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OS X and Windows Vista...some random thoughts...

wow quite the discussion here. As much as I love OSX and my mac, I have to say I had no problems with my windows computer at all (the one in my sig.) It lasted me my whole time at college and still runs very well to this day. So much so that I gave it to my parents for their primary computer.

As someone mentioned NEVER use IE, in fact I hid it from them and only placed Firefox icons for them to access the internet. Since I got licenses from my school I have Norton Systemworks (which includes Anti-Virus) and Firewall installed on it. I have never had a virus and or security scare EVER. Windows isn't perfect but if you get certain apps that help its deficiencies you shouldn't have much problem. As for uptime as many mac users like to boast about, that computer has no problem keeping up with my powerbook as far as that goes and I'm not saying this to be a troll or whatever, but its just a fact. Now are all windows xp computers this reliable? no absolutely not, my brothers dell (1 year old vs 6 yrs for my win pc) is vastly unreliable in comparison. However I recently wiped it out with a windows xp install disc (NOT the dell one with all the dell **** it preinstalls) and he has not had a problem since. Personally I do believe that some of the problems are caused by what some of the manufacturers put on them in additon to XP (their "helper applications").

All that being said, I still use Windows and while I find Mac OSX superior, I don't dread going back to it (as long as its one of my computers lol) because I rarely ever have a problem.
 
jayscheuerle said:
And that pretty much sums up everything from either side doesn't it? ;)
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I'd say so.

Just wish I could take the things I like about both and mash them into some kind of Frankenstein OS.
 
poohat1000 said:
windows-vista-demo.jpg
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That picture has the blue screen Photoshoped on to it. I saw the original on Microsoft's site. Still funny tough. :)
howesey said:
I hate to break it to you, the person that Photoshopped that isn't very cleaver, there is no BSOD in Vista, it's RSOD (the error screen is red).
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haha
 
Malfoy said:
People tend to keep mentioning that something is wrong with the windows interface, and someone even went as far as to say its 'confusing'. Can someone please tell me what is so wrong and 'confusing' about the windows interface? If anything I find that 'out the box before you change anything' the Windows interface to be more friendly than OS X.
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Intuitive is a hard term because really all computer GUI are inherently unintiutive. You have to understand the paradigm of windows, desktops, and applications before you can even begin to use these systems—although I have users whose 'click-on-it-and-see-what-happens-whoops!' method allows them to bypass this.

Furthermore, there are steadily fewer computer 'newbies' people who have never touched a computer and therefore are the kind of tabula rasa necessary to define intiuitive.

However, I have to disagree with you because Windows offers so many inconsistencies between applications, between different ways of presenting settings and between the wandering menu choices that I think OSX offers an advantage.

In my own experience, newish users tend to wrap their heads around OSX once they get the dock and are happily crunching away while other newish users tend to stay within clearly defined boundaries on Windows.
 
poohat1000 said:
http://media.spikedhumor.com/2772/windows_vista.wmv


check out this video with gates doing his best steve impression, "now what if you have loads of windows open at once, and you need to see which to use... well llook what we did - we copied apple!!!"


(it does look vvvvvvv pretty tho )
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It may look pretty (kinda) but as far as using it goes, it is still not as practical as expose. Neither the "alt tab" or the "flip 3D" features are any good. It still requires you to flip through your windows. With expose *boom* you can see them all instantly.
And that part where you can hover over the task bar and see a preview of what it is... Have they ever heard of a Dock??? I don't need to hover over anything, I can see them all anyways.
Stupid Windows! :mad:

And Bill Gates Voice! :eek: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I can't stand it!
 
jayscheuerle said:
Vista doesn't look bad, but the transparency is an interesting affect that's horribly applied. It kills legibility and makes things more difficult to read. The only reason it's there is because it CAN be done. Bad, bad, bad...

The Aqua pinstripes were bad for the same reason. "Brushed Metal" makes the same mistake as well.

Heck, why not have windows wave around like they're floating on water all the time? It would look cool, but would make usage impossible..
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Actually one of the best ideas that was lost with Mac OS 10.2 was "minimize in place." That is one of the best little but alto cool features that was in the beta and never made it to the final release. There is some usage of it in Dashboard however in a slightly different form/function.

