I wasn't really trying to correct you, Betty. You were making
the case that while Photoshop is available for both WIndows
and OS X, the OS still makes a difference. I wanted to make
the point that although Mathematica is remarkably similar across
platforms, the OS matters even there.
An example that is closer to your Photoshop example is Microsoft
Office. The Windows and Mac versions share the same file formats,
but the programs themselves always have big differences. Visual
Basic is missing on the latest Mac version, for example. And it
reportedly is slower and more crash-prone on the Mac than it is
on Windows.
There is now a beta version of StarOffice for the Mac which is
extremely similar to the Windows and Unin/Linux versions, and
Google Apps behaves uniformly across platforms. If these catch
on sufficiently, perhaps Microsoft will be pressured to reform
and make Office more consistent across platforms. Of course,
consumers might take that as one more reason they don't
need Windows.
When my son was at UMd, he used whatever computer was available. He
had
a Mac iLamp of his own and bought his own copy of Mathematica for OS
X.
In the lab at his job in the sub-sub-sub-basement of the Physics Dept,
and for class labs, I think he used both Unix and Windows computers.
He
didn't mention which worked best, and that was 5 years ago. I'd expect
that if it was written for Unix, that would be the OS of choice to run
it, including Linux and OS X, but I don't use the program myself.
Thanks
for the clarification.
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