namkcuR said:
May I present a rebuttle now? Thank you. I mean no offense either, but you are just wrong about some of this stuff. First off, I use Windows word processors such as Word and Wordpad and Notepad every day of my life, and I ASSURE you, when you close out of them they ask you if you've saved your file. I am 100% sure of this. Your claim that they only ask you if you're sure is just plain wrong.
That's not system-wide though. Some applications do it, which is great, but the majority do not. Every application on OS X has this. System wide is consistent and the way it should be.
Secondly, the 'annoying dog' comes up in Office applications when you're looking for help. For the most part though, it has little part in 'searching' as you put it. The search box in Windows is a simple and easy to use search box, and you need only answer two questions, what you're searching for and where you want to search. Simple.
I'm not talking about Office in this case. In XP, when you do a regular file search, it comes up by default. Here's a screenshot:
http://g0rman.com/dog.jpg . The point is, you shouldn't have to go through 3 steps to do a search, and it shouldn't take forever for the results to come up. It should be Google-like.
Also, I too use ITunes almost every day and agree it is a GREAT program, but it's not propietary to Mac. You can use it on Windows too. I've used several Mac applications and I can tell you(and you should know) that ITunes looks and feels significantly different from other Mac applications. Anyway, I bundle it with the IPod and what I said earlier about it: any company can come up with a gem twenty years down the line.
Yes, it is a great program, which is created by Apple. I specifically said I was using it as an example of Apple's top-notch application design, since you, as a Windows user, have a chance to use it and verify my claims.
Which applications in specific are you referring to that don't function on the same level? As far as I'm concerned, there is no Apple-created application, and pretty the majority of the third-party applications are all of the same quality.
And yes, Macs ARE simple. They're simple in the way they show things. Mac OS never tells you what is going on. I'll give you a few examples. Take the Finder for example. This is one of the most annoying things I've ever come across in the world of software, and I'm a web development major in college. You can never really tell if/which programs are open or not. There's no such thing as minimization. The Windows GUI where you can clearly see every application open on the taskbar works MUCH better and is FAR easier to look at and understand in five seconds. Another example. Do you remember those MAC commercials a couple years back, where they'd have somebody talking about having a bad experience with PC, having to wait to download drivers or whatever, and then they'd say how they got a MAC and whatever it was worked just like that, and then the commercials would end 'I'm Jeannie Hogan, and I saved Christmas' or something along those lines with different names and different thing being saved? If you plug in a camera or scanner or whatever into a Mac that's never been connected to that particular machine before, the Mac needs drivers just the same to make the hardware work. The difference? Mac doesn't show you any box or anything saying drivers are being downloaded. They figure the user doesn't care or doesn't need to know. Some users like to know. I could go on.
First off, let me quickly debunk the driver myth. When you plug in a digital camera, there's no "downloading" of drivers going on. In fact, there's no installing of drivers. The built-in driver support of peripherals is astoundingly good, and stays very up-to-date. I have yet to have to search for drivers for any hardware I've used, and I have worked with a ridiculous amount of them. From digital cameras to external sound cards, they've all worked flawlessly.
Now, let's talk GUI! From one web developer to another, I urge you to check this out:
http://g0rman.com/exposelove3.png . That's Expose in "application" mode showing off every open window in Photoshop. The regular mode of Expose shows off every window you've got open. There has never, ever been a more efficient way to find the window you're looking for. When you're working with a ton of Photoshop windows, or a ton of text files, or a ton of browser windows -- or all of those -- this is a godsend.
Those little windows appear _instantly_ as you move your mouse to one of the hotcorners (as described earlier), or by clicking one of the hotkeys. There's also a mode of Expose that immediately shows your desktop. You can do that in Windows by hitting the Windows key and D. However, with the Expose version, you can get all of your applications back in front instantly by either moving your mouse back to the same hotcorner or clicking the same hotkey. With Windows, you have to manually bring your windows back to the front.
Speaking of Expose, there are a few neat features I'd like to quickly overview. Let's say you have a bunch of IMs open in iChat, you can go into the application mode of Expose and see all of your IMs at once. I've already told you that, but what I haven't told you is that while in Expose mode (with all of the windows shrunk down to fit on screen), they continue to update just as if you were looking at them normally. This means that if someone sends you a message while in Expose mode, you'll see it instantly when it comes in. An even better example is that if you have a video playing, it will continue to play even while shrunk down. Ah yes, the beauty of an OpenGL/hardware accelerated GUI. An unrelated example of that is when you minimize a movie to the dock, the icon preview is actually a preview of the movie itself, which plays just as nicely as if you were looking at it normally.
