Joyce’s Musings

I wrote this a while back, but never got around to re-adding it to my blog. Here it is again.  I wrote it just after buying my Macbook.

There have been many project ideas that have drifted through my mind over the past few years. One of them has been to create some sort of app for the iPhone. Last summer, I happily signed up as an iPhone developer on Apple’s website, with the idea of being able to get started on building an application on the phone ASAP. Unfortunately, I was dismayed to discover that the iPhone SDK was only available under Mac OS X. At the time, I did not have access to a Mac platform, so the idea fell to the wayside.

I’ve been struggling with personal motivation to learn new things for many years now, and haven’t been able to get much progress done on my personal projects for a long time. Sure, I’ve been learning things at work, and I’ve been building my skills there, but I haven’t been spending time building myself up on my own time. That all changed at the beginning of December, when I started doing indoor rock climbing three times a week or more. Suddenly, I had all this energy, drive, and focus like I hadn’t felt since I was in high school or college. I began to get a lot of progress made on my set project, and I was finally learning again.

Naturally, my thoughts turned to the iPhone projects that I wanted to work on again. Of course, if I wanted to work on those, I would have to purchase a Mac. Since I was thinking about getting a laptop anyways, I decided to purchase one of the pretty new Macbooks.

I’ve been a Windows user for most of my life, due to the fact that I used to play video games all the time. I figured that the Mac would probably be an acceptable alternative to Windows, since I barely play video games any more, but really, it’s just another operating system. I’ve used Linux before, and there really was no distinction between that and Windows for me. I expected my experience with Mac OS to be quite similar.

I was wrong. I have never had such a wonderful and smooth experience with a computer. It was like the Mac OS was perfectly designed to satisfy my every need. It was the fastest setup experience I’ve ever had. I’ve never been able to get a computer from out of the box to useful that fast! There were several key things that I found to be absolutely amazing about my beautiful new computer:

1. The pre-installed software bundle.
Normally, when I get a new computer, the first thing I have to do is dig in and start deleting all of the pre-installed junk that comes with the system. AOL, MusicMatch, Tutorials… All of that crap. Then I have to go online and start downloading all of the tools that I actually need to use. A web browser that doesn’t suck, word processing tools, my audio editor, all of my software IDEs… You know the drill.

With the Mac, I didn’t have to do this nearly as much as I normally do! The pre-installed software package is absolutely fantastic. To start off with, Safari is just a great web browser, and probably my favorite browser ever. I downloaded Firefox, but frankly, I’ve only run it once, and that was to make sure I had installed it correctly.

Mail.app is an email application that actually WORKS, for once. I could actually get my email and everything set up and running on the application, unlike all of my failed attempts to get Outlook Express to behave.

GarageBand is an absolutely awesome audio manipulation platform. I’ve really enjoyed playing around with it and creating music.

And I absolutely love how Xcode is actually packaged with the rest of the system. It’s like someone actually paid attention to what people actually use computers for, and designed a pre-installed software package around that. Fancy that.

2. The simple configuration process.
I really despise the Windows control panel. Every single control panel on there is oddly named and contains complicated archaic settings that barely have anything to do with my actual goals. I just want to change my background wallpaper! Would that be under Themes, Desktop, Appearance, or Settings? Augh! The configuration pages for most Windows programs aren’t much better. The settings I want are always buried under a hundred levels of clicking, and are given strange and archaic names. Generally speaking, all of the defaults for these things are set horribly, so the first thing I do with any new application is open the settings page and start fiddling. It’s the only way to get the damn thing to actually work for me.

This was yet another thing that just blew me away about the Mac. As usual, one of my first stops on my new computer was the System Preferences pane, but I found that I had very little to change there! Most of everything was already configured intelligently. I barely had to change a thing. And I practically swooned over the icons. They were so well named and laid out. Compare the Windows and Mac versions of the desktop wallpaper settings:

In the Windows one, I have to dig through a ton of different options to find the one that I actually want, which is the Desktop menu. In the Mac configuration panel, I have two options: Desktop and Screen Saver. If I want to change my wallpaper, it is pretty easy to figure out which one I want. Whereas the Windows one is absolutely confusing if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. Hell, it looks like that screen right there is the right screen to change your wallpaper, but if you thought that, you’d be wrong.

In The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman describes this sort of thing as putting constraints on your user. By having fewer choices presented to me, the control panel on the Mac is simpler and easier to use. I have to do less thinking to figure out what it is I want to do.

I was done configuring my Macbook within just a few minutes when I got it. What options I was offered, I was able to quickly and easily understand what they did, and most of them were already set to values that I liked.

