Mac Vs Windows.. the WAR begins
Having said what I said about my breakup with Ms Windows and a new relationship with Ms Mac, let me just say now, in all fairness, that I do appreciate some things about Ms Windows now that were more right than wrong.. that doesn’t mean I am not going steady with my new soulmate, no, on the contrary I have totally committed myself to ‘her’ now. This is same as my iPhone rant.. you gotta love it but sure, it is not perfect – kinda’ thing. So don’t think I am trying to get out of this!.. not yet 
There are more things here that I like or am interested in than I hate..
1. Windows Explorer rocks (the views especially). The Finder views in Mac are plain useless. No hierarchical view, not sure whose idea was the column view ‘coz it sucks so bad. The thumbnail view is stupid and unusable. Here is the thing, you can’t go into thumbnail view and select a few files to copy!
2. Windows Alt+Tab is much better than Mac (sure they have Spaces and all that fancy stuff but the basic Command+Tab is really not done right). The Mac Command+Tab does not show all ‘instances’ of an application, say you have 10 Firefox windows open, you will see only one icon for Firefox. So if you want to switch, you either have to search in the task bar or use Spaces.
3. Mac OSX releases a JDK version with its own release so you can’t just pick a JRE/JDK from java.com and use it on your Mac. How stupid is that.. apparently Mac mucks around with the JDK before it let’s it live on its OS.
4. No central program registry: While the Windows DLL hell is horrible, it still makes sense to me to have a central Program registry like Windows has, after having spent quite a few wild night-outs in the Linux and lately the Mac land. So I do like the convenience of getting rid of everything by just deleting the app instead of going through an Uninstaller that does not install everything (!) as on Windows. However, not having everything in one place is kinda’ not that great. Sure Mac has the Applications folder. But sometimes, you download something, install, and the app is sitting right there in your Downloads folder. Then you gotta move it to Applications… that’s a bit lame.
5. Resizing Windows:
This is really a bad usability thing. Again, I thought Mac OS X is known for setting standards in Usability and UI design. This is honestly a mistake to have the resize hotspot in the lower right corner. I use an external monitor sometimes and if I resize a window there, and return back to the laptop monitor, this corner is out of screen and there is no way to resize sometimes because you can’t move a window above the menu on top and off screen.
Let me state here categorically, whatever Mac loyalists might say, but using any window edge (like MS Windows) to resize is absolutely awesome. Even if a window is off screen in windows, you can switch to it, press <Alt>, <Dn Arrow> (this opens the main window menu), press ‘M’ which selects the ‘Move’ option in the menu and then just use the arrow keys to bring it back to the viewable screen.
6. Application Support: Some of the simple things in Windows life are fairly difficult.. now look, I have dealt with Unixes before, so I am not completely that “stupid-windows-user”! But if you don’t use Mac for a real hardcore *developery* stuff then you won’t realize these hardships. But then, you couldn’t get too adventurous with Windows on the other hand – you had to follow the stupid way or hit the highway which I finally did
- VMWare Fusion : Had to use Windows VMWare Workstation for creating a VM with 2 network interfaces. There was no easy way (even the difficult is just hearsay) to create 2 interfaces for a VM in Fusion..
- Apache – mod_security : The amount of time I have spent so far without success just to get mod_security installed on my Mac is crazy! I found out about MacPort (package management system for Mac OS X) that potentially has a port for mod_security – http://trac.macports.org/projects/macports/browser/trunk/dports/www/mod_security – which allegedly has a variant for apache2 but everytime you do a “port install mod_security +apache2″ looks for and installs apache 1.3.7 and then the checksum for mod_security tar fails…. now how frustrating is that??
- Enabling php5 for apache2, with mysql and pear support was just a port command such as – “port install php5 @5.2.5_3+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear”
…there will be more as I get acquainted more…
Ok Mr Kedar, let me rebunk all the lies about your ex
first off, with finder, column view isn’t so bad, though I will admit, list view is better after you select the option to show path in the view menu bar. tip1
next alt tab better on windows, true, but all you need is a tiny program called switch to get a better version on osx, http://www.manytricks.com/witch/ (it’s on my blog man! unwiredthinking.com)
Third, you can use your own JDK, i’m using 1.6 from sun and it’s fine…
Fouth, central registry. Ok, put down the crazy pipe my friend. drag and drop to /Applications is worse then doing a windows prog install??? “Somebody plz cut his supply” layoff the ganja my friend
Next, window sizes… well you might have me on this one… I do like the tile feature of windows (although I didn’t really use it much). I do prefer how windows has icons that represent the actions of the resize buttons, rather then mac with only colors… thought resizing is not all THAT important to me compared to the other advantages of MAC. BTW, did you take advantage of ctrl-w (quit window) and ctrl-q (quit program). They are great in my view.
last, app suppport. Well yes, some programs haven’t yet ported over, but the vast majority have. Besides, so much is about the web experience these days. Btw, did you ever install ports on mac? it really makes things easier, also there is a gui for ports that is a great, again, check my blog for the mac page: http://www.unwiredthinking.com/2008/06/10/clean-install-of-osx-leopard/
I’ll update my blog post next time I reimage my mac.
I have to admit, i really like the close tie-in with the macbook hardware, I like to faster processing, I like the application install/remove, I like the applications themselves, i prefer the dock, I like the stability, and to quote many others, “It just works.”