[kitko]

It's like watching Bambi learning to walk :-)

[tysenn151]

Peter, I think some of the posts here are missing the point of reference from which you were writing this article... and it was made in the title of the article: You're a 'Windows Guru' trying out a new and unfamiliar OS. It doesn't say you're an 'OS guru', super-fast and adept at sponging up every little nuance of whatever OS is thrown into your field of vision (Even though, by the list of Windows books you've written, especially with a couple O'reilly creds in there, if I needed Windows help, I'd buy your books.)
And 'nuance' is the word of the day kids. In Mac OS, nuances tend to be discovered and evangelized as "hey, that's a little 'ol thing Mac OS can do... but in my daily workflow, man I don't want to work without it!" And many times, in Windows , nuances tend to grow into annoyances, and what can mass loathing do for your OS? Um... it gives good book-writing guru's the opportunity to craft another book like "How not to get annoyed with Window's annoyances". Oh, and as a bonus, it can fast-track the next version of Windows to market.

[flybynight]

One thing about the menu bar... I know this is jarring for PC users. The trick to getting used to it is to realize that there is no "application window" - only document windows. You don't minimize an application to the dock, you minimize a window to the dock. You can still use the application with no windows running.
I'm confident that after a little more use, this will click and you will realize just how vastly superior the menu bar is on a Mac.

[dougeddy70]

Thank you for an interesting article. I too was stunned that you received not a representative machine but a less functional sportster that I would never give to someone as a "learn Mac" machine. Shame on them!

Your article is helpful to me and has probably saved my marriage. My wife and I share my study frequently. She on her HP 17" laptop and me with my MacBook Pro. I would like a nickel for every time she has had to call her IT guy at work for help or has lamented a glitch here and there. My response is a cynical "get a Mac." Her response is to start dialing an lawyer (NOT - just threatens). I now have an understanding as to some of the things that cause her confusion. It is a very different language. She freaks when using my computer to get online because her HP has once again decided to upgrade Norton and everything has to be reinstalled all over again. I have Expose and Widgets pop up at corners with cursor. She nearly faints.

Thanks for an interesting and helpful article. I urge you to give a MacBook Pro and iWork a spin.

[mdawson]

Quote

pcharles wrote:

>

Quote

I completely agree with your feelings about how Apple handles the menus. It is archaic.

Actually it is not archaic, it is correct. Windows implementation of including menu bars on each application, and in fact the entire concept of an application window, violates the rules of good user interface design. Windows implementation of menubars specifically violates Fitt's law.

At most, Apple should place the menubar at the top of each display, but the reason they likely do not do so is because from the operating system?s perspective there is only one desktop regardless of how many displays you have. As MiniMoe suggested using keyboard shortcuts for common functions is more productive anyway as it does not require you moving your cursor away from your work.

Keyboard shortcuts were not removed from the GUI for that very reason?for common tasks it is far quicker to hit commandc, commandv, etc. than to constantly mouse over to a menu, regardless of where it is, evoke its contents and select a command. A good GUI balances the benefits of the graphical user interface and the shortcut keys inherited from command line systems.

[mwheeler]

Very nice article. Two weeks is not that much time but you did an admirable job in such a short experience considering most of us have had years to learn all of the ins-and-outs of Mac OS X. You had them thrown at you all at once and I know first-hand that folks used to Windows are used to doing things a certain way and it can be difficult to think how they might be done differently and discover them on your own without a little guidence.

I'm sorry others here who are used to thinking the "Mac" way don't seem to have any patience with someone else. I don't think if I visited another culture that I'd know everything about it in two weeks and I don't see why someone used to the Windows culture world would know everything about the Mac culture or way of doing things in two weeks either.

To those folks I simply say it's not an attack on you or your platform if someone doesn't know something about it so quit coming across as being so defensive about it. (uh-oh... now I've done it! Now I'll be attacked by defenders of the very platform I love so much and worked so hard to support since the very first Mac was introduced in 1984). But patience is a virtue and years ago I was extremely defensive about the Mac platform too so I guess I've got it coming.

I remember sending off some totally ignorant half-cocked rant to Leo Laporte years ago. Sorry Leo for being a jerk. MacWeek made me do it (uh... ur.... sort of but not really). How embarrasing... blush.

[akulavolk]

This is a good article and I appreciate the author's willingness to step beyond his comfort level in certain areas. There are some big limitations in how the author (or those setting up the "experiment") were willing to, or did, set things up and I think that really colored their results.

1) The MacBook Air? Really? I'm a hard-core Mac user. Have been since '84. But even I can't justify the compromises the Air takes for its svelteness, machine lust or not. A MacBook or MBP would have been a FAR better choice. Lower cost. And less missing features, too, which would have reduced some culture shock and the impression of a Mac tax. Better yet, why not an iMac? We're comparing the OS here, not the hardware, necessarily. An iMac's full size keyboard would have gotten over a lot of the keyboard hangups he has, and the iMac is priced competitively with a similarly-configured PC. No doubt he also runs desktop PCs, so this isn't an unfair expectation.