To answer your Dock questions, let's compare the way Windows & Mac handle windows. We'll use XP and take into account it's program grouping in the taskbar. Let's say you have 10 browser windows open in both operating systems. With Windows, you have one method for getting to one of those browsers. You have to first click the program group in the taskbar, and then, from a text list, select the specific window you want to access. Chances are, you'll play a guessing game as to which window is which, as you probably have multiple windows open with a similar or even the exact same name. How annoying.
With the Dock, things are grouped as well. However, the way it functions is quite different. When you click an application in the Dock that has multiple windows running, it brings all of them forward, so you don't have to guess. If you want to, you can right-click on the icon and select a specific window to open. You're probably thinking "how is that list any better than the Windows list you just described?" Good question! Every right-click menu is designed to be most effective for the application, yet it retains consistency by sticking to the general guidelines. Because of this, you have useful information to go by on this menu. For example, with Mail, it would list the complete subjects of all messages you have open. However, it also lists several program functions, such as "Get New Messages" or "Compose New Message" right there in the right-click menu. With iChat, it groups IM windows in the list by requests and open IMs. If you have System Preferences open and right click on it's Dock icon, you're presented with a list of all of System Preference's panels. Having the right-click menus be context-sensitive is very, very useful.
As I mentioned, when you minimize something to the dock, you actually see a graphical preview of it as the icon in the dock. For example, if you minimize a browser window, you can actually see the web page you had loaded in the icon. As I mentioned above, if it's a movie, you'll see it still moving (if you want).
To be honest though, with Expose, minimizing or even going to the dock for anything but application launching is the second-choice for window managing. Expose is truly that useful.
Another way of dealing with windows is alt+tab, or command+tab on the Mac. With Windows, every window is listed separately. Guess what! That's even less efficient then trying to the right window out of the taskbar right-click menu. You can be cycling through windows on the alt+tab list in Windows forever, and still not find the right window. The command+tab functionality in Mac works similar to the dock, in that as you select the application, all of it's windows are brought to the front. This makes a lot more sense, since being window-specific in this sort of a list is just pointless. Furthermore, the command+tab list in Expose has some very cool functionality. As you highlight a program in it, you can press either Q or H. Pressing Q will quit the program without even bring it to the front (unless it needs to ask if you want to save, etc), and pressing H will hide the application and all of it's windows. In Windows, you've got nothing more than a fairly useless list.
There are so many other important aspects of window management, such as how the OS handles drag-and-drop. If you look back to my initial post, check out what I said about using Expose to drag-and-drop a file from your desktop to a non-visible application. Some other neat things are being able to switch from one application-specific view of Expose to another by simply hitting tab to reveal the next group.
A Mac will NEVER make me happy. There is no flexibility within. I'm a computer guy, it's my field of study/work, and I'm telling you, people like me like to be able to fiddle around with an OS, edit what in Windows is called the registry, experiement around, maybe screw some stuff up. Macs don't give us that chance. They assume that no one wants that. I suppose it depends on what you're looking for in a computer, I really can't imagine any hardcore comptuer techie like myself ever taking a Mac over a Windows PC.
I knew I'd have the most fun with this part! The flexibility on OS X is completely unrivaled. Hands down.
Let's start off by talking about look and feel. OS X is fully skinnable, and the skins are beautiful. Because this is native, there is absolutely no performance hit if you decide to use one of these skins. They also have the luxury of using alpha-blending, which makes them look even nicer. Here are some great examples:
http://www.maxthemes.com/themes/?theme=EYLO ... and if you're feeling a little out of place when switching to a Mac, you'll notice this specific designer has even made an XP skin! It's a sad day when the XP look looks better on the Mac!
You'll also notice that because OS X was built from the ground up to have a fully dynamic UI, the skin effects everything. Every window type, ever button, every scrollbar. It's the most consistent skinning system you'll see.
However, let's get application specific. Without the need of any special application, you can chance any image in any program, period. With Windows, you can sort of do this using programs that extract the images from an EXE, but it's rather hit-or-miss. On OS X, they're all right there for you. In fact, if you're feeling adventurous, you can actually fully redefine the look of a window by loading it up in Interface Builder, which is one of the freely provided development tools. From here, you can completely change the front-end (placement of anything) for _any_ application. Thanks to the modular way a program is put together on OS X, this is possible. As any good coder knows, keeping the GUI and code separate is always the way to go. OS X just makes it possible for you to fully change the GUI however you want without needing the sourcecode of the program. In fact, if you want to take it a step further, you can actually write add-ons to any program. You know how some Windows programs support plug-ins? Well, with OS X, you can make "plug-ins" for any application, without them specifically needing to support it. For example, someone made a great away message management plugin for iChat that hooks right into it -- you'd never know it wasn't part of the program to begin with.
