As luck would have it, I was back on that Intel Mac again. Well, it looks as if I have made some real headway in my getting used to OS X and I owe much of this to NeoOffice for making an Office suite installation the easiest I have ever experienced on the Mac.

Now that some time has passed and I have still had a chance to look at things objectively, I have come to the final conclusion that a lot of my frustration from before was simply the polar opposite UI offered by OS X when compared to Windows and KDE/GNOME. At the end of the day, I guess there is no master UI which is best for everyone. Each of us has to decide what best meets our needs.

Having said this, I remain a huge fan of the Mac default applications. In many respects, Linux devs could learn a lot here. But as long as we are speaking of applications, what am I missing with Firefox 2 on the Intel Mac?

Considering my limited exposure to this OS, I am going to simply lay this out as it is in hopes that some of the Mac Gnomies out there can point me in the right direction for this Firefox issue; in addition to one other problem as well.

With a fresh install of Firefox downloaded, I ran the dmg file and then dragged the new application icon generated (looks like a disk image) over to the applications folder. Easy enough, makes sense. OK, so here is where Firefox seems to differ from other Mac apps. Once I reboot the Mac, I then look for my application that should appear in the applications area of Finder – no dice. What makes this so annoying is that NeoOffice stays put and works as I would expect any application to. Drag it over to that area of the Finder and it will stay there reboot after reboot. So what gives?

In the interest of saving time, allow me to point out a few other things to consider when looking into this: First off, I am positive that I am not dragging and dropping a shortcut into Finder with regard to Firefox. I figured this would be the first thing most of us would be pointing to. But alas, this is not the case.

With each attempt, I have checked everywhere to see if the application (Firefox) was simply being moved with each boot of the notebook, however this is not an issue it seems. So what in the heck am I missing? The dmg file remains, but the application goes “poof”.

Out of ongoing frustration, I managed to do something (couldn’t even begin to tell you what) to keep this from happening. Somehow I ended up getting the app included permanently onto the Dock. This is fantastic as it seems to have fixed the problem. But I would love to know what this was needed in the first place? Is there an update that they need to run to keep this from continuing to be an issue? I am willing to say that I’m likely missing something amazingly obvious, however even after looking into this with regard to the Firefox issue, I am not having any joy with straight forward answers.

And my final question of how to deal an error that came up when the owner of this Mac was trying to install MS Office for OS X onto their Mac. Apparently the local Apple provider here in Bellingham had told the owner of this particular unit that they would install Office for her, but then told her she was out of luck once the install turned out to fail. To be fair, the software failure was not discovered until the unit was already brought home.

Once I installed NeoOffice, I had removed the poorly installed copy of MS Office and went ahead with Ctrl clicking on a document to make sure that it was to be opened up with the new software by default. The option property was something along the line of “Always Open With”. Logically, this would change the default application for .doc files. But for some reason, this too, does not want to stick.

So yeah, very frustrating. I’d really love to hear your thoughts. Please hit the comments area above if you could with any ideas you have as to why the default application is for a program that has long since been removed. Thanks everyone.

[tags]OS X, Firefox, MS Office, NeoOffice[/tags]