I found Mac and OS X very appealing as a development platform. For me the most important think would be that I have a *nix system without any hardware support issue -- yes, "it just works".
Got really really tired of dealing with various driver issues on Linux as I would usually spend tens of hours trying to configure some devices and then they just became unusable again when I did an upgrade.
Oh, and the font rendering on Mac is so nice esp. when one has to face codes more than half of the day!! ClearType on Windows looks so so. Linux fonts ... well, not so many great free fonts :( This is just personal preference though ...
Oh, and the font rendering on Mac is so nice esp. when one has to face codes more than half of the day!!
People who like typography need to use Macs. The design for Cirqueti is a font-only design, and a long time was spent making fonts look good on various operating systems. Even at its best, there's a huge difference: Mac fonts look beautiful.
I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04 and I'm still using it in virtual machine now. I agree that esp. for 8.x Ubuntu really beats XP on font rendering (well, except for OpenOffice and occasionally Firefox).
However both Windows and Linux still have very far way to go to beat Apple's font rendering engine. Apple just needs to get the font right because otherwise it cannot sell so many Macs to designers. And they did.
I remembered I was seduced by the Ruby guys' screenshot of Monaco font in TextMate. In my opinion Monaco is probably the best ever designed monospace font for programmers. Well, of coz it must be rendered by Apple's font engine to get the right look -- tried Monaco both on XP and Ubuntu and it sucked big.
I have to face code more than half of the day, and thus a good Monospace font is very important to me. On Ubuntu I think Bitstream/Dejavu Mono is the best, and on Windows I prefer Consolas, but both look kinda unpolished compared to Monaco on Mac.
No, I'm not talking about those cool design fonts. I'm talking about the basic typefaces like Times, Helvetica, etc. I think probably fonts are the area where commercial companies do better than open source --- fine-tuning a font requires so much time and energy of artists which I think is a very very scarce resource in the open source community. It also explains why a good set of typefaces costs big bucks. Sad, but true ...
Every new release getting better, faster, more usable; growing market-share faster all the time...
I'm a Mac user (for now) and this scares me. I mean, statistically -- how long can such a thing be maintained? What goes up must, must come down, at some point.
P.S. Enjoy your new computing preference, David. You're in good company.
When they need to revamp the architecture entirely.
Apple really took a gamble with OS X. They were quagmired with the System 9 line - they could have kept incrementing, but it was obvious they'd hit some limits.
I think one thing people forget is how bad OS X was when it first came out. It was slow, missing key features, and was just plain buggy. It wasn't really until Tiger that they had something ready for the mainstream (imho).
But they took some risks - especially with the rendering approach w/ Aqua - and as hardware caught up it started to pay off. The features they can slip in today are really the result of some brave design decisions a decade ago (the Intel transition is another example).
It was somewhat easier then because Apple's market was still a very hardcore group. Now, it might be harder for them to go through such a revolution - the market might just rebel against them... The downside to brand I guess.
Of course, Apple made a good move with the iPhone - this is a totally different evolutionary path that might be a better bet (i.e. Perhaps there won't be an OS 11, or if there is by the time it comes it might not be as big a deal as other things).
> Every new release getting better, faster, more usable; growing market-share faster all the time...
You could be describing Windows or Mac OS X with that.
> What goes up must, must come down, at some point.
That rule doesn't really apply to software. The main thing problem in producing an operating system is coming up with a significant improvement over the previous release. For example, Windows XP was and is still good enough for almost everybody. Vista makes a lot of things easier and simpler, but for many people that isn't a compelling reason to upgrade. I'm sure Mac OS X has the same problem; except for programmers, I've never met a Mac OS X user that has upgraded Mac OS X.
I used Windows XP for years and then switched to Vista about six months ago. AFAICT, there is nothing slower about Vista than XP on the same machine (an old ThinkPad T60). But, because of usability improvements in Vista, I can get things done faster. UAC removes a lot of the hassles of running as a limited user in XP, and that is the main reason I upgraded. UAC probably saves me at least an hour a week.
> > Every new release getting better, faster, more usable; growing market-share faster all the time...
