OS X Vs. Vista — In Spandex

An anonymous reader writes "CNET UK compares Vista Vs. Apple OS X in a Romeo and Juliet, spandex-wearing, Shakespearean English style. Two guys dress up as their favorite operating system and fight with swords, guns, and fists, while a third guy, dressed as a woman, awaits the winner. 'Usability - Act 3, Scene 2: Swords clash, sparks fly and men grunt, but the showdown ends in stalemate ... [Vista] has a far better user interface than XP -- the file and application search facility is vastly improved and the cascading Start menu has been banished, but it only takes a few moments of use to discover pointless idiosyncrasies. Microsoft constantly reminds us of how great Flip 3D is, but this feature doesn't help us find the right application window much faster than Alt-Tab did. It's very time consuming when you have many application windows to flip through, and it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature ... We're calling this one a draw. They're just as good as each other, and in some cases just as bad -- a pox upon both your houses! Score: Mac OS X - 2, Windows Vista - 2'"

Comments

Delete Key

[stewbacca]

Why can't you delete a file in OS X with the delete key? Because you need to use a modifier key (in this case, the command key) so as not to inadvertently delete items. Anytime you make a critical key stroke (such as deleting), a modifier key should be used to avoid unintended consequences. What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they hit the delete key to remove a string of text, but actually where clicked on an important document? With the command key, the USER is telling the system that he or she REALLY wants to do something. It is simply sound interface design...something PC people never seem to understand, as they continually pound the "del" key on a Mac, then bitch that their Windows-centric mentality doesn't work on a Mac. This goes for nearly EVERY niggling complaint I've ever heard from a PC user about Macs...."Why doesn't this thing do it like Windows???"...um, because it is decidedly NOT Windows.

Re:Delete Key

[Coryoth]

What happens if the user isn't paying attention and they hit the delete key to remove a string of text, but actually where clicked on an important document? Then the document ends up in the "Recycle Bin"/"Trash"/Whatever-you-call-it and the user can easily recover the file. I actually think GNOME handles this quite nicely. If you hit delete it simply gets sent to the Trash, and you can quickly recover it when you spot your mistake. There is also a modifier key version (shift-delete) which lets you by pass the Trash and permanently delete a file -- the brings up a warning dialog about permanent deletion of course. Seems to elegantly combine the best of both approaches to me.

Re:Delete Key

[stewbacca]

And this is why the science of UI is so important. Users WILL make mistakes. Why is everyone so quick to blame the user? To the UI designer, this is like blaming the customer. If the users are making mistakes, it is the UI designer's job to make mistakes less likely, or less damaging when they do happen. Based on the posts so far, most of you don't understand this, which also explains the lax attitude and willingness to accept such poor UI choices from Microsoft the past 10 years.

Re:Delete Key

[Divebus]

Right after they stole everything from Xerox and co.

Here we go again... Apple was given the technology by Xerox and Apple hired some of the design team from PARC. Xerox actually invested in Apple and invited them to view their work on the GUI. Xerox wanted out of the computer business which is why they didn't think these inventions (which created the modern personal computer) had value. They gave this stuff away. HP had the same shortsighted issues with Steve Wozniak's silly little machine. Xerox didn't sue Apple over the GUI stuff until it looked like they could benefit from the Apple-Microsoft "Look and Feel" suit. Nothing came of that. The only reason Xerox went into the computer business is because IBM started making copiers. Xerox Corporate wasn't serious about it and dumped everything shortly before the Mac came out. It was Microsoft who plain flat stole it from Xerox or Apple or whoever.

Re:Delete Key

[tbo]

Yeah, that makes sense. The PC people should pick up on these little usability things and put the eject button directly next to the power button, which doesn't require holding the command key to turn the machine off.

Turning the machine off with the power button requires either that you confirm onscreen (Restart/Sleep/Shutdown/Cancel), or hold the power button down for 5 seconds to force a restart. Seems reasonable.

Or they could have you eject by deleting the drive.

That was stupid, but was fixed a while ago. Now you can eject the drive using the Eject command or with the Eject key on the keyboard. Ejecting by dragging to the trash or deleting is kept around as an option so that old-school Mac users don't get upset.

Or, even better, don't put an eject button anywhere and only have an eject button on the keyboard.

Actually, it makes sense. This allows the OS to first check whether you have open files on the CD before it ejects. If there are open files, it notifies you. Putting the button on the drive usually means the OS can't stop you from ejecting with open files and buggering things up. If you really, really want to eject a disc with open files, you can use the emergency eject button with a paperclip.

