I love my Mac.
I actually was a PC fan for multiple years. Up until the summer of 2008, I loved PCs. I felt bad for all of the people who had tiger machines and I had absolutely no I dea what mac products were out there.
But in the summer of 2008 I went to a computer summer camp called DMA where I took a class on web design. At DMa EVERYTHING was Mac. The game design classes were using Windows (The main gaming platform after all) on bootcamp.
My instructor loved Macs. And the thing was, I had really never used a Mac and I was fine using it. I knew how to get around, it all simply made sense. And finally after one week of class, I wanted a Mac.
AnI love the simplicity, but here is a list of the top 5 things I love about my Mac.
5. The Menubar
Having the File, Edit, View etc. menus at the very top o the screen has proven to be easy and I like it. Why? I don’t really know…
4. The Dock
Instead of having application shortcuts cluttering my desktop or “Quick Launch” icons, The applications are right there in my Dock. And after launching an application instead of each window that appears of the application showing up in the menubar all of the windows are part of the one running application which is indicated in the dock. And when a new application is launched it shows up to the right of all the others. Also, when you minimize a window it goes to the right of the divider. With a cool animation! And then Stacks. Stacks is AWESOME! I love how I can move a folder there and instead of opening a new window to see what is inside of it a cool little fan or grid springs out to give me easy access. And having the trash bin right there? It just all makes sense and saves a lot of space compared to the windows menubar.
3. Mounted drives on desktop
When plug in a USB disk or DVD or whatever, instead of going into My Computer, It’s just right there on my desktop. And when I unplug it, it’s gone. Once again, it just all makes sense.
2. Built in printer drivers
My old HP printer stopped working, so I needed to connect to a printer downstairs (Oy). The printer was being shared through windows on a computer downstairs. If I was using a PC, it would be driver mania. On my Mac? It al makes sense. Open System Preferences (another of my favorite things instead of control panel), go to Print&Fax, Click the obvious +, Select windows, and select the computer downstairs, and select the printer connected to it. I want the Gutenprint, I click done and tada, I can print to it. So simple, no CDs or finding drivers on the web needed! YAY!
1. Spotlight
I have no idea what I would do without spotlight. I need to open an application. I can do it in 4 clicks, a ew scrolls, and some hard searching through alphabetized names. Or, I can find it in 5-* keystrokes, which will take much less time if you consider how much moving around the mouse you need and how fast you type. Just press Command>space and type the name of the file, application, iCal event, address book card, email, or even past visied webpage and press the return key to open it. No Start, All Programs, Etc. involved! Say I want to open system preferences. Instead of going and opening finder, going into Applications, scrolling until I find it, opening it, and closing the Finder window, I just press Command>space, type Syst and press return. System PReferences opens and the spotlight search dissappears and when you reopen it and it will have cleared the search for you. There is Google Desktop for PC users, but that takes up quite a lot if CPU. Spotlight is awesome!
It’s known to be faster & easier to hit a known spot on the screen (the menu bar) instead of having to think about where the menu is located if it’s inside a window. Also you can just move the mouse all the ways up quickly and it’ll stop at the menu bar.
I actually prefer LaunchBar & QuickSilver to Spotlight for launching applications.
Here’s the Windows side acting up:
1) Spotlight: The search feature in Windows XP was the very first search engine on any operating system to actually index files on the local computer and beyond. It was introduced when SP1 for XP came out, which was around 2002-3ish (honestly I don’t remember when it came out and I’m too lazy to lookitup). Spotlight for OS X Tiger came out in late 2005, nearly 2-3 years later after it was introduced in XP. Personally, I wish the ol’ doggy from XP was in Windows 7. Oh well, times go and I have to keep up with the new as old gets forgotten and unsupported 🙁
2) Built-in Printer Drivers: NEVER EXISTED EXCEPT FOR PRINTERS THAT ARE 5+ YEARS OLD. Oh hey, a BRAND NEW Canon printer came out and its structure and software is completely different! Hey, it’s even got a different logo.
Story is, you still need to install drivers. I know that OS X also has this feature, Windows has this “Automatic Updates” feature that searches for drivers on the Internet to find the right ones for the device you just plugged in and automatically downloads and installs them onto the computer. Point is that no operating system has drivers already put on them, or else each operating system like that would require an over 9000 TB Hard drive to store ALL of the drivers for every single printer and to automatically download even more drivers that you won’t need.
3) Mounted drives on the desktop: This is just a matter of personal taste, I for the matter don’t actually care where the drives and disks are located as long as the operating system recognizes it. I actually prefer to have the autoplay thing in Windows to pop up when I plug in a drive and ask me what to do with it. Usually I choose to open in Explorer and go through it like that, but sometimes when I plug in my iPods I choose to open iTunes. Again, it’s all a matter of taste and who likes it salty and who likes it sweet and who likes it sour.
4) The dock: Again, this is a matter of taste and what-nots, but I actually prefer to have the old Windows taskbar like we all saw in Windows 2000. That taskbar, in my opinion, had one of the best interfaces of all time. It was clean, uncluttered, had nothing I didn’t need, easy to access, fast and simple and professional looking. The new Windows 7 taskbar which is easily comparable to the OS X dock is somewhat simpler, but I don’t need that much of a degree of simplicity. Sometimes when the simplest gets even simpler, it becomes extremely hard to find what you need. I’m not much of an icon guy but more of a text guy as I’m used to seeing code and script instead of buttons and bells and whistles. I’d still like to see a feature in Windows 7 to actually have an option to revert back to the old Start menu and the old taskbar.
5) Menubar: What I HATE in any Macintosh OS is the fact that NO WINDOW (except for some via X11, but that’s a whole different story) has its own menubar. To have to use the menubar, you have to be IN the application. And then again, the menubar in Macs have historically been proven to be the most painful thing on earth when they stop responding and freeze. Nearly on every Mac I have used, the menubar has frozen at least once. Besides the semi-transparent dark-grey bar on top with black letters kinda “engraved” onto it also make it sometimes hard to see, but when selected the blue around the white makes it somewhat easier but not all the way better to read.
What I also want to mention on why I hate the menubar in Mac systems is because it just hates me. When I was using it back in the early days (Mac OS 8-9 era) the menus just simply disappeared when I just move my mouse away from it by a pixel. It was extremely annoying when I was using the old 90’s PowerPC Macs my elementary school had and when I used KidPix on it (Ohgod I just nostalgia’d so hard….oh the memories…) I had to press the File menu a few times to actually save my pictures as the menu was escaping from me every time my mouse went astray.
Nevertheless Max, I respect your opinion. I still hate Macs all the way, never will get around to liking them at least one bit.