> You could be describing Windows or Mac OS X with that.
Not really, no.
No Windows release in this timeframe was a match for the transition to Tiger, or the transition to Leopard.
Vista isn't faster then XP for most things, nor is it more usable. That's reserved for Windows 7.
And their market-share is actually shrinking faster all the time.
> > What goes up must, must come down, at some point.
> That rule doesn't really apply to software.
I sure hope so.
Though your evolutionary strategy view is very corporate-y, shareholders and quarterly profits is squeals. I'm more of an actual user of the said systems, so I don't care much 'bout that.
MS lost me in 2005, when I could run Ubuntu and do all the same things with none of the hassle. And they won't get me back, because they move too slow -- I've gotten used to good things fast. All of this is to say that Windows is irrelevant to my original comment. I didn't come to MacOS X from Windows.
My original comment was a bit on the off-topic side, if you will. I was interested to know if anyone else feels the big boot looming over their computing habits. That's all.
I'm genuinely curious. What do you do with your computer that makes Mac OS X better than Ubuntu? And especially, what made Ubuntu better than Windows XP back in 2005?
For me the lack of management (malware, registry, NTFS) was a big boon back in 2005. The magical UNIX terminal where you could get new functionality by piping pieces together into your own customized tool was hard to start with, but grew on me in a couple of months. That was the point when I couldn't really go back -- Windows didn't run my favourite software -- the bash shell coupled with transparent mount-points for FIFO and tools like SSH, VIM and Python. Yeah, I know Python runs on Windows. It makes little ice-weasels cry, though.
And later on, my Wacom + Painter/Photoshop (I really hate Photoshop, I do) doodling hobby required too much effort to support with Linux. As of late this has gotten better, including Linux apps for painting, but by then I was gone.
Then I sort of bought into some of the software specific to the platform, such as Panic's Coda, the iTunes on the Mac, and now I'm stuck here. I could move onto a Linux machine for the web-development, even now I can.
But I don't want to. It's very cozy in here. "Everything just works" -- there's some emotional truth in that.
If Apple's proprietary tendencies ever catch up to it, at least we'll have something guaranteed to be free (Linux) and of continually-increasing quality. Despite Apple's flaws though, it still makes great software thus far.
Apple's flaws are what let it make great software. If they were releasing OS X as an open-source code implementation, it would not be as good as it is.
How would its "proprietary tendencies" catch up to it? There will always be people willing to pay for good things.
I bought an ipod touch and mac mini to develop iphone apps.
I don't find OS X to be better than Win 7. But the ipod touch is pretty cool and hopefully I will have some success selling Numbrosia for the iphone/ipod touch.
Yes, it does have some nice little touches. But it misses some big things, such as being able to write to a CD in a reasonable way, being able to write to an NTFS drive, or have a proper way to uninstall software and its data.
I've owned 3 mac minis over the last 4 years or so (2 G4's and now a new Core 2 version), and there's one thing that keeps me coming back to Windows for dev work - window management. Maybe I just don't get it (or haven't figured it out), but when I have 20 windows open on then Mac, trying to figure out what is what in the dock is painful (all of the terminal windows look the same in icon form). I find it much easier to jump between apps using the Windows task bar.
I don't know what people did before Expose came around (I'm only about 2 years into being a Mac user here so I have no non-Expose experience). I have thumb buttons on my mouse bound to Expose and Spaces, I use them constantly (often at the same time, Expose in Spaces is very convenient). Honestly I have enough running most of the time that the Windows taskbar would have to be 4 rows high to be readable, but with nine desktops in Spaces and Expose a touch away I have never had a problem finding my way through the absurd mess of windows I make.
By the way, if you use Terminal in OSX, I highly recommend checking out Visor (http://docs.blacktree.com/visor/visor), I have it bound to ctrl-~ (tilde) and I use it constantly.
The dock's not meant to be a jumper. Expose's useful, but if you're a power user (e.g. 20 windows), learn to use cmd-tab and cmd-`. That lets you quickly find your app and cycle between windows for each.
