Book Review: Mac Annoyances

You'll have to excuse the sarcasm. I know that the Apple Mac is a strong, stable and very functional operating system. To listen to Mac fanatics though, particularly when discussing Windows, you would think that Steve Jobs walks on water and the Mac can do no wrong. Well, I used to provide tech support to Mac and PC users and I got as many or more calls from the Mac users than the PC users. Rizzo's book will help Mac users work out the kinks and get the most from their systems.

My own sarcasm from the intro aside, the book deals as much or more with quirks and issues with applications as it does with any annoyances in the Mac OS itself.

Regardless of how intuitive and relatively flawless the operating system may be, the fact is with millions of users come millions of preferences and points of view. Often, the annoyances aren't a matter of right or wrong, but simply making the operating system or application work the way you want it to.

Many of the annoyances, in fact, are still related to Microsoft even though we're talking about Macs. Microsoft Office for the Mac platform seems to offer a number of quirks and issues that seem counter-intuitive to the Mac crowd.

This type of book, addressing various annoyances and teaching people how to tweak and modify their systems to work the way they want them to, are growing in popularity. Rizzo's book is a great addition to this genre.

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.