Slashdot Mirror
X vs. XP.com Site Launched
Dan Pouliot writes "I've been compiling a shootout of X vs. XP for some time, but I've finally given it it's own domain xvsxp.com. Sure, I prefer Macs, but I've tried to have this site be as objective (and thorough) a shootout as possible."
There's quite a bit in here, not necessarily all new observations but a pretty solid collection of opinions that I think would seem to reflect the bulk of users on both platforms....
These comparisons are nice but for a significant number of ppl it mainly comes down to what they are comfortable with. If people don't know any better than they really aren't missing much of anything....
Should be re-organized more fairly to compare offerings. The "Full" (as opposed to upgrade) figure should be emphasized in larger text, and Microsoft's Full pricing should precede its Upgrade pricing, since that's what compares with Apple's offering. "Family 5 pack" should be renamed "Five Licenses", and there should be a figure that shows how expensive it is to buy a box and 4 additional licenses from Microsoft. If Microsoft does not sell just licenses, then the price / box should be multiplied by 5.
OS X starts seeming much more cost-effective.
Damn... I thought this was X(11) vs. XP, not (OS)X vs. XP.
I wanna see a good X vs. X vs. XP shootout. Everybody always talks about the right tool for the job; I want to see a good analysis and adaptable scoring system that shows which is really the best for which jobs.
But, for this particular thing, my vote's for (OS)X.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
I read through most of the site, and I found it pretty balanced and objective.
When you compare Linux to Windows XP, it seems that we are not too far from having all the features we need to be wildly successful.
But when you compare Linux to OS X, it is obvious that we are so far from the goal. Even Windows XP looks like a joke compared to the things that OS X does.
I'm glad he put together all the little tidbits of the user interface and user experience. I think the Gnome and KDE developers are paying a lot of attention as well.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
The menu bar for each window was discussed by Tog.
Basically, having the menu bar at the top of the screen makes it infinitely tall, becuase you can flick the mouse to the top of the screen and click a menu. It makes a *very* noticable increase in accuracy and speed, especially for expert users.
The application vs. window issue is something that you get used to pretty quickly. If you use a mac for more than a day or so it seems pretty natural. With a modern OS with modern virtual memory, it doesn't really matter if you leave it open anyway. It actually can be a pretty nice feature, especially on a system like OS X where some apps still take quite a while to start up.
Twostep
There are 10 different types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't.
The numlock is a software thing. The mac ignores the state of numlock. I imagine the numlock is only there for people using Virtual PC or Linux/NetBSD.
And the reason the menu bar is at the top is easy - that way you can close and open documents without having to restart the application again. Mozilla on Windows means if I close the browser, I have to restart it. The alternative is the convoluted window inside a window technique Microsoft uses everywhere, such as in Word. The menu bar doesn't need to be repeated for every open document.
Now, if the application is not really document oriented (not all applications are) or if it has features that don't require interaction with the document, that's what a dock menu is for. I don't know if you're familiar with dock menus, but nice authors make frequent commands accessible from a menu attached to the application's icon in the dock.
Mail lets you check mail straight from the dock, Project Builder let's me make a new component or project from the dock, iTunes not only shows me what's playing, but it lets me pause, stop skip, or go back from the dock. Granted, those are all Apple applications, but Watson lets me check the weather, stocks, news, versiontracker, etc. all from the dock menu. Chimera - correction, Camino (kick ass browser!) lets me call up bookmarks from the dock.
Not all applications are taking advantage of them, but, the support for it is there, and good programmers will use it those situations for a non-document based applications major functions.
So, since dock menus reasonably address your need to have the menu bar always present and in the process removes the unnecessary repetition of menubars, I'd argue the single menubar approach is superior.
Besides, with overlapping windows, most of your menubars will be obscured (at least somewhat) anyway, thereby forcing you to click on it to reveal the rest. The dock is always in the foreground, so dock menus are always accessible.
Application vs Window. I don't remember if this was mentioned, but this has always annoyed me about Macs. In windows, if I close Word or some other program by clicking on the "close" button on the top right of the window, it closes. On a Mac, the window closes but the application stays open. This wouldn't be a problem for notepad or somesuch, but for large programs like Word, Photoshop, and other things, this can eat ALOT of memeory. This too, is cruft.
Allow me to disagree. First, leaving applications open on OS X doesn't use a lot of memory. For instance, I've had MS Excel running for 6 hours now, using it off and on, and it's using 0.4% of the CPU and 1.8% of memory right now with no open windows. Photoshop behaves similarly.
Second, why should closing an application's only open document quit the application? What if you want to open another document, or just leave the app open to save yourself the trouble of re-launching it? By confusing Close with Quit MS created yet another confusing UI metaphor, combining two different actions.
"Expert" users rarely make heavy use of menues - they use the keyboard.
