Whoa,
What a huge headache I had with Windows Vista… If anyone could remember, I blogged about my experience with my Dell Inspiron/Windows Vista a year ago. As you might see, my first experience was not very satisfactory. My review was more of a rant about Vista. I could manage to push it through for about 15 months just because of Dell’s service (though not great at times like this one). I switched to mac primarily because of the excellent experience I had with my iPhone. Now onwards to the review…
I don’t want to say that Mac’s are great comparitively at the moment coz, I have never used one before and two days is simply too less of a time to make a sound judgement. However, I thought of sharing my two cents with you.
Firstly, Mac Applications don’t crash is a myth.
I could still find certain applications crash as regularly as they do on Windows. Even my first app, the Control Panel equivalent, System Preferences written by Apple crashed. App crashes never brings the whole system down. I think that was the age of Windows 95/98 or probably Mac OS 9.
The same error report sending stuff popped up.
But, certain things are really better when compared to my previous 2000$ Dell Windows Vista laptop. Yeah, I do agree that I paid a couple of 100$ as Apple tax to get this machine, but as a NTU student I got a student deal. This laptop costed me close to 2900$ with 3 year apple care protection plan, Office 2008 for Mac, iLife 09 upgrade etc.,
Now, moving on to those certain things… Firstly, I should say that the usability in general is great. Apple has devoted a lot of time in testing and fine tuning the UI. Macs don’t make noise. In the sense, “New Hardware Found”, Windows is now installing device drivers for this hardware…”, Windows has finished installing drivers”, “You might need to restart your computer before your hardware can be used”.
These are the four common prompts that you may encounter from a Windows laptop when you plug in your usb drive. Windows makes you wait for atleast 30 seconds before you can actually start using it. On a Mac things are different. No prompts, nothing of any sort… Just plug in your device and the drive appears nearly instantly on the desktop.
Secondly, the error messages, prompts are quite meaningful compared to Windows. When you download an application (exe file) on a Windows machine, you get a very nasty error message that doesn’t even state a proper message. On Mac, the first application I downloaded was Senuti. The moment I double clicked it, I got the following message.
The message not only told that the app might be dangerous, but also told me how I got that file into my Mac. “Firefox downloaded this blah blah blah stuff yesterday @ 9.30 pm. Whoa… ! Mac really rocks.
Contrastingly, I blogged about a usability issue with Visual Studio a month or so ago. There are a few points which every switcher should know. As of now, I know a bit which I’ll share now. Knowing these would make the life of a new switcher easier.
Firstly, working on a mac is like working on a table. You’ve got a lot of tools and lot of documents. Closing the last document does not close the tool (Application). Similarly, starting the application does not create a new document by default. Only the tool palettes open up. Maximize means make the window large enough to fit the contents. It’s not equal to “Make the window as large as the desktop”. Opening a lot of documents especially when you don’t have a taskbar could easily get you dis-oriented. But thanks to Expose. It does the job of window switching easier.
On a mac there is a very clear distinction between Application and Window. Command + Tab switches applications and Expose switches Windows. The 1App 1 Window policy on Windows creates a lot of trouble to new switchers.
Secondly, on a mac, don’t try to organize your files your way. Leave it for the application to do it. In fact, to backup your files, it’s rather easier using Time Machine and restoring it on a new/existing machine is also easier using Time Machine. Though I personally hate getting locked to an application, I’m kinda getting used to it as I don’t have a choice. To protect myself from vendor lockin I usually avoid getting locked like this. But in my one year with Vista, I understood that Windows is a bigger “vendor locker” than anyone else. Mac uses more open specifications like Open GL (Direct X on Windows), Open Source Kernel, PDF (XPS on Windows).
Your menu bar is always at the top. But the app designers have thought about very carefully to decide on which buttons should be on the application windows. 99% of the time you tend to use the button on the Window itself. It’s analogous to toolbar in Windows but far clearer.
Elegant notifications for all the applications through Growl – another great thing missing in Windows.
Chat client Adium’s UI is far far better that it’s big brother Pidgin on Windows. Minimize user’s typing and mouse clicks should have been their motto. In Pidgin, I’ve to set protocol name, that address this address and many such useless things to get it work. Adium is far simpler.
The only thing bad about Mac is that, it’s perceived to be expensive. But hardware wise I would say that Macs are costlier only by say around 200S$. Add that amount to the software you get. You should be happier then.
There are much more things that I still miss. As of now I don’t know anything like Flashget for Mac or Paint.NET for Mac. I’m still researching about it.
This post is still a work in progress as I’m not yet fully conversant with my Mac. May be after a month or so I’ll be in a position to judge things and provide a more reliable post…
Thanks for reading…
MK
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