system shock

[jazzfish]

I've been considering a number of lifestyleish changes for awhile now. I blame the hat. I've never thought of myself as a guy who wears a hat, and yet now I have one. (A black paper/straw trilby. I'm told it looks pretty decent.) The concept of wearing a hat is starting to grow on me.

Anyway, once I got a hat, other things started popping into my head. Some of them I'd been considering for awhile, some of them are brand-new. One was kind of shocking, honestly:

I'm thinking of going Mac.

Hear me out. There are a lot of things about Windows systems that I like but they mostly boil down to "I know how to get things done on Windows." My fingers know the keyboard shortcuts intuitively. When something goes wrong, I can find what I need to do to fix it; when something needs tweaking, I have a pretty good idea of where to look to tweak. Like with QWERTY, I accept that there's some inherent inefficiency in the system, but I'm not willing to switch because learning to overcome that inefficiency will take more time than the inefficiency itself.

But my next computer (coming in probably another year) is likely to be running Windows 7, with its ridiculous ribbon bars and general revamping of the user interface. Now, I've not actually used Win7, or Vista, for any length of time: just long enough to grumble at not being able to do things with the speed and finesse I'm used to. So I don't really know how much additional learning time there'll be, but there will definitely be some.

I don't game much anymore. Every so often I get inspired to pick up something oldish (Moonbase Commander is currently taunting me again), but mostly I satisfy my gaming urges elsewhere. For me the computer's for netsurfing and writing, in that order.

I know for a fact there are things that will minorly irritate me ("War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Backspace is delete.") and things that will irk me no end (learning the difference between option and apple, trying to right-click on things for a context menu). I understand that the interface, once you fully grok it, is an aesthetic triumph of form/function melding.

So tell me, o converts, and you who never knew another system: is this way for me? Or will it end in me throwing a thousand-dollar laptop through a window and rooting through sketchy websites for a copy of Windows XP?

(Things I am specifically not looking for: lengthy paeans to the awesomeness of the Way of Mac; diatribes about the horribilitude of Apple or Windows; exhortations to try Linux or any other OS.)

Comments

[rbandrews]

Not a lengthy diatribe, I promise!

I haven't actually used Office in years, so I dunno about any changes there, but I use OS X and Windows 7 simultaneously all day long. Windows 7 did fix a lot of the stuff that irritated me about Windows, by introducing a Mac-like dock, but it also added a bunch of other irritating things like windows hiding or becoming large unpredictably based on how you move them around. It's idiotic and Expose is much better.

The pointing device thing won't be an issue at all, assuming it's USB. If you get one of the "Pro" keyboards it'll have a delete key too (dunno about Mac Office, but it forward-deletes just fine in Emacs). And the key that is labeled "delete" is in the location, and of the shape, of a backspace key, and does a backspace. So it's pretty much the same key.

Let's see, what else... Flash sucks, Firefox sucks even harder. Chrome is a good browser on the Mac though. Option and Apple (which is now "command", which I dislike) are the same as alt and ctrl. Option is even labeled "alt" on my work laptop.

Stuff you'll probably like: Expose, iTunes not sucking (apparently it does on Windows?), the laptop goes to sleep and wakes up instantly, so you just close it instead of rebooting, there's a real command prompt and copy/paste works on it (seriously, even Windows 7 still has that broken cmd shit).

Stuff you'll probably hate: having a laptop that looks exactly like every other laptop on the planet, the fact that as soon as you get used to it they'll release another one and you'll subconsciously start to think yours is old and sucky even though a week prior you loved it.

Oh yeah, and if you are annoyed by alt+tab working differently, then prepare to be annoyed. But, you can fix it with this.

In general, the Mac ecosystem is fewer apps, and they cost more, but they're much much better made. Companies tend to put more effort into making really elegant programs for OSX, compared to just throwing out random crap for Windows. It's that, more than any differences in the OSes themselves, that makes me prefer the Mac at this point. Although I do like that it's Unix, since I'm more used to Unix, I trust that I can fix it.

[vond.net]

Companies tend to put more effort into making really elegant programs for OSX

Not that I've written a lot of code for either platform recently, but isn't part of this because Apple designs their API's in ways that strongly encourage good design? Also they have the gumption to actually deprecate API's, unlike Microsoft, which is hell-bent on maintaining compatibility back to Windows 95 (and even to windows 3.1 in some cases). This is the kind of thing that led to that DLL loading vulnerability that just cropped up.

[rbandrews]

I haven't coded enough for both platforms to really say, but I like the idea. I do notice that a lot of Windows stuff, especially pre-.Net, tends to reinvent the wheel, whereas almost nothing made in Cocoa does. That's where I was coming from, with "Mac apps tend to be made better": everything fits with everything else because people tend to use the built-in libraries more. Whether that's because Windows APIs are incomplete, too hard to use, or what, I can't say.

[jazzfish]

That's pretty much what I was looking for, thank you.

The sucking of Firefox is annoying. And yeah, iTunes seems like a painfully slow resource-hog of a beast under Windows, at least on my trailing-edge laptop, so having that improve is okay. (Flash I don't particularly care about, except for maybe Youtube.)

Really it's relearning keyboard shortcuts and general OS behavior that's putting me off. I can adjust to different software behaving differently; it's a different /environment/ behaving differently that may frustrate me no end.

[rbandrews]

You're most welcome!

Flash tends to jump to 100% CPU instantly, videos freeze for no reason, the fan starts going. It's irritating, and Adobe shows no interest in fixing it. We can haz HTML5 video tag plz?

I'd also like to say, the issue about relearning shortcuts is drastically overstated. The shortcuts you use the most won't change; ctrl+c becomes command-c, but the command key is in the same place the ctrl key was, so meh. When I got my iBook in 2003, I spent under a week before I was getting things done faster than I ever had on Windows or Linux, and I had never used an OS X Mac outside the Math Emporium. Mostly, stuff either worked exactly like I expected it to, or exactly like I thought it should have worked the whole time.

A few annoying tricks, though: removing things from the menubar is command-drag, and this is hard to find anywhere. There's a magic incantation that I forget right now that makes the Dock not look 3D even when it's on the bottom (although put it on the side; you'll want the vertical space more). Either don't install Macports or don't install anything but Macports, but the third alternative leads to pain. These things I have learned...

Oh yeah, and if you're struck with a desire to learn Ruby (hey, I promised not to diatribe about Windows sucking, I never said anything about Perl), every single Rails contributor uses a Mac. All of 'em. It's the world standard Ruby platform.