The application vs. window issue is something that you get used to pretty quickly. If you use a mac for more than a day or so it seems pretty natural.
I've been using Macs on and off for about 8 years now and as a main machine for the last 2. I still find this behaviour annoying - although not as annoying as the lack of a quick & easy way to switch between arbitrary windows when they are obscured from view.
On the other hand, why would closing all an application's windows *not* quit it ? It's just another example of how the Mac is application-centric and not document-centric. In a document-centric UI, there should be no real distincion between documents and applications - opening a file should just give you a window with that file in it and no separate "application" icon or menu floating around somewhere. Leaving the application open is, by and large, a historical hangover from when launching applications was quite slow and the performance benefit for leaving them loaded was significant. Leaving the application open may still have benefits, but there really shouldn't be anything in the UI to create a distinction between an application and a document. It also leads to nasty situations where the user isn't aware an app is running and just keeps on trying to launch it (this happens when the developer doesn't have their application do something sensible - like open a blank document - when the user attempts to launch it while it is already running).
On the subject of the two-button mouse: the Aqua human interface guidelines specifiy that a contextual menu should not be used for any feature that is not also accessible through another UI control. Assuming for sake of argument that all software everwhere follows the Aqua HIG, you never have to control-click on a Mac. Ever.
On the subject of the menu bar: google for Fitts's Law.
On the subject of quitting an application by closing its window: some Mac applications have this behavior, some don't. The virtual memory implementation in OS X works in such a way that having extra idle apps open has essentially no effect. One you hit your physical memory limit, those applications get paged out to disk and no longer occupy physical RAM until they're activated again.
Of course, this is just another one of those KDE vs. Gnome... things. It has no answer.
I think the purpose of this web site is to demonstrate that this is not merely a question of preference, but rather that which is the better OS can be quantified, and a conclusion reached thereby. All that's left is to argue about the methodology.
I write in my journal
Yea, it's only in beta, but I've never had many problems. OS X can run OSX apps, OS 9 apps, and X11 apps. XP can run. . .Xp apps.
"Everyone I know who uses Macs alot (real computer people, not just people who only use AOL or something like that) have bought 2+ button mice for their Macs, because they are simply superior in usuability."
One of the reasons Macs rock is that application designers are forced to design for a one-button mouse--not hiding vital features up in contextual menus that only show up when your mouse is in a certain part of the screen. That's one of the biggest unsung reasons Macs will stay defaulting to one mouse--it makes better design.
And as you point out, it's a whole $10 to get a different mouse, depending on your preference--it can be more, but it doesn't have to be. So I can't see this as a serious "problem" with the platform.
Cmd-` is a big step forward in this. (It switches between an app's windows.) I still find Cmd-Tab unusable.
I use Windows XP, X11 and Mac OS X, now. My biggest complaint with Macs is not the one-button mouse thing (for god's sake, get a $10 usb 2-button mouse and be happy, or better yet a Kensington Orbit trackball); it's not the one-menu-to-rule-them-all-thing (I don't care).
It's the lack of good keyboard bindings for menu navigation. even the "Keyboard Navigation" mode doesn't really do it. I've been doing okay with Youpi Key (the best freeware ever). But I miss the glory days of Now Menus or was it Action Menus... I forget now, whichever one automatically added arrow and key control to all menus.
But when all is said and whinged... I use OS X for everything I can. - Eric
Because the application is irrelevant and should be completely transaparent. The user doesn't (and shouldn't have to) care what application is being used to open their documents. All they care about is the data in those documents, and the UI should reflect that.
An applications can run without any document window, it might be doing some house keeping at background.
What possible "processing" could an interactive application be doing in the background isn't related to a open document (or analogical equivalent) ?
In simpler terms, if you have closed all methods of interacting with an app, thus indicating you no longer want to interact with it, what possible processing could it need to be doing (excluding normal startup and shutdown procedures) ?
Most of the times when the user closes a document window, he or she doesn't intend to stop the application.
As previously mentioned, the user shouldn't have to think about the application at all. The whole concept is simply unintuitive.
When people open and close lots of document windows, it's very annoying that they have to remember avoiding closing the last window and killing the application by accident.
With a decent implementation, this shouldn't be an issue. Particularly in these days of dirt cheap RAM.
Plus, due to the excellent virtual memory system in OS X, [...]
I haven't tried to abuse the VM in OS X for a while, but last time I did (ca. 10.1.x), it was far from "excellent".
[...] you can hide all the documents of the front application or all the other applications by a single key stroke, and the background apps consumes very little CPU or RAM.
The Mac in front of me has 512MB of RAM and an uptime of less than a day. Thus far OS X has create 3 "swapfiles" of 80MB apiece for paging reasons. All that is running is X11, MSN Messenger, Mail, Safari, Terminal, Word and Excel. That's a _lot_ of memory usage.