I'd have more belief in Apple software engineering genius if I didn't have to use iTunes on Vista to sync with my (otherwise wonderful) iPhone. What an awful, awful, product. And god help you if you try to do any management of your music files outside of the program.
So sure, OS X is great, I hear. But every time I put a Mac on my desk next to my Windows or Linux machine at work or at home, I get bored of it very quickly. Like Linux, like Windows, it runs multiple graphical applications at once. What else do I need an OS to do except stay out of my way?
It could be worse. You could be a Mac user who needs to use one of Microsoft's products. There is no more worthless piece of shit in the world of computing than MS Entourage....
I couldn't agree more that iTunes is a pretty horrible Windows app, I don't know anyone that ever used it as their primary music player/manager.
It's a fairly stark contrast to using it on OSX, where you pretty much don't ever think about it.
[edit 15 minutes later]
I can't help but to quote Darby Lines (aka, The Angry Drunk):
> Second, bitching that anyone is a “bad” Windows citizen is the rhetorical equivalent of arguing that one turd in a sea of shit is particularly stinky. Microsoft is a bad Windows citizen.
Granted, I run iTunes on a Mac, and my main use case is just finding and downloading new podcasts and syncing them to my old iPod. But I can hardly think how iTunes could be improved to take less effort on my part. I put the iPod in the dock, iTunes launches, it syncs all the podcasts, and I just have to click the little eject icon next to the icon of my iPod to take it out and start listening to it.
I think the key difference is you say you WANT to manage your music files. With iTunes, I don't even bother to manage anything, hardly. It just does the obvious thing which is almost always what I want.
I wish it worked that well for me. (It evidently works that well for my girlfriend, a Mac user.)
But no, I don't want to manage my own music. I want, for instance, all the duplicates to go away. I want podcasts that failed to download properly and are now missing to be able to be refreshed without a bizare and undocumented shift triangle-click shift-click trick (no menu option to achieve the same!). I want my music to play every time I click on it without having to turn iTunes off and on. I want it to work with Windows Remote Desktop like every other piece of music software I've got. I want a useful search UI, instead of the stateful UI that we've got that can only search either library or store. I want to be able to flag a long audio file as "podcast" so that it can remember my place and resume without having to set up my own feed to make that happen.
You can do the last one by right-clicking and picking "Get Info." There's an option called "remember playback position"; check it and it should work.
How often do you have to do an advances search? For ones you do often, just make a smart playlist. Otherwise, what kinds of searches don't work easily with a simple fast text search? I'm curious.
As for the other stuff: iTunes on Windows is bad. I think it's better than some other media players (though I've heard WinAmp is better), but it's not particularly good. On a Mac, though, it's very fast. In my 50GB library, it searches near-instantly, and I really can't think of any time I've had a problem with it. So I can absolutely understand your complaint with the Windows version, and I hope they fix it, but on the Mac it's really a good program. (Good enough that no competitors have seen fit to exist, anyway, not counting the ultra-experimental Songbird.)
This has always been a major complain for me, Itunes is a pretty horrible program, I guess it only gets excruciatingly slow with a lot of music and files to index. I used to think it was my relatively crappy machine at the time, when I tried again on another machine (2.0 GHz core2 duo, 4 GB) same disgustingly slow performance. Completely unusable.
Only way to make it work without grinding to a halt is only indexing certain folder of music... great....
Those were on windows with about 600 gig music and its painful. Really I have just stopped moving much music because of this reason, plus I only have windows on an older machine I don't use much. Last time I tried to use it under virtual box on ubuntu it didn't work at all because of USB issues.
I find that all the mac users I know are always waiting on the next update to fix some sort of problem. As an example, one of my friends cannot connect to a bluetooth network due to some bug that was introduced 2 years ago.
It's too bad you can't go in there and, you know, jumble some plumbing around and get it fixed.
Got really really tired of dealing with various driver issues on Linux as I would usually spend tens of hours trying to configure some devices and then they just became unusable again when I did an upgrade.
Oh, and the font rendering on Mac is so nice esp. when one has to face codes more than half of the day!! ClearType on Windows looks so so. Linux fonts ... well, not so many great free fonts :( This is just personal preference though ...