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Mac port of OED gets a resounding “F” from TUAW revewer
September 27, 2009 | 10:35 am
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By Paul Biba
Now this is a huge disappointment. I’ve been look forward to the native Mac port of the OED for a long time, but The Unofficial Apple Weblog has reviewed it and says it fails miserably. Given that the hard copy costs $1,000 and that the subscription price is a completely unreasonable $300/year, I don’t quite know what to do. I wish I didn’t have such a respect for the TUAW website so that I could just disbelieve the review.
…The CD-ROM lists itself as “version 4″ but this is the first version to be “native” on the Mac. If there was a way to emphasize the quotation marks around the word “native” I would do so, because as I quickly learned, the OED puts the “ugly” in “butt ugly Windows port.” The image you see above is the application icon. Have you ever seen an uglier icon? Have you ever seen an uglier icon for a $300 Mac application? …
It would be possible, but pointless, to go on with further detail of the relentlessly awful user interface. If I was the instructor of a college-level Mac OS X programming class and this application had been submitted as a final project, I would have given it an “F” for failing to support even the most basic elements of the Mac OS X user interface: copy, paste, preferences, menu bar, etc. Had it been submitted to Dr. Cupper, my former computer science professor, I believe he would have been tempted to give it a “Q” because, as he used to tell us, sometimes an “F” just seems too good for some efforts, as it might appear that the project was anywhere close to passing. …
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Comments:
Have you tried your local (US) public library website? Mine has a link to the online version for only the cost of a library card number (which, in my town, is free).
I left a comment over on the TUAW post, so I won’t replicate it here. But, yes, a big disappointment.
Something similar occurred when the Times decided to make their cryptic crosswords available on CD some years ago. They apparently decided that interface-writing was something a bright person could get the hang of in a weekend, and the result was the most appallingly useless product imaginable. I don’t think they sold many copies, because I picked mine up from a remainder bin.
Where is the cluegun when you need it..?
Mac fans will often criticize a program because it is ‘ugly.’ This usually has no bearing on the program’s functionality (sometimes it does, e.g., if the menu items are confusing).
So just because some text is jagged, the reviewer doesn’t trust the definitions? I imagine that ‘version 4′ (which must refer to the content of the words/definitions and not the program) has the same words and the same definitions as the MS-Windows version 4.
I would say if you are not going to be using copy and paste but simply looking up the words, the review has nothing to deter you. But I imagine I’ll be using my version 2 on a virtual machine; the OED prices are too rich for me to keep current — especially since my main interest is in old words and origins.