3. The intelligent organization of applications
I have a really carefully laid out organizational structure on my PC. Whenever I install a new application, if it is a game, it goes in the C:\Games folder. If it is anything else, it goes in the C:\Program Files folder. Then I meticulously organize all of my icons on my start menu so that I can quickly and easily access all of those applications.

I’ll spend hours digging through my start menu when I first get a computer. Microsoft likes to put EVERYTHING under Accessories, so I go in there and start tearing it all out, organizing my software into games, applications, programming tools, accessories that I’ll never use, etc.

One again, the Mac impresses me. Instead of all this crazy organization and insanity, Mac OS X has a simple application install procedure. When you want to install an application, you just drop it in your applications folder. The application file is also the shortcut you click to access the file, so no need to organize the application link and application data separately. If you use a particular application a lot, you can simply drag it over to your dock. Clean, simple, and fast. There’s one way to install applications, and one way to add icons to your dock. Once again, constraints help the user always know exactly what the right solution is in the moment.

But wait! Now all of my applications are all unsorted and all that! How will I ever find the apps I want?

Well, first of all, the apps I use the most are on my dock, and my dock is reasonably organized for the way that I think. You can see it to the left. I start with my web browser, then my IM clients, then email and calendar, then office productivity stuff, then programming IDEs, then photo and audio editors.

Of course, if the application I want to use isn’t actually on the dock, I don’t have to dig through a hundred applications in my applications folder to find it. I just hit Command-Space and open Spotlight to search for the application I want to run. Easy-peasy! Sure, I use Launchy on my Windows machine, but Spotlight is pre-installed on Mac OS X.

4. The trackpad
I had only been using my Macbook for three days, when I had to go back to using a PC laptop. What a difference! Within a few short days, I had managed to completely retrain myself to use the two finger scroll to scroll around pages. This simple little feature completely took hold of me and I fell in love. This trackpad is the one and only built-in mouse controller that I have EVER seen on a laptop that I don’t cringe at the thought of using. I am absolutely in love with it.

Whenever I’ve owned a laptop, I’ve always wanted to have a wireless mouse in my laptop bag along with the laptop itself, because trying to control the mouse through the built in trackpad on most laptops is absolutely horrible. You can barely make anything work, the trackpad jumps around a lot, and generally it is just a bad experience.

The trackpad on my Macbook is completely different. I find that I actually prefer using it to using a mouse. Even though I have my laptop hooked into my mouse and keyboard at my desk, I still reach over to use the two finger scroll from time to time. It’s just nice and easy to use! Combine that with having such a large and responsive touch surface, and you’ve got yourself a winning mouse controller here. And with the expose-all and expose-none features in here as well, I can control my entire system with hardly a need to switch back to the keyboard. I just swipe my fingers, and everything I need appears right in front of me.

If I have one nit, it’s that the trackpad support isn’t nearly as nice when running Windows on the Macbook. At those times I go back to preferring to use my nice trusty wireless mouse. But really, how often do I boot my Macbook into Windows?

5. The “It just works” feature.
This is just sort of a summary of everything else that I’m experiencing with my Mac. Whenever I run Windows, I am constantly encountering random and bizarre behavior in the system. Inexplicable crashes, programs not running for seemingly no reason, unexplained changes to word documents… It all seems par for the course when using a Windows machine. It seems to have a mind of its own, and does strange things at times, with or without prompting from me.

My experience of Mac OS X is rather different than this. Even when I get errors, they tend to be rather sensible errors that actually explain what happened and what I can do about it. They’re not arcane generic messages with links to help files. They are actually productive messages.

But that’s not even really necessary, as the Mac generally doesn’t experience such error messages. It just works, all the time. From boot up to hibernation, it just works. When I tell it to do something, it seems to just do it, without all of the annoying guess work that I find myself involved in with Windows.

It feels as though this is a platform that was built from the ground up to work correctly from day one. Oh, I’m sure I’ll have issues with it in the future, but for now, I am floored by the amazing and incredible performance of this device.

So I guess you could say that I’m a Mac convert now. Within a few days of owning a Mac, I was already questioning whether I would really use my PC anymore. A week later, and I had already converted another life-time PC user to a Macbook owner. Once I returned from my Christmas vacation to Cleveland, I went out and bought a DVI dongle for my Macbook so that I could use one of my two monitors on my desktop computer for the laptop. I now have a three monitor setup in front of me, two showing the Macbook screens, and one showing the PC screen, and I really only use the PC for IM and music while I’m working on the Mac now.

This is absolutely the best computer that I have ever owned, hands down. It is a purchase that I shall be raving about for a long time.