2) Where in the requirements did it state that all the software used on the Mac needs to be free? And as others have commented, there are 30 day trials of iWork and VMWare/Fusion. Why not try apps that are Mac-like instead of going for a port of a Windows/Linux app that doesn't take advantage of the Mac's strengths? And spending $70 for iWork and $50 for Fusion is a lot cheaper than $400 on MS Office. How many PC reviewers opt out of buying Office because it's a paid program?

3) He's still defaulting to Windows. That's fine, and it's good to illustrate how switchers to have a safety net available. But he's kind of cheating on his "live without Windows" experiment. Because of this, he missed out on easy alternatives. You can surf the web without running a VM on a Mac, of course. And if you want to remote control your PCs from the Mac, use MS's free "Remote Desktop Connection" instead of Windows. It's free and it works. (A Google search for "remote desktop windows mac" will find it right away).

4) I can see how it was frustrating for him to get the Mac set up for Windows to find it. But let's be clear. The problem isn't really on the Mac side. It's that Windows requires a ridiculous amount of specific and manually set settings to make a networked volume "findable." The same problem would happen on a PC network if users typed in the wrong workgroup name on their computer. And this is really common for a XP user using MSHOME on Vista out of habit. Apple should probably default to the most commonly-used settings, but it still won't help in a mixed XP/Vista environment. Another Windows problem that reflects poorly on the Mac.

5) Installing: The majority of Mac apps have a "drag this icon to your Applications folder" install routine. I think the installer-heavy experience he had was because he was using so much cross-platform FOSS software. I love the stuff, but it's not always Mac-like.

6) Windows Live Sync instead of Moble Me? Mobile Me's gotten a bad rap, but it's still going to be better than Live Sync, I think.

I've no problem with a switcher using a lot of MS technology and integrating that into their workflow and Mac setup. But is it fair to "rate" the mac as a different platform from Windows, hobbled by Windows' (or at least cross-platform) limitations? How well does the Mac ecosystem rate on its own, unencumbered by these issues? I'd expect the same objectivity and openness of a PC review from a long-time Mac user. Some suggestions:
- Use a representative (not niche) hardware configuration when testing.
- Drop Live Sync for Mobile Me.
- Compare networking multiple Macs against each other. And Multiple PCs against each other. Out of the box.
- Use iLife and iWork against Windows built-in apps and MS Office. Oh, and don't forget price in that comparison.

[flybynight]

dtbrummell said:

How exactly are those little dots hard to see. I was a windows user until recently and I don't find it hard to know what programs are running from those dots. Maybe my sight is just better.

If he left the default Leopard desktop picture (Wallpaper, for Windows vets) of the space/stars image, then the blue dots get lost in that. I was always confused why Apple chose that image for Leopard when the new dock had dots that were similar in size to the stars in the image.
Change it to something else and the problem goes away.

[macnews]

I want to give a big kudos to the author. This was a very well balanced and I think fair assessment. He came at it from a pure, never used OSX before perspective. In my experience with other people in the same situation, his experience is dead on.

Did he miss a few things? Yes. The two finger tap is obvious, along with custom keyboard short cuts. I think if he had spent a month with the mac he would have discovered them, along with other things like spaces (which can have a love/hate following). The key thing is he was HONEST. Of course he doesn't know as much as someone who has been using it for a year or ten years, PLUS, he is writing about the experience NOT writing a manual on OSX.

As to the Apple tax comment, hello Mac users, this is how the windows folk look at it. They just don't GET why we like our macs. For many, learning new ways to do things on your computer is too bothersome or scary because in Windows XP or Vista it feels like you are fighting your computer and OS vs on the mac actually being able to practically ignore the OS. Thus, they don't take the time to learn the new things because they feel as if "why learn this stuff and still have to fight the OS when I can stick with what I know and be at the same spot?" To them, its a zero sum game and just don't believe the hype.

PC users also buy in to the Apple tax because they are used to:
1. Buying PCs for well under $1,000, and often less than $500
2. Are used to having to replace their PC every 3 to 4 years.

In today's throw away world, the notion of "you get what you pay for" is lost on them. Thus, why pay for a more, initially, expensive Mac? It seems like a "tax" but they don't know that same mac can not only LAST 5 to 6 years (or longer) but also RUNS virtually like it did the day it was bought. I'm not making a blanket statement but am speaking from over 12 years of personal Mac use as well as running a lab of Macs (towers, imacs and laptops). I've had some duds but if I had to estimate a percentage on it my duds run less than 5% of ALL the macs I have ever purchased (that's over 300 machines in 12+ years). I suspect this has more to do with the "tax" claims than anything else.

[Link33]

The comments about application installation and running them afterwards were spot on. In my opinion, it's just the Apple Philosophy on computer users. You are on a computer. You run computer programs. Learn how to do that and the rest will come to you. Remember the days of DOS, you needed an idiot instruction manual to run the program off the floppy?and just about every app had a different way to run?
MS has gone to great lengths to be idiot proof and the OS suffers so much for that. Apple has tried to make the art of using a computer simple.

