windows world.

The title of Mac Annoyances may be a little misleading in some ways. It almost should be called Mac Hacks (O'Reilly does offer Mac OS X Panther Hacks as well) because many of the tips are not so much about an annoyance, but rather provide insight into tweaking or modifying the OS or application to work in a particular way.

Some of the tips or advice are not as helpful as you might hope for. For instance, tips on how to get the Safari web browser to work the way you want or perform certain functions often end with "switch to another browser".

Overall, the book is written fairly well and the tips will make sense to most beginner to intermediate level users.

(...)

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