When I was “allowed” to “retire” from National Semiconductor on March 14, 2009, I promptly went down to the nearby Apple store to buy a MacBook. It had a new and improved operating system, OS-X (10.5.7), also known as Leopard. I was tired of fighting with Microsoft-based computers.*
I paid $1000 cash plus tax plus a couple hundred bucks for a service contract. I took it home and it began to just work. I was very favorably impressed. It just worked! I could send e-mails, and I could receive them. I had heard all the good stories about Apple computers, and I believed I was through with grief.
But after a while I started finding leetle problems. This MacBook needed to be rebooted every six or eight days because it simply stopped working, on the average—about as poor as my old Lenovo T-61. So much for Apple’s vaunted reliability.
Then I typed up a nice two-page memo in Apple’s Mail software. Just before my computer went sicky-poo (that is a technical term), I clicked on “Save As Draft.” I shut the computer down and rebooted. I went to “Drafts,” and my memo was not there. That annoyed me—a lot.
I reconstructed the memo from memory. I shoved it into “Save as Draft,” and I also shoved a copy of the e-mail into the free Thunderbird e-mail application from Mozilla, which my son Ben had given me. After the next big crash, I restarted it all, and the copy in “Drafts” was gone! But the copy in Thunderbird was saved. I was very grateful.
THE SEARCH BEGINS
Somebody told me, “Well, if you do a save, it might try to ‘Save to Server,’ depending on your settings...” What the hell was that supposed to mean? No info. Never heard of that.
Apple has several kinds of search machines in Leopard including Finder and Help and Spotlight—and calling the factory guys. I searched everywhere and could not find any info on “Save to Server.” Neither my wife nor son could guess where to look.
I had bought a couple hundred bucks of books that claimed to be able to teach me everything I needed to know about this Mac. They were utterly useless. This started with The Missing Manual by David Pogue. Bragger.
Finally my wife got lucky and happened to find “(X) Save Drafts to Server?” I hit the X to un-check. Now it will save drafts to the hard drive. Even after I found the devious instruction path—Mail/Preferences/Accounts/Mailbox Behavior/Save Drafts to Server?—none of the search methods above could find it.
In other words, I discovered that Apple had some features that were extremely well hidden. This just confirmed what I’d suspected: that Apple continually adds many fine features into its computers, which I sorta like, but the company doesn’t like to tell you about them. It just likes to hide things, with no documentation. That, I do not like.
If I save to my hard drive, I can save an e-mail with a guy’s address and phone number and get that info back even if I am in the middle of nowhere, in my car, etc. But if it was only “saved on the server,” that’s pretty hard to do without a connection to an actual server, eh?
One helpful expert at Apple explained that “Save to Server” does not necessarily mean it will not save if you are not connected to a server. But my experiences contradict that.
I was going down to the mall and I parked up by a San Francisco branch library, where I found a couple more books on Leopard. They all had the same deficiencies. In fact, they had largely the same wording. H’mmm. I then went down to the mall and looked at a couple more books on this topic in Borders, and they had the same deficiencies—and phrasing. H’mmm. Why am I such a suspicious old bastard?
OTHER GRIPES
Other problems turned up. In the Safari Web browser, my address line disappeared—namely, the place where you’re supposed to type your URLs. Using the instructions in Mr. Pogue’s book, I couldn’t get it back. Ben tried to help me by phone, and his advice didn’t work. Finally when he came by, he figured it out quickly, using a slightly different variation from what the books said. The books were out of date. The computer was “improved” until it didn’t work.
Similarly, I needed to look at a few pdfs, but the print was too small to read on the screen. How could I expand it? Mr. Pogue’s book had explicit advice on how to expand a pdf, but it did not work! Finally Ben came by, and in three minutes he showed me four ways to zoom in on a pdf so I could read it. What a miracle!
Similarly, if I am saving an e-mail, and then I start to type and make updates, my Mac can make some autosaves. But this function is utterly hidden and undocumented, with no explanation in Mr. Pogue’s book or any other book. If you like the autosave, the lack of an explanation is tolerable. But if you don’t like it, you should be warned so you can do a workaround and avoid it, eh?