Using Mac Os X after a lifetime of Windows (if you don’t count DOS, an Amiga 500 or an Acorn Electron when I was a wee nipper) was a bit of a shock. Not an ‘Oh my god, where’s my other mouse button’ shock, but an exercise in discovering different ways to do things. I think, deep down, the reason why Mac people find Windows PCs hard to use and vice versa is because they are very different animals and people don’t like having to relearn how to do things once they’ve become accustomed to doing things a certain way. But really, once you’ve sorted out that Ctrl+Alt+Delete is replaced by Apple+Alt+Escape it’s not all that bad…
Aqua, Quartz extreme, etc etc
What can I say? Antialiasing of fonts throughout (thankfully you are able to set at what font size it stops, lest teeny weeny text become a miasma of blurgh), the hyperactive Dock‚Ñ¢, genie in a bottle type effects when minimising/maximising windows, gem type interface buttons on the windows and sliders, the horizontal lines, active windows cast a shadow over inactive windows, etc etc. Beautiful. When items are minimised to The Dock‚Ñ¢ they stay active (after a fashion) to the extent that you can minimise a playing Quicktime window and still watch the presentation while it sits in The Dock‚Ñ¢. Does it help me work better? Not really. Does it make people stop and stare? Not really, but if they did…
iSo Called Life
Unlike Windows, Mac Os comes with a load of useful programs. Well, mostly useful at least. I couldn’t afford the PowerBook with the Superdrive, so iDVD is not much use to me. Neither is Mail. I refuse to pay for iDisk or .Mac, and I don’t use iChat. I can’t afford a video camera, so iMovie is out of the question and my mail client has a perfectly good calendar system so iCal doesn’t really see much use either. iPhoto? Well, since the manufacturers of my digicam decided not to support Os X it’s a bit of a sore point.
iTunes, however, has quickly become my favourite music player bar none. I’m a bit of a purist - I like my music player to play music and not make a fuss about it. I don’t need to be shown psychotropic light displays while listening to Miles Davis, nor do I want it to play my DVDs. iTunes doesn’t do any of these things. Nope, it just sits there with a rather good media navigation system and plays my music without getting in the way. Bliss.
What goes where
Configuration is pretty easy. The control panel type thing seems sensibly laid out. I like the way the Ethernet, 802.11g, Bluetooth and 56k connection settings are grouped together under one heading (instead of Network Connections and Dial Up on Windows). I would have liked a bit more control over the interface though without the need to install third party progs though, and the ability to add and removing items from the Apple menu would be very nice. The addition of configuration tools for programs such as Samba and peripheral setup progs all have their place in the System Preferences window which keeps everything neat and easy to access. Which is good.
Thwak! ‘AVE IT. Rock solid, me.
Of course, the best thing about Os X is the fact that it runs on top of a BSD Unix layer that Apple have chosen to christen Darwin. This has the effect of, as a friend pointed out, replacing the bottom deck of the house of cards that is the Mac operating system with a row of bricks. I have always regarded the Windows 2000 family of operating systems (2k, XP, etc) to be pretty solid (don’t even mention 98) whereas my experiences with Mac Os 8 and 9 have been somewhat… disappointing. On this front, Os X has finally done Apple justice. It has to be mentioned though, that like Windows, although the OS is solid, applications are still just as crash prone, it’s just that now they don’t take the system down with them. Aside from the stability, the two greatest things about the POSIXification of Mac Os is that it now has a command prompt (hussah!) and through projects such as Fink, the Mac now has access to the huge library of open and closed source programs available to the various *NIXes, including The Gimp, GCC, Ghostscript, Samba, the Apache Webserver, MySQL, etc etc, the list goes on and on. Also, with companies such as Adobe and Macromedia porting their progs to Mac Os, it will probably not be such a huge jump to continue a bit further over to FreeBSD and ultimately, Linux, but perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself…
Endgame
There’s something about Mac Os X that makes it, well, more fun to use. I’m not entirely sure what it is, but since I bought this PowerBook, my desktop PC has be relegated, it seems, to a life of file storage, the occasional game session and a bit of media playing, whereas everything else seems to get done on the laptop. I dunno, maybe it’s the hovercraft like noise of my desktop but I can’t really bring myself to turn it on anymore.
See, it’s not all bad…
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