A month ago, I blogged about my first experience with my mac. As a sequel to it, in this post, I’ll blog about features that I think I miss as I migrate to Windows and things I miss if I migrate back to Windows…
First thing I missed was…
It’s close to a month with my mac and I’ve not restarted it. Yes! No updates, no patches, no crashes and absolutely no restarts. Infact, the system is as responsive as it was on the first day…
Secondly,
A couple buttons like Home, End, Page Up, Page Down etc., Home = Command + Left Arrow and End = Command + Rt Arrow. It took a lot of time to figure this out… but once you are used to the Mac way, you feel that shortcut keys in windows are kept far apart defeating the very purpose. Not only Home/End, to close a window, Cmd + W is easier to press than Alt F4. F4 is far than W which is bad as per Fitt’s Law.
Another nice thing that is difficult to get used to but easier is the menu bar. The menu bar for any app is always at the top. May be at first, you will find it difficult to move your mouse to the extreme top for accessing the menu. But because it’s at the top end, is easier (see Accot Zhai’s Law) to navigate than menus docked inside windows.
Right clicking (Cmd + click or two finger tap) menus are considerably smaller and it’s easier to choose an option than in Windows Explorer. Context sensitive application specific menus are grouped under “More”. So not every folder will have those stupid actions like “Play with Windows Media Player”, “Enque in WMP”, Play with WinAmp”, Enque in Winamp”, Scan with Blah blah Anti Virus”, Winzip, WinRAR context menus.
Built in apps:
Finder vs Explorer.
Ah.. Windows Explorer is painfully slower compared to finder. Open My Computer and it takes atleast a couple of seconds to display the drives in the machine. Not on a mac. It’s instantaneous. Here I’m making a unbalanced comparison. My Windows laptop had a 7200 RPM harddrive. My macbook’s is only 5400. Still, browsing thru my files is blazing fast on my mac. However explorer offers more functionality than finder especially the way it presents and groups files. “Group by Type” is something I use in windows often. On a mac, files appear scattered, but the idea is, one rarely opens files directly on a mac. Everything is done through applications. The column view in mac is amazing. It’s more of a usability feature rather than aesthetics. Stabilitywise, finder is better than Explorer. When finder crashes as a result of a plugin (which is the only case), it reports which plugin is causing the issue. For example, I installed “Syncplicity” and it installed a couple of Finder Plugins. A issue with that plugin crashed my Finder. Mac reported which was causing trouble than just displaying some junk 0×00342872 messages. Another good thing is that when a network share is open in explorer and the system goes down. Explorer crashes and restarts itself. This will kill *all* the copy operations that are in progress. But not on a mac. Copy/Delete dialogs are grouped so that they don’t get lost unlike in Windows. But still copying requires baby sitting just like Windows. By baby sitting, I mean someone should be clicking on the “Yes” button whenever it asks a question or the copy is suspended. Spotlight search is far better than Windows Search especially with regards to the speed of indexing and the interlinked dictionary and calculator. Spotlight also indexes thumbdrives and the content in thumb drives automatically show up when connected.
Yet, still, except for the speed and ease of rummaging thru files, I find Windows Explorer a better counterpart than Mac’s finder. I don’t know whether it’s because of addiction, yet still Explorer rules…
Adium vs Pidgin.
Though adium is a branch of pidgin (atleast the underlying libpurple), the UI of adium is well refined. The theme support, plugin support are much more elegant and designed with aesthetic sense rather than being “featurish”. The dock animation and notification when you receive a new message/file are better than it’s windows counterpart.
Mail.app vs Entourage/Outlook
For those who don’t know Entourage is the M$’s Outlook for Mac. I should say that it’s one of the most complicated software on the mac. It starts automatically and always deletes a huge file called database. When it runs you can see a file by that name in Trash which will prevent you from emptying the Trash can. I uninstalled that app soon and I’m not in the right position to judge its capacities. Compared to Windows Live Mail that’s bundled with Windows, I should say that Mail.app is far far better.
Desktop Publishing
On Desktop Publishing, Microsoft rules the world with it’s awesome Office Package. The only thing that Mac still lacks is a decent desktop publishing tool. Though there is a Microsoft Office for Mac, it’s not as great (feature rich) as Windows.
Browsers
No one (or atleast no techie) can deny that FFX is *the* best browser in the World. Because it’s available for both Windows and Mac, there is no point in comparing. But comparing the built in browsers, Safari is far better than IE7 or IE8 (alpha beta gamma nonsense editions). The main advantage of Safari is that it needs no plugin any sort. Every plugin is built right into the browser.
Another reason why I use safari at times ditching my default FFX is to read Google Reader. FFX somehow did not implement full screen browsing in their Mac Port. I use Safari 4 Beta with some plugin called Glims.
Games
Mac is not for games is what you might find on the Internet. I second that. However I would also say that Windows is also not for a hard core gamer. Specially the Vista editions. The gaming market is slowly moving to console based gaming like XBOX and WII and PS3. As I’m not much into hard core games, I might not be right in judging gaming capablities.
Photo Editing and other “Fun” stuff.
The area which I use my computer for is to edit, store and label my huge 30 GB collection of photographs I took with my canon s5 is camera. I still use both iPhoto and Picasa interchangably. Video editing software like iMovie is somewhere in between Adobe Premiere and Windows Movie Maker. In the sense, iMovie is far better than Windows Movie Maker, but not as feature rich like the costly Adobe Premiere. But Apple has it’s own competitive software at the high end like Final Cut Pro to compete with Adobe in those niche segments.
Third Party App Support
Mac has only 10% of sofware unlike Windows. This is the most often heard cliché from the PC guys. Though it might be true, you will never find that you miss a software as nearly every software that you use in day to day life is available for a Mac.
uTorrent – the same torrent software is available for Mac. There is even one more Transmission.
Picasa for photo editing.
Firefox for browsing.
Microsoft Office 2008 for Desktop Publishing or if you don’t want to pay Microsoft Tax, you can downl
oad OpenOffice.org for free.
Mac comes with a better backup software called Time Machine than Windows Backup. Moreover, Windows Backup is available only in Windows Vista Biz/Ultimate Editions and home users have to do a tradeoff between Windows Media Center (home premium) or Windows Complete PC Backup (Biz) or shell of 400$ for that stupid Windows Not Ultimate Edition.
The backup software (Time Machine) even allows you to setup a new mac from one of it’s backup. This means migration to a new Mac is even easier. Though Mac may be a bit pricier, I find it worth the extra 200$ I paid for this Mac (esp on the software side). There is a built in tool to make compressed disk images from DVD/CDs and so dumping your CD to your external hard disk is much easier on a Mac. You have to hunt for virtually any software on Windows and many a times you have to hunt for its crack or Warez. Too painful… 
I’ll blog about my experience with Time Machine soon. I just got my new WD 1TB My Book and started time machine backups today. Stay tuned…
–
Mugunth
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