I’m trying as hard as I can not to say that “Macs suck” or “Macs are garbage” at the moment, but I have found out that, as good as OS X might look on the exterior, it has some, I guess, irreconcilable kinks that are probably going to prevent me from looking at it the same way as I did prior to today.
How so? Well, let’s start from the beginning.
I was in Operating Systems class, and everyone had already left because they (and I) had gotten through with our weekly chapter tests. I stayed behind, and asked Mr. Carlisle if I could work with the Mac Minis which the school had bought for educational purposes; he said yes, and I switched one of them on.
Needless to say, I immediately started downloading .dmg files for a test drive. I had already known about and tried out the RSS Visualizer screensaver (which displays RSS feeds from Safari in a smooth, airy blue display), so I was ready to go. I tried out Safari, but again, I was reminded of exactly how much a person who “switches” will have to get used to: clicking the middle scroll button on the mouse will get you Dashboard, even if you’re trying to open a link in a new tab in whatever browser you’re using (Safari, Camino, Shiira, even Firefox). So you’ll have to open the link *manually* (left click if you’re using a non-Apple mouse, which they used for the Minis).
OK…..that’s not cool.
Then I tried opening any of those browsers – hell, even any of the applications, like Finder – in fullscreen (y’know, press on the “Expand” button on a window to, well, expand it). However, except for Camino, when I press the plus sign on the upper-left corner of Safari or Finder, the window will shift to one side of the window.
Huh?
I press the plus sign again and it shifts back to the position that it was in before.
“Oh-kay……”, I think.
Finally, feeds: I can’t find the button on Safari that allows you to add RSS feeds to the built-in reader. No Mac browser (save, probably, for Firefox, which I didn’t try out) can recognize Atom feeds (the XML syndication type that is used by Google, Blogspot, and as an option alongside RSS on Livejournal). And finally, for the first time, I felt like there was just too much clutter and disorganization on the desktop (with the Dock showing up everytime I bring the cursor anywhere within its vicinity, although I can barely get it to show up when I shift the Dock to the right or left side of the screen. Peachy.)
Overall, during my short tenure with the OS X desktop, I felt…….debilitated. Yeah, that might be the word. I felt debilitated when I was on it.
That said, I think I have a reason (or two) *not* to “get a Mac”.
These aren’t kinks, they’re differences. Microsoft isn’t the holy grail of usability, and Apple OS X isn’t Windows. Things are done differently. Hopefully I can help you out.
Using a PowerBook, I have only one mouse button. Honestly, I always thought Mac users were nuts for using a one-button mouse until I Switched myself. These days, I only ever notice the second button’s gone when I run Windows in Microsoft’s remote desktop client. To open a link in a new tab, hit command+click (command is what Apple users call the button with the picture of the Apple and the Hotpoint-logo-like swirly hash). Or you can remap your mouse button keys – it sounds like someone has mapped them in Expose to open Dashboard on a middle click. You can also drag and drop a link into the tab area, just like in Firefox.
The green bobble isn’t a maximize button, it’s a zoom button. Even then, it’s a “zoom to fit”, not “zoom bigger”! That may sound pedantic, but let me explain why Apple realized maximize isn’t the way to go. Maximizing a Window in Windows will cause it to fill the entire screen except the start/taskbar. Apple realized this makes drag and drop somewhat cumbersome. (Start drag, alt+tab…) Also, most documents are vertically oriented, yet the browser is wider than it is tall – especially on Apple’s new widescreen displays! A maximized Word document, for example, takes up the whole screen but uses mostly vertical space, horizontal space being eaten by the grey bars. Instead, the “zoom” button toggles between 2 states: a developer-set standard state which usually takes up as much vertical and horizontal space as is needed and no more, and a custom-state which the user can set by dragging the bottom right corner of the window to a size that’s comfortable. Just like in Windows, the window moves over to the top left hand corner of the screen when it is “maximized”/”zoomed”. This is pretty handy, it’s a nice shortcut to move the document to the top left hand corner. If you want, you can then drag the Window to take up the whole screen. I never do this, but some Windows users still prefer it. The Window moves back to its custom position when the zoom button is clicked a second time. Basically, don’t assume the standard state should be as large as possible, most monitors are much larger than the useful size for a window.
For some Safari documents, no more vertical space is needed than the size of the document – which may even be smaller than or the same size as the custom state.
Unless someone’s been seriously honking around with your machine or it was an invalid feed, Atom shows up fine in Safari. I’m looking at an Atom feed right now. I don’t mind telling you it’s Google’s own blog It’s easy getting the feed to open up in the reader, just click the link! That’s it. Just click the link. Or, if there’s a button saying “RSS” in the address bar, click that. It’s a shortcut to the feed.
The RSS reader has a sidebar with search tools and filter tools. It also has, down the bottom, a link marked “Add bookmark”. Click it. A popup shows up, allowing you to select a title and place to stick the bookmark. I like to stick RSS feeds in the bookmarks bar, that way Safari alerts me whenever there are new articles – and how many.
As default, the dock actually shows all the time at a set size. Most people switch this so that the dock shows up when you hover either at the bottom of the screen or the right of the screen. It’s a very handy shortcut for applications, but you can even turn it off if you don’t like it. Of course, if it shows up when you don’t want it, you only need to move away. It’s never caused problems for me. Of course, most of the time, I don’t have my windows zoomed – there’s no need for it.
Hello, I have this cricket-comm — … and I thought I’d like to have it affiliated to … Is that OK ? Please do tell me.
Yeah, sure. I don’t see a reason why it shouldn’t be.
Thank you so very much. I am sorry to be so late in replying, but I had problems with my ‘net.
Once again, thank you.
🙂
Umm … maybe you’d like to have a look at the comm. ? Please do check it out once atleast …