Re:Delete Key

[stewbacca]

Well my "ghetto" consists of other educational technology specialists, many of whom have written books, all of whom have published works and ALL of whom who recognize the importance of Apple Human Interface Design guidelines. If it is so outdated, then why then, do the majority of professionals in my field use it as THE authoratative reference? Why do such mundane items like cash registers and ATM machines refer to it? Why did every graduate level course I took in System Design require this document? In Tom Kelley's book The Art of Innovation (2001), he references Apple's innovation 11 times. Microsoft is mentioned once, and even then, it mentions Microsoft Word for the Macintosh. To deny Apple's continuing innovation in the field of personal computing while simultaneously lauding Microsoft, shows a stunning lack of historical perspective.

When there is a devoted science to UI, backed by years of academic research, it cracks me up to see every random hack on slashdot claim they know what is better. Why should anyone listen to some 20-year-old slashdot "power user" that has spent half their life meddling in MS operating systems?

Unlike your cirlces, I LIKE my cult of well paid educational technologists. We speak of what we know, not what we think.

Re:Delete Key

[adolf]

Eh? Just because there's a button physically on the drive, does not mean that said button overrides the wishes of the OS.

The eject button of a CD-ROM drive in Vista behaves as it should: It simply notifies the OS that the user would like to eject the media. After that, Windows finishes any pending writes and does whatever else needs done, and then ejects the media.

Which is, I'd guess, about how OS X works. Except that, on a PC, the eject button is where it belongs instead of on the keyboard.

Re:Delete Key

[RedBear]

Just because you happen to be used to the stupid idiosyncracies in the Mac interface doesn't mean that the Mac method is in any way better.

A) The power button doesn't turn the machine off unless you hold it down for 5 seconds. If you just press it, normally a dialog appears that lets you choose between Restart, Sleep, Cancel and Shutdown. Or, depending on your power preferences it will go to sleep, but that can be disabled and in my long experience Macs wake up a lot faster and more reliably than PCs.

B) Macs never had eject buttons on floppy drives or optical drives because they realized that control over the drive should normally be in the hands of the operating system, to avoid corrupting disks, losing files or crashing the computer by pulling out media while it was being accessed or when an application was still expecting it to be there. Once you let go of the idea that it's a good thing to be able to pull out media willy-nilly any old time, you'll realize it's a much smarter way of doing things.

C) Yes, dropping the disk on the trash is an odd way of doing things, but at least they make the trash change into a big standard eject symbol now whenever you pick up a drive. They have to keep that around for people who have been using Macs forever, which is a surprising number of people.

D) Besides the classic drag-to-trash method, there are eject icons next to any ejectable media in the Finder, there is an eject command in the File menu, there is an eject command in the context menu when you right-click on an ejectable drive, or you can use Cmd+E on the keyboard when a drive is selected. The eject key on the keyboard only applies to the optical drive, and I find that having that eject button on the keyboard is vastly better than hunting around for an often difficult to see button that may be different on each computer model and may even be under the desk or otherwise difficult to reach. Someone want to tell me why almost every optical drive has a tiny button, often almost flat, almost always the same color as the rest of the bezel? No thanks, that isn't easier than just having a standard keyboard key.

The same thing applies to the now-standard volume controls on every Mac keyboard. Last time I checked, even for PCs that do have volume controls they are often in different places using different icons with different on-screen displays and software interfaces. Blech. With any Mac I go to, I don't have to sit down and puzzle out how to operate the volume controls or look around for the little button to open the optical drive. They're all right there on the keyboard, and they all work the same way.

I was a PC person for many years and disliked Macs for a long time for these silly reasons as well, because I was used to having "control" over such things. After extensive experience using Macs in the last few years I've come to find that the way things are handled on the Mac side is almost always the more logical and useful way. I certainly wouldn't use the word idiosyncratic to describe very many Mac behaviors, in contrast to the stupidity I experienced in years of working with Windows. If that makes me a fanboi now, well, so be it. I'm in good company.

Linux v Vista has already been done

[MarkByers]

Ubuntu vs Vista was on the front page yesterday:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/ 1337246

Re:What?!

[Anonymous Coward]

If one is "no way as efficient" as the other, how can it be a draw? Because of the three paragraphs between "it's in no way as efficient as OS X's Exposé feature" and "We're calling this one a draw."

Re:Win2K had better searching than XