More Goats

So, I've been using my Mac at home full time, and all day today at work. Some points that stand out:

• Coming from years of Cleartype on Windows, I just don't like Quartz Extreme's subpixel hinting - the fonts look much blurrier, even on the 'light' setting. I realise that this is partially due to choice of fonts, and I can definitely see why some people prefer Quartz' version.
• The single menu bar at the top of the screen might've been a good idea 10 years ago, and might still be a good idea for laptops, but now that we have massive hi-res desktop screens, it just doesn't work. I generally have a browser, texteditor and file browser all visible at the same time, horizontally and vertically separated - it makes no sense for an browser to be on the bottom right and have to access my bookmarks at the top left, crossing over several other apps in the process. Fitt's law works against OSX, here, and I think we can assume that most users are now very very used to clicking on small horizontal bars of text.
• So the single menu bar, app's giant amounts of chrome, and the need to click to focus an app before using it (on Windows, you can still interact with unfocused windows), really does continue MacOS' 'app-focused' feel - you have a core set of apps that you do stuff with and generally only using a few at a time, Windows tends to blur the lines between apps and services, and likes to run with four million systray 'service' apps etc.
• Performance is much better now that I have 2GB of RAM in this thing. Still much much slower than Windows, but livable. Lauren also mentioned that she found this machine slow (she has a G4 Powerbook), Spotlight indexing might have played a part in this, but it's still pretty bad. I find it bearable mostly because of something Evan said about Mac Zen.
• I'd be back on Windows already if it wasn't for Quicksilver, MouseFix, DoubleCommand, Witch, Pathfinder and Textmate. I love those things. Dasher is also nice.
• I miss being able to resize a window from any edge or corner. This is a large annoyance when dealing with multiple windows from multiple apps, something that, as described above, MacOS doesn't really encourage. I'll get used to it I suppose.
• Native X11 support is great, though VPN definitely wasn't as easy as Windows.
• No window position/edge-snapping utility? Heavens!
• I'm considering a MacBook Pro, but I detest touchpads, and the single button-ness? Yuk. I'm a trackpoint lover to the core (they're so much faster!), and this could be a huge blocking factor. We'll see.
• As the mousing is painful, I'm learning lots and lots of keyboard shortcuts. This consequently makes me feel a lot more productive.

Really though, I'm quite liking it, and when I remember how much default WindowsXP sucks without spending hours recustomizing it and downloading a billion helper apps, OSX stacks up pretty well. I just wish the transition to x86 had resulted in the speed boost I'd always hoped for.

Cheesiest .. post .. ever.

Handypants

So I work in the Firefox group at Google, and since every one of my co-workers who has seen me open the search dialog with the keyboard has asked "how did you do that", I figure it's safe to assume that it's not common knowledge: to open or focus the search dialog (that thing in the top-left corner with the Google logo), press Ctrl-K. Ctrl-K is your friend. None of this F6 Tab, or Ctrl-L Tab business. It even works when you've removed the search box from your browser chrome.

I love working at a place where people will stop mid-sentence to ask how to do something they just saw you do out of the corner of their eye, rather than just dismissing it as magic.

Kernel Quartz

I've been a daily, nightly DOS/Windows user for about 20 years. When OSX 10.0 came out, I was excited (having been forced to use OS9 at work).. until I realised how slow the UI was. When I bought an eMac with 10.3 last year, I was excited, until again, I realised how slow the UI was. This weekend, having decided that I've become too set in my ways, and tempted by the "ooh they're so much faster" lies, I bought an Intel Mac Mini (the fastest one they had), eagerly set it up, and .. it's still soooo sllooooow.

This is mostly because I am overly fussy when it comes to responsiveness. Thanks to my Quake background, moving my mouse cursor around, and typing text in OSX sets off this uneasy "YOU ARE GOING TO GET FRAGGED" feeling that comes from having controls that don't work quite right. I even get more satisfactory results on my Windows machine when it's running as a Synergy client, with the keyboard and mouse plugged into the Mac and everything being sent over the network.

That said, at least the Mac is consistently slow - Windows, in all its blazing 2D-blitting glory, runs crazy fast 98% of the time, and then produces freezing, blank-white-Explorer-windows of frustration the other 2% of the time. I'm also terrified of what might happen with Aero in Vista, whose latest betas run with the same thundering "wait mortal, I am rendering fancy effects" slowness that OSX does. At least you'll have the option of turning Aero off, however.

Still, as Aaron pointed out, I am doing this whole thing because I want differences, and so I should enjoy them.. More detailed discussion on pros (unixness, reliability, ease of use, spotlight, happiness) and cons (single menu bar when multitasking, quartz' font rendering) to come. Maybe.

An ExplorerCanvas Demo

Running much much faster than I thought it ever could, Rafael Robayna's Canvas Painter now uses ExplorerCanvas to allow it to work in IE. Crackers!