Re: Windows.. it's like coming home!
- From: bobinnv <bobinnv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:54:15 GMT
In article <lije-711CE6.20255914082006@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Elijah Baley <lije@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <12e25k2fibu78cf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Dan Johnson" <danieljohnson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I recently posted about some problems I had bringing
up my new Toshiba laptop. So now I feel my trolling
is incomplete if I don't post some explaination for why
I would want to buy a Toshiba laptop at all.
After all, I had a PowerBook G4, and the junkware
infestation on this Toshiba was not a surprise to me.
That I like MS as a company better than Apple is
one factor that will surprise no-one. But I have
better reasons too. Lots of reasons.
This will be a long post.
* Apple sacrifices a lot for style.
The PowerBook is beautiful. The aluminum
case is a marvelous look, and it is so thin!
But the PowerBook runs *hot*; burn-my-lap hot.
When using it on my lap, I had to lay it on its
carrying case for insulation.
And the WiFi reception is not so great. Sometimes
I feel I have to be so close, I might as well run a
cable. Making the case of metal makes reception
problematic.
Toshiba's laptop is standard issue Wintel ugly; it's
thicker, and has a three-tone plastic case. But it
runs reasonably cool- no icepack needed- and
gets better reception for WiFi too.
It's not art, but it is practical.
* Application Availability
I was not a very demanding user- mostly
Apple apps for me- but even with my
limited demands, I found I found app
availability to be a problem.
I had a devil of a time finding a decent
newsreader.
I eventually settled on Unison, which has
adequate UI- it looks like Aqua at least-
but it was terribly buggy then.
It's better now, but it's still mostly targetted
at Pr0n Surfing.
I posted rather less here because it was
awkward to work with threads in this
newsreader.
I also tried MT/Newswatcher, but the UI
was a crawling horror.
On Windows I just use Outlook Express
for this. Works fine, decent UI, no problem.
I also bought a few games for the thing. I
wasn't expecting much, but I was still
disappointed. Little is available, and
what is there are ports of older PC
games, and they still do not play real
well on G4 hardware.
There does not appear to be much of
a Mac games industry at all.
* My Eyes! The Goggles, They Do Nothing!
If the googles had magnifying lenses,
then maybe they would do something.
Mac OS X has no resolution independance; it
treats all screens as 72 dpi. They are really
about 100 dpi; the result is teeny tiny UI.
This was just an ongoing sore with the
PowerBook; never a insurmountable
obstacle, but always annoying.
The first thing I did to the new Toshiba-
before even removing the jumkware- was
setting the dpi setting to "Large Size"
Such a relief!
* Surprise: Transition!
Being an Apple customer is an advanture;
you never know what the Next Big Thing
is. It's very exciting. But it's most.. impractical.
I really, really don't like it that Apple is
dropping Classic now.
And I don't like my choices at this point:
I can buy a MacBook, and run my existing
software in emulation (ick), or stay with an
old computer and eventually be cut out of
new software. That sucks.
If I gotta repurchase software, it'll be
the Window version, thank you.
* Tools for the Previous Century
I came to the Mac, originally, to see the famous
developer tools; Objective-C, Cocoa and
Interface Builder.
It has been a mind-expanding experience. Objective-C,
in particular, is a very different way to think about
code. And If anyone wants to expand their horizons
by learning a new platform, I can recommend
Cocoa/OS X as the platform to learn, if you can
spare the cash to get into it.
But, in the end, it's just not as good as what you
get on Windows.
Objective-C has horrible syntax, and the memory
management in there is cruder than VB 6. And
you have to focus a lot more on optimization with
it, because it produces pretty slow code by
default.
Interface Builder is obsolete. It's not well
integrated with XCode, and it works poorly
for user-defined controls. It's just not
competitive at all.
XCode itself is weak for a commercial IDE;
it's slow and unstable. The code-sense is
almost unusable. And the UI is still quite
awkward for editing multiple files.
Cocoa is the best thing about the platform;
but even it is showing its age.
In particular it's error handling is terrible;
they've got an exception mechanism but
they almost never use it; instead you have
methods returning nil and false and such
for errors, and there's no good way to find
out what went wrong.
* Grand Unification Theory
I never thought I'd say this, but the UI of
Windows apps is *more consistant* than
what you get on the Mac today.
No, Really.
Nearly everything works with the battleship
gray Classic Theme. And they all work in
pretty similar ways; toolbars, menus, and
panes. It's not radical; it's just Microsoft's
update on OS/2's update of the original
Mac UI.
On the Mac, you get a mix of 'new style'
Aqua apps and OS 9 refugees.
The OS 9 brigate have been ported to
Carbon, but their UIs often show their
roots very clearly.
MT/Newswatcher was a real poster child
for this. It may use the Aqua widgets, but it
doesn't behave like Aqua at all.
You see this on a smaller scale in many other
(Carbon) apps. Check out the Office: Mac
preferences, for one place I've noticed.
Even if you stick strictly the New Breed,
you still get a hodge-podge of visual styles;
some Aqua Classic, some with the new
'Unified' look, some with brushed
metal, some with 'unified' brushed metal,
and some with the 'pro' style.
All that in Apple's own products.
They also vary in behavior, but not quite so
broadly. For instance, Cocoa apps often
use NeXT-style inspectors- Keynote and
Pages do this. Carbon apps will use
old-style dialog boxes, however: iTunes
does this.
I appreciate the technical problems Apple
faces here, but it really seems like they
go out of their way to make this worse.
* That'll be another $129, please
One spiffy thing about Windows is that
MS gives away a lot of the little stuff
for free download. Microsoft's Spotlight-
clone is one I've installed. It's as convenient
as the real thing, and quite a lot quicker.
Apple isn't into freebies, I notice.
* That'll be another $30, please
I still think it's incredibly lame that Apple
demands $30 bucks for fullscreen playback
in QuickTime player. Talk about nickle-and-
diming you to death!
New versions of Windows Media Player
are one of the many freebies MS makes
available. I've got WMP11 beta on here
now; its very slick.
* The Dock and The Taskbar
Apple's application-centric Dock also annoys
me. I almost never want to switch to an app,
but to a window. The taskbar is much nicer.
And the taskbar blows less real-estate, so
I can leave it visible. It can also hold more
items; it can be more than one tile tall,
and it auto-combines tiles into menus
when necessary.
* The Dock and the Start Menu
As a program launcher, the XP start menu
just kicks the dock up and down the field.
The start menu, like the dock, keeps small number
of apps immediately available, but unlike the
dock, they don't move around all the time.
Muscle memory works; Apple used to care about
this sort of thing. But not anymore.
Plus the start menu offers all sorts of system
configuration and control stuff, like the Apple
menu in Mac OS X. But the start menu can be
customized.
Plus the start menu shows recently used apps;
I find that very handy.
And of course, the start menu also has a
complete program list in it too. But that's
not something I use too much.
Funny how trolls always seem to parrot threads they read on Mac forums.
That's how obsession works I guess.
Because someone that writes something you don't like doesn't make them a
troll. I think this is an interesting post, even if I don't agree with
much of it.
.
- References:
- Windows.. it's like coming home!
- From: Dan Johnson
- Re: Windows.. it's like coming home!
- From: Elijah Baley
- Windows.. it's like coming home!
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