ExpanDrive

Here is my least favorite Windows XP dialog:

Let’s say I have a long WEP key - maybe a random 26 digit hexadecimal string [quite common]. Not only do you have to type it in without the option of seeing the characters you type, you must type them TWICE.

This is dumb.

It is only critical that a user confirm a typed password during the process of creating a new password, just so they don’t accidentally get locked because they unwittingly made a typo while entering in the new password.

Here, OS X gets it exactly right:

Type the password once, hit ok. If I mistyped the password authentication will fail and I can try again. Brilliant. In the spirit of complaining, I do have one major gripe with the OS X wireless stack that Windows XP does a much better job with.

Head up the the Airport dropdown on your menu bar and you’ll see the list of access points that have a strong enough signal to connect to. If you’re in a public place you might see 25-30 access points. OS X gives you no indication of which of those are open or closed, and certainly no idea what their signal strengths are. Want to find one that has a good signal and is also unencrypted out of that list of 30? Good Luck.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 5:44 am and is filed under Rant, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.