>"Expert" users rarely make heavy use of menues - they use the keyboard.
This is absolutely true, as long as you define 'expert' users as people who rarely make heavy use of menus, but instead use the keyboard.
Or perhaps you mean to say that I'm not an expert user... after all, I've only been using computers for 20 years, and Macs for 14. And heck, I only started programming professionally 11 years ago, got my BS in Computer Science 6 years ago, and have only been professionally programming Macs full time for four years.
(I use command keys for quitting, saving, closing windows, opening new windows, occasionally for switching between programs. Almost everything else I use the menu bar, or contextual menus, for.)
Or, just possibly, what you really meant by the term "Expert" in your sentence was "users who still yearn for CLI"?
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
By confusing Close with Quit MS created yet another confusing UI metaphor, combining two different actions.
dude, that's ABSOLUTELY correct, I NEVER understood the close/quit thing until I got a mac. Then I realized that Microsoft just screwed it up when they were transferring it over from the mac interface.
I don't know about you but I would hate it if the many various text files I work with somehow chose their own app to run in. I regularly open tomcat log files in BBEdit for example. I open PDF files in preview mostly but sometime want to open them in smacrobat. I open most graphics in preview but every so often want to open them in photoshop. sometimes I want to open html files in bbedit, sometimes in safari, sometimes in omniweb. Same docs, entirely different applications.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
This whole document-centric theory is complete bullshit. The user, no matter how dumb or non-expert, very much does care what application is being used to manipulate their document. The average person probably has 3-4 applications that could open common file types (windows has at least three distinct applications by default that could view and html, gifs, jpgs, and text documents, for example) and the application they are actually using makes a huge friggin' difference. This sounds like some sort of budget HCI academic theory that has no value at all in the real world.
Without even going into how severely this theoretical 'document-orientation' deviates from the actual day-to-day necessities of using real computers to do real jobs, the windows way of doing things is very annoying in the limited way it does implement your ideal.
I have an OS X machine and a win2k machine on my desk right now. First of all, Windows is completely inconsistent about the relationship between application, taskbar entry, and document. The most annoying example of this (which I face daily) is with Word and Excel (so I'm not talking about fly-by-night shareware here. In Word, every document is its own little floaty bit that sits on the taskbar and takes up space. When you click the upper-right (visually deceptively) Fitt's-law-adhering-to 'close' X, the doc closes, and only the doc. When the last one closes, the start-up time to open a new document is insane, so I have to keep a document open and in my taskbar all the time, but that's neither here nor there. In Excel, you get a little task bar entry and a document window for each of your workbooks, but you also get a little bonus entry for the application. In Excel, though, if you click that same X, the whole application shuts down and closes all workbooks. What the shit? It's maddening.
So the whole document-centricity of windows is very confusing. Beyond that, document-centricity is the most brain-dead idea I've ever heard. The application should be completely transparent? Why? That's retarded. The application matters a lot. All they care about is the data in those documents? No, they care about *doing* stuff to and with that data, or creating it, or inputting it. The application is a tool that provides all of these capabilities. I would argue that most non-expert users think of their computers in more application-centric ways than document anyway. Think about how many moms say, 'i'm going to go online'. They don't 'compose emails' or 'download webpages', they click the AOL icon, and 'go online'. They are first using a tool, secondly, they are producing or interacting with the product of said tool. I guess it doesn't matter if you look at that XLS file in Access or Excel.
with a decent implementation
Well, name an OS that has a decent implementation. It's a real issue on every platform I've used (in addition to my previously mentioned PC and mac on my desk, the Mac is ssh'd into a freebsd box)
In simpler terms, if you have closed all methods of interacting with an app, thus indicating you no longer want to interact with it, what possible processing could it need to be doing (excluding normal startup and shutdown procedures)?
Hmmm...be available to compose emails at a hotkey press, receive instant messages, play music, help with OS navigation (like OS X's brilliant launchbar add-on), be available as a drag-and-drop target...
Also, you argue that given dirt-cheap ram, the relaunch penalty of the app should be very small (basically cause the OS is keeping the application loaded and pointlessly hiding functionality from you). Then, you argue that OS X's doc hiding is bad because it wastes mem and the VM isn't good enough?!?!? Put in the same dirt-cheap ram.
"Expert" users rarely make heavy use of menues - they use the keyboard.
Bullshit. Sure, I have all of the keyboard shortcuts for my favorite development IDE and web browser memorized, so I can do a lot of work without using the mouse. But being an expert user, I also make use of dozens of other programs that I'm half-familiar with, but don't use often enough to have all of the shortcuts memorized. So I use the mouse a lot. The Mac's single menu bar really is easier to use in this case.