If anything I want "minimize in place" back, it adds to Expose in a big way.

I hate having my windows get sucked into the dock and much rather have then shrink on the desktop. :)

Apple bring it back, please. :)
 
EricNau said:
It may look pretty (kinda) but as far as using it goes, it is still not as practical as expose. Neither the "alt tab" or the "flip 3D" features are any good. It still requires you to flip through your windows. With expose *boom* you can see them all instantly.
And that part where you can hover over the task bar and see a preview of what it is... Have they ever heard of a Dock??? I don't need to hover over anything, I can see them all anyways.
Stupid Windows! :mad:

And Bill Gates Voice! :eek: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I can't stand it!
Click to expand...

If Apple Computers and Steve Jobs never existed then, who would Microsoft and Bill Gates copy. :eek: ;)
 
maya said:
If Apple Computers and Steve Jobs never existed then, who would Microsoft and Bill Gates copy. :eek: ;)
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So true...
...but the sad part is, they can't even copy anything good! They take a very good concept and crush it to pieces.
 
EricNau said:
It may look pretty (kinda) but as far as using it goes, it is still not as practical as expose. Neither the "alt tab" or the "flip 3D" features are any good. It still requires you to flip through your windows. With expose *boom* you can see them all instantly.
And that part where you can hover over the task bar and see a preview of what it is... Have they ever heard of a Dock??? I don't need to hover over anything, I can see them all anyways.
Click to expand...

Please explain how the Dock shows thumbnails of open documents that aren't minimized.

This is the primary benefit of the Windows taskbar. The user sees all open documents, not just open applications.


And Bill Gates Voice! :eek: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I can't stand it!
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Do you play audio tapes of Steve Jobs to lull you to sleep at night?

Cult of personality, baby.
 
thirdkind said:
Do you play audio tapes of Steve Jobs to lull you to sleep at night?

Cult of personality, baby.
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No, not just cult of personality. Jobs just has a more pleasant voice. Gates, through no fault of his own, got that more Carmack-style prototypical "nerd" voice. More nasal. Nothing he can DO about it, but unfortunately it does make him harder to listen to for long periods of time. Grates on me too, and not just because I'm a Mac user now. Even when I was an unabashed Windows fanboy, I still thought Gates sounded like a huge nerd. :D
 
thirdkind said:
Please explain how the Dock shows thumbnails of open documents that aren't minimized.

This is the primary benefit of the Windows taskbar. The user sees all open documents, not just open applications.
Click to expand...
With expose I don't need to see them all at the bottom. With OS X I can just hit F10 and see everything that is open, or I can click the app I want in the Dock and then hit F9 to see just that applications windows. That is much faster than searching through the taskbar for the right program, and then the right window.

thirdkind said:
Do you play audio tapes of Steve Jobs to lull you to sleep at night?

Cult of personality, baby.
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No, do you? :)
 
Cless said:
No, not just cult of personality. Jobs just has a more pleasant voice. Gates, through no fault of his own, got that more Carmack-style prototypical "nerd" voice. More nasal. Nothing he can DO about it, but unfortunately it does make him harder to listen to for long periods of time. Grates on me too, and not just because I'm a Mac user now. Even when I was an unabashed Windows fanboy, I still thought Gates sounded like a huge nerd. :D
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Maybe surgery could help. :eek: :p
 
Im no Windows basher like some, but Expose is clearly far superior and quicker to the new range of tricks Windows offers for window management, be it flip, flip 3d or live thumbnails. Expose lets me see ALL live thumbnails at once, not by hovering over each part of the task bar. And for minimised documents theyre in the dock as it is. Expose is simply a wonderful feature. I think Apple will extend it in 10.5, possibly offer some kind of Sun Looking Glass flip the window around to write on the back kind of thing...
 
