Things I don't like about Mac OS X 10.9

I like many things that Apple does from a design perspective, and I hate to be too critical, but after upgrading my old iMac to Mac OS X 10.9, I honestly can't think of anything I like better from a UX perspective in OS X 10.9 compared to OS X 10.6. Rather than just say, “I don’t like 10.9” and keep whining about it, I started to keep a list of the things I don't like about 10.9, and it goes something like this:

  1. Getting rid of the 2D grid in Spaces was a bad decision. I assume this was done to make OS X more like iOS, but that was a poor decision -- we’re not limited by a small touchscreen here. Fortunately I can pay $18 for TotalSpaces to get this functionality back (argh).
  2. Despite fiddling with it constantly, I can't get icons properly arranged on the desktop. And new files all pile up in the upper-right corner.
  3. The color was removed from the column headers in the Finder, so I can't easily tell which column the files are sorted by.
  4. What the heck was wrong with "Save" and "Save As..."???
  5. Locking my files because they haven't been accessed in a while? WTF?
  6. The changes to Preview make me want to strangle someone.
  7. Starting new Terminal windows not in $HOME by default. This causes startup files not to be read.
  8. The new animations are often too much.

There are a few more things I don't like that I forgot to write down, but those are some of my top annoyances. I guess my point is this: From a usability perspective, OS X 10.9 is a step back -- a step in the wrong direction -- from OS X 10.6.

Mac OS X 'defaults' commands

Here’s a link that shows how to disable some of the animations. I especially enjoy this command to disable animations:

# opening and closing windows and popovers
defaults write -g NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false

Here’s a long list of defaults commands on a Github page.