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Vista Worse For User Efficiency Than XP
erikvlie writes "Pfeiffer Consulting released a report on User Interface Friction, comparing Windows Vista/Aero with Windows XP and Mac OS X. The report concludes that Vista/Aero is worse in terms of desktop operations, menu latency, and mouse precision than XP — which was and still is said to be a lot worse on those measures than Mac OS X. The report was independently financed. The IT-Enquirer editor has read the report and summarized the most important findings."
Aero was an overhaul of the interface designed to sell copies due to the "wow" factor. I don't think that pretty widgets were meant to be a productivity booster, and any article that says that you can be productive on a mac for more than the generic things and like 2-3 specialized apps has a built in bias.
I'm still of the opinion that vista is a productivity booster only for the RIAA/MPAA and microsoft's stock.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
At least at the time I visited the Pfeiffer site. While I'm not inclined to deny their results, it would be nice to have a little more in-depth knowledge of their methods.
'Loose' is when your pants are three sizes too big. 'Lose' is when you misuse 'loose'.
Guess what? Despite Microsoft's efforts to provide for a more fluid and agreeable interface with Vista's Aero, Pfeiffer Consulting found Vista to be even worse than Windows XP (SP2) --and of course Mac OS X. Their conclusion is backed with cold, hard research.
Where? I don't see the in the article. All I see is that Windows Vista (which I won't ever be using unless they make me at work) sucks compared to XP SP2 and OS X. I don't see why or how they came to those conclusions.
I recently downloaded Media Player 11, which shows off a bit of the Vista/Aero interface. Specifically, the minimize/maximize/close buttons in the upper left corner are done Vista-style. What I've noticed through use is that even though these buttons are physically bigger, they very frequently don't recognize my clicks, requiring me to go back and click it again, sometimes 3 or more times. Also, when I hit Alt, F, X (the sequence to exit using the menus in Media Player 10) about 4 times out of 5 the menu refuses to respond to my keystrokes, requiring me to stop, find the mouse, and click the appropriate action.
Obviously, because this is running on XP, I can't make claims as to the overall usability of Vista. However, if my experience is any indication of the way Vista behaves, I'm not suprised that such an article has been written, and I'd expect many more complaints as time goes on.
If you truly believe that OSX will make you more productive, then you are simply a fool
Fool here.
First of all, if Illustrator and InDesign are taking down your whole system, something is wrong with your configuration, your OS installation, or your hardware (RAM?). Illustrator is not the most stable app (although it's not that stable on Windows either) and I expect it to crash regularly, and once in a while InDesign freaks out, but I don't think either one has ever taken down my whole OS. One place to start: if you have the misfortune of having Adobe Version Cue installed, delete everything associated with it.
While PowerPC OS X is somewhat laggier than Intel OS X (which compares favorably to XP on similar hardware), I don't find the difference dramatic, and I don't see any usability problem on my PowerPC system. It's a 1.8GHz dual G5 (3GB RAM), so my experience should be nearly identical to yours, although Tiger is more responsive than Panther in most situations.
With that out of the way, I'll tell you exactly why OS X makes me more productive (and why this summer I'll pay through the nose for a Mac Pro, whose 4 cores and ECC RAM I really don't need, rather than buying a cheaper Conroe-based commodity tower). This is personal to me. YMMV. But judge for yourself whether I'm really a "fool."
1. Terminal. OS X is the only OS that can run Adobe CS, Microsoft Office, and a full bash implementation natively and side-by-side. This is a godsend for those of us who really need to straddle both the business-computing and UNIX worlds.
2. Integrated color management. The OS's color management, while not perfect, is good enough to ensure relatively close color matching between different systems and between screen and print output, no matter what app I'm using. XP and all Linux distros I've used are a disaster in this regard. I don't know yet about WCM (the system in Vista).
3. Expose. I'm a very visual user and text-based taskbar buttons don't communicate the nature of open windows to me nearly as well as graphical previews.
4. Mail. I've never gotten along with with Outlook or any of its numerous commercial and OSS copycats because, dammit, I really want to have all messages in my 4 IMAP inboxes displayed in the same list. Mail is the *only* mail client I've ever used that will do this. (And, no, I don't want to forward all the messages to one inbox. There's a reason I have 4 of them.)
5. Logic Pro. This won't apply to you if you're not a musician. But if you are, it's a fearsomely kick-ass mega-tool (sequencer + synthesizer + lots more) and only available for OS X.
6. OS X software development culture. OSS users are always amazed that they have to pay for so many Mac apps. But the shareware culture promotes developer accountability. Independent OS X software, by and large, is an order of magnitude more professional and useful than such software on either Windows or Linux. OS X's unique development frameworks also help with this by allowing developers to concentrate on usability and features rather than basic nuts and bolts.
7. Easily comprehensible directory structure. A non-n00b Windows or Linux user could start playing with the Finder and locate *anything* important to operation of the graphical side of an OS X system within a few minutes. This makes troubleshooting a simpler and faster process, especially when compared to Windows, where neither file nor folder names are remotely comprehensible.
8. Security (yes, this is a productivity booster). No UAC; the machine rarely asks for admin rights, and when it does, you need to give a password. No time fighting malware of any sort. No instability or slowdowns from malware.
9. OS X text rendering. Compared with other OS's, it's magic. Preserves both character shapes and legibility without any visible compromise. Not only does the increased legibility improve productivity, but it also is a big part of the reason people find OS X systems so visually striking.
If I thought about it longer I could probably figure out a few more -- but I've got work to do... productively.
now if only CMD was as good as bash and you could use it exclusively (like me). Somebody needs to do a comparison of efficiency when using a GUI (any GUI) and the terminal and see how that pans out.
Ok, here's something. I have a music directory. Filled with.. well.. Music!.. I wanted to search for a file i KNEW was in there. So i typed it in the Vista search ( with indexing ) and it gave me a bunch of files.. None of which i was looking for. So i turned off indexing and tried again. Better results but still not what i was looking for. Started up cmd.exe, chdir to the music directory, and used "dir /s/a *mymfile*". It found exactly what i was looking for. It's stuff like that which put me off the search function in Vista.
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.