What Do Shortcuts Have To Do With Sydney Bristow?

Another aspect of Apple's broken UI is how difficult it is to do something simple in Windows: make a fraking shortcut. I've been using Guitar Rig a lot lately and figured it'd be convenient to have a shortcut on the Desktop or the Table (aka Dock).

In Windows you can do this by right-clicking any program icon and selecting Create Shortcut. Simple, huh? It's even easier in Win7 when you can pin apps to the Start menu or Task Bar with a right-click or just drag them off the menu.

Well, none of these simple steps are available on the Mac. Dragging doesn't work. There's no shortcut or pin option. Stumped, I asked Google and found this tutorial which lists the four steps to duplicating what a right-click can do in Windows:

To create short cut in Mac OS X, follow the steps below:-

* Launch your Finder, look for the program that you want to create shortcut for.
* Highlight the program by clicking once on the file
* Control + Click on the file (or Right click on the file), and select “Make Alias”
* Once the alias being created, you may drag the alias to desktop or to anywhere you wish
* Done. you’ve just created a shortcut in Mac OS X

** In Windows we call it shortcut, in Mac OS X we call it Alias.

In the upside-down world of Apple, having to do all these steps to do what Windows can do with a right-click is hailed by the Kool-Aid besotted fanchimps as another reason why "Apple just works."

Wrong. It's how Apple makes you needlessly work four times as hard to do the simplest thing. And pay a premium price for the abuse.