I'll be the first to tell you that there is no registry in OS X. Thank, you, god. Whoever had the brilliant idea of putting every setting for the OS and applications into one easily corruptible "database" needs to check out how it should be done. The way it should be done is, as I'm sure you'd expect me to say, OS X's way. Before I get to that, I need to explain one additional thing -- the way OS X handles users.
OS X handles users like Unix does. Every user has their own home folder, which contains everything specific to them. Their preferences, their documents, their web folder, their media, their cache files, their histories, and anything else you can think of. There is nothing, and I repeat _nothing_, user specific outside of a person's home directory. What makes this actually work (as opposed to Windows failed "Documents and Settings" idea) is that one user can't access another user's folder. In fact, you can even enable on-the-fly encryption of your home directory. Because of this though, every user truly has their own preferences of _everything_. When you create a new user and login with that account, it's truly like the OS was just installed for them. Sharing a computer has never been less stressful. This also makes for a very clean filesystem. You have your computer-wide applications (you can also have user-specific applications), your home directories, and then the system components. Because there are only these three main areas of the filesystem, something called Archive Install is possible. This fully replaces the system components without touching the other two. That gives you essentially the same thing as a clean install on Windows, except you don't have to spend hours (or days) getting your computer running the way you want again.
Now, let's talk about OS X's version of a "registry". Instead of having an easily corruptible database that contains every preference, you have a folder, within your home directory, called Preferences. Within this folder is an individual file for various system components you can configure as well as every application. These files are all XML formatted, which I'm sure, as a web developer, you can appreciate. Every possible setting that you can define through the GUI, and in many cases, more, are fully editable through these XML files. If you want to take a program back to it's initial state, you simply trash the preference file. There is also an included application that provides a GUI to editing these files. Now that is an elegant way of dealing with preferences. By the way, hex editing is just as possible on OS X as it is in Windows, if you're really looking to dig down deep.
By the way, the registry is even less efficient on Windows due to the fact that many programs ignore the registry, and maintain their own settings files. As a result, the registry isn't even a one-stop-shop if you're looking to make a change or two. On OS X, every single application puts its preference file in the exact same place using the exact same formatting.
One last note about applications -- they're all self-contained in what OS X calls a package. Not only does this eliminate having to dig through folders to find a program, but it also eliminates having an application install files all over your hard drive, which as I'm sure you know, gets messy in a hurry. Every single file that the application needs is contained within this package. You can easily view the contents of a package, but the real beauty is how easy this makes installing and uninstalling. To install an application, you simply drag it from the CD or wherever you downloaded it to into the Applications folder (if you want). That's it -- no annoying installers, no files all over your computer. Uninstalling is even easier -- just drag the application to the trash, and it's entirely gone.
I won't get into all of the power that you have due to the Unix core, but let's just say that it's pretty limitless. Heck, you can make kernel extensions for the OS if you want.
Security is really where OS X shines. If a program tries to run indirectly (i.e. let's say a program would try to open up a virus it included), you would be notified that a program was trying to run indirectly, and you could elect to have it run or not (you're only asked once). Safari (the default web browser) blocks pop-ups by default and simply doesn't have the same vulnerabilities of IE, although Firefox is certainly recommended on Windows, and takes care of those security issues. Mail doesn't allow things to just execute on their own, and you always know exactly what you're opening, before you open it. While it's true that OS X has remained virus-free partially due to its smaller user-base, that's not the only reason. OS X was designed with security in mind, and the results thus far show that.
In closing, I definitely see that the biggest problem in Mac/OS X's adoption is simply that most people don't really understand it's benefits. It's true that you really have to use the OS for a while to realize all of it's tremendous benefits. I have no problem with people not knowing all of the benefits, as spending a lot of time with a Mac or having someone like me around isn't always possible, but the Mac bashing is really unfounded.
I'm far from a newbie, and I didn't switch to the Mac platform because it was easier. I deal with compiling kernels and fixing Apache problems all day -- ease of use isn't something I need. OS X simply provided me with the most innovative OS and apps, a stable and secure system, and the ultimate development platform. If I didn't truly believe it was _that_ much better, I would have sold my Powerbook immediately. It's going on two years now, and I couldn't be happier!
I'm also hoping to break some sort of long-post record here