Project said:
Im no Windows basher like some, but Expose is clearly far superior and quicker to the new range of tricks Windows offers for window management, be it flip, flip 3d or live thumbnails. Expose lets me see ALL live thumbnails at once, not by hovering over each part of the task bar. And for minimised documents theyre in the dock as it is. Expose is simply a wonderful feature. ... ...
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I agree. Thank you. :)
 
EricNau said:
With expose I don't need to see them all at the bottom. With OS X I can just hit F10 and see everything that is open, or I can click the app I want in the Dock and then hit F9 to see just that applications windows. That is much faster than searching through the taskbar for the right program, and then the right window.
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Since Exposé doesn't seem to follow any logic as to how it positions the thumbnails, I find getting to a particular window to be a bit of an Easter egg hunt if I have anything more than a few windows open. At least the Windows taskbar groups application windows together.

Exposé should group application windows together regardless of their position onscreen. I shouldn't have to focus on a particular app first and hit F10.


Project said:
Im no Windows basher like some, but Expose is clearly far superior and quicker to the new range of tricks Windows offers for window management, be it flip, flip 3d or live thumbnails.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Flip and flip 3D are stupid because it's exactly the kind of action the user is trying to avoid, and the taskbar already tells me what document/application a window contains with text. A thumbnail doesn't really add that much.

The new alt+tab functionality isn't really an Apple ripoff because Windows has always shown icons for the user to jump through. Replacing those icons with the actual application window is the next logical step.
 
Another weakness of the Task Bar is that if you have more than say, 4 apps open it becomes quite difficult to tell which is what without really focusing on the text in each window. Or if you have 4 Word documents open, and the Taskbar hasnt grouped them together you basically could have "Microsoft Wo...." for each of the 4 windows on the Task bar... effectively rendering it useless as you cant see the full text.

Expose (all windows) as my bottom right screen corner has changed the way I use computers and manage my windows... I find myself throwing the mouse to the corner on my Windows computer at work, much to my dismay lol
 
thirdkind said:
... ...Agreed. Flip and flip 3D are stupid because it's exactly the kind of action the user is trying to avoid, and the taskbar already tells me what document/application a window contains with text. A thumbnail doesn't really add that much. ...
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Funny, I said like the exact same thing as project and you didn't agree with me. :confused:
 
EricNau said:
Funny, I said like the exact same thing as project and you didn't agree with me. :confused:
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I agree with the part of Project's post I quoted. The rest, as you said, is pretty similar to what you said, which is why I didn't quote that part :)
 
thirdkind said:
But that's what's so crazy! The UI improvement provided by the Dock is that you actually know all the apps you have open at a glance. Remarkably similar to...the Windows taskbar. However, I really appreciate the fact that the taskbar tells me not only what apps I have open, but how many windows of each. Therefore, I know not only what applications I have open, but the actual documents I have open. I prefer this to the Window menu under OS X, which not only requires extra clicks, but also requires that the user already be focused on a specific application before selecting it. Exposé takes care of that, but again, I prefer to know at a glance. I will say though that Exposé is much more helpful than the Windows taskbar when you have many, many windows open.
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Actually, in Windows you never know which applications are running, only which windows are open. This may or may not be the same thing. Perhaps you were unaware of this, but you don't need to use the Windows menu to discover the open windows in OSX, or to change applications focus. Simply click and hold the Dock icon for any given application and a list will pop up. The biggest problem with the Windows tray is the way it uses limited horizontal space. Windows truncates the file names such that if you have too many windows open, figuring out what they are quickly becomes guesswork.
 
Project said:
Another weakness of the Task Bar is that if you have more than say, 4 apps open it becomes quite difficult to tell which is what without really focusing on the text in each window. Or if you have 4 Word documents open, and the Taskbar hasnt grouped them together you basically could have "Microsoft Wo...." for each of the 4 windows on the Task bar... effectively rendering it useless as you cant see the full text.
Click to expand...

But isn't that why you would want the apps grouped? :)

Has anyone tried Project Looking Glass? Here are some screenshots.
 
IJ Reilly said:
Actually, in Windows you never know which applications are running, only which windows are open. This may or may not be the same thing. Perhaps you were unaware of this, but you don't need to use the Windows menu to discover the open windows in OSX, or to change applications focus. Simply click and hold the Dock icon for any given application and a list will pop up. The biggest problem with the Windows tray is the way it uses limited horizontal space. Windows truncates the file names such that if you have too many windows open, figuring out what they are quickly becomes guesswork.
Click to expand...

Don't you mean vertical space rather than horizontal. :confused:
 
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