What would you do with it? I can see Grandma downloading a legitimate application and wanting it to show up in the dock... maybe a dialog box or two to take care of that. No problem.
I can see a sys-admin getting pissed off because he is simply adding software for the 50th time that week and is sick of answering extra questions for each program over and over again. Now what? Admin toggles? Extra help pages to deal with it? God forbid plist modifications.

I'm not saying Apple has it perfect, I'm just saying that as a computer user who understands the fundamentals of being a computer user, I prefer Apple's method. But oh man is there room for improvement.


Cheers,
Link33
Message was edited by: Link33

[bousozoku]

You people won't be happy until you've tied him to a stake and lit a fire under him, will you?
Mac OS X has flaws and so do the Mac faithful.
There are many long time users who don't know keyboard shortcuts like Cmd-Shift 4 to get a screenshot of a selected piece of the display. It's unlikely that someone spending two weeks with an unfamiliar O.S. would find the two finger click when regular Mac users didn't know that it was there.
I find the multiple ways to install applications vexing. How many times have users tried to install drag-and-drop applications and have the disk image in the Dock instead of the application?
At least, more people are looking at the machines and maybe Apple will come up with better ways to do things because of it. They certainly don't listen to us.

[mretondo]

dbutenhof said:

{quote}
More disconcerting still is that when you minimize an application, the menu of that application remains open at the top of the screen, even though you may be now looking at an altogether different app.{quote}
This, actually, is not true. What the author probably did was minimize the open WINDOW, by clicking the "-" (yellow light) icon or double-clicking the title bar. The APPLICATION remains active, however, which would be obvious if you had more than one window.

When you minimize the APPLICATION ("Hide " in the application menu), the application is inactive and another application (often Finder) will take over the menu bar. Mac application windows are more independent than in Windows, including the ability to interleave windows from various open applications in the "stacking order" -- extremely useful for reference and copy-paste.

And of course, while the single menu bar model is foreign and initially confusing to Windows users, the scattered array of inactive and useless separate menu bars in Windows is equally confusing to Mac users. You can only use one at a time; and the Mac's is always in a single known place so you don't have to search for the one you need to use. Either model works; I think the Mac's makes more sense, and it certainly follows consistently with Apple's generally "simpler and more elegant" approach to design.

You're correct because the Mac is Document centric not Application centric. It's windows' represent documents i.e. pieces of paper lying on you're desktop. This is were the concept of the desktop came from. When you close or minimize a Document Window you haven't said put down my pencil and give me a paint brush just because Photoshop happens to be the next application to pop up. There could be other documents from the same application you want to work on or create a new one. And like you said, if you want to hide the current application type Command-H.

[lwdesign]

This article is a fair assessment of a Windows user experiencing a Mac for the first time. Windows, unfortunately, educates a user into thinking in complexities rather than simplicities. I've show the desktop to several Windows users and popped in a disk, and when it showed up as an icon in the Finder they didn't know what to do with it. They've been educated to think it's something they can't control, until I say, "OK, when you want to open a file, what do you do with it?" "Double click on it" they respond. "OK, do that" and they're amazed that they can see the contents of the disk in a Finder window.
The choice of the Air was a bad one for a new Mac user. It's a very incomplete Mac but very useful if you do a lot of traveling and want to travel light. An iMac or MacBook would have been a far better choice.
When I first got a computer I had several friends who I could call and talk to and ask questions of. They gave me wonderful tips and helped get me up to speed quickly. The author didn't seem to have that, and he did surprisingly well for doing it by himself. The 2-finger tap for right clicking is not intuitive, but once you know it, it's much easier than using a button. This issue would have been different on an iMac or Mac Pro where right click action can be done on a mouse or trackball.
All in all this was a very fair article. If the author had had a friend who was there to show him the ropes and a few tips and tricks during his initial few days, he would be selling his PCs and living the MacLife right now.

[FuturDreamz]

"More disconcerting still is that when you minimize an application, the menu of that application remains open at the top of the screen, even though you may be now looking at an altogether different app. For example, if I was working in NeoOffice and then minimized it, the NeoOffice menu remained active, even though I was now looking at Firefox (whose window was initially underneath NeoOffice’s window). Admittedly, once I clicked in Firefox, its menu became active. But I never did get used to this, and found it continually confusing."
Basically in Mac OS the frontground windows is the one that has the menubar. not sure why when it is minimized the menu doesn't go to the new frontground window tho.
"I found that the single-click trackpad of the MacBook Air was inferior to the two-button trackpad of a PC. It’s simpler to right-click an item to get an options menu than it is to press the Option key and click the spacebar, which is what you have to do on the Air. However, the scrolling trackpad is quite nice; you can scroll through documents by moving two fingers down the trackpad. And, as I mentioned previously, there are other gestures that you can use well, for zooming in and out of documents and more."
Push down on the trackpad with two fingers. there's your right-click.