> -----Original Message----- > From: Gruss Gott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 10:10 PM > To: CF-Community > Subject: Re: New MacBook Pro 15! > > > Jim wrote: > > Of course personally I find MacOS a big pain in the ass... > > Just curious: how so?
Understand first that this come from a sometimes Mac user - I'm no expert by any means. Personally I've never liked Mac "Open Pallette" mentality - lots of little Windows. I like my apps contained. The way that files open in new windows for all apps... just drives me crazy. And when an app decides (sometimes all on its own apparently) that it needs something and it leaps to the front (dragging all its little windows with it) - that's annoying. Much of MacOS seems "show room ready" rather than "work room ready" - many of the features are flashy for the sake of flash with no real benefit. It looks great in the showroom but gets in the way at home. The Dock looks great in the store - but it really, really sucks. Macs tend to rely a lot on physical metaphors. They rarely work for me. Apple software (especially that madefor PCs, but that's another story) has a strong tendancy to annoy me. I really dislike iTunes and QuickTime to give two examples. There are also other issues I'm sure I could get used to... I find the mouse movement in OS X to feel "muddy". I also don't care for the default gamma settings (they also feel muddy - too dark - to me). > It's extremely intuitive and if you don't like it you can just pop > open a shell. As an example, I wanted to get my iPod's tunes onto my > new MacBook. Apparently the software doesn't let you do that so I > wrote a quick shell script to dump and load. Took about 45 seconds. And this brings up the major issue I have: it's not "better enough". There's a rule of thumb in usability: unless you can improve usability by more than 100% don't change from the de facto standard. This translates pretty well to this arena: theMac IS better at some things, but is worse at others - but overall it's a wash. And generally a wash that's more expensive and less capable (in my opinion) than my preference. Personally I find XP and Vista to be incredibly intuitive. Of course it's impossible to tell whether or not this is experience-based (having used PCs for 15 years) or not. However my mother does just fine with XP so it can't be completely useless. In my experience Macs are just about as reliable as Windows XP - which means they're pretty damn reliable. Apps in both seem to crash about the same amount to me. Both are good (if you stay away from crappy hardware in XP) at recovering from App crashes. Again - to me it's a wash. MAC OS is easy to use - once you LEARN it. Just like Windows the OS is FILLED with little things that make no sense and are not discoverable. How do you change a file name? Click the icon, click the name? Delete a file by dragging it to the trash... but eject a disk by dragging to the trash (WTF is up with that)? It's not hard - but it's hardly obvious. You have dozens of things like this in ANY OS. But somehow we're to believe that the Mac stupidities aren't but Windows stupidities are. Vista just ups the ante. For me it's better than XP in nearly every way. Talking about productivity: sub-pixel rendering across the OS in Vista means a tested 20% improvement in reading speed off an LCD screen. Also - only partially a joke - moving to a Mac would mean becoming a Mac user. Damn they just annoy me. I prefer to USE my computer rather than proselytize it. ;^) All that said I would never mock somebody's choice of a Mac. They're fine machines and better suited in some cases than PCs. But they're not for me - and outright false statements like "Macs are twice as productive as PCs" just plain set my jaw further against them. Also, as far as it goes - Windows has a really nice scripting host as well. Just like you I often write quick shell scripts to do repetitive or one-off tasks. Jim Davis ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Upgrade to Adobe ColdFusion MX7 Experience Flex 2 & MX7 integration & create powerful cross-platform RIAs http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/flex2/?sdid=RVJQ Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/message.cfm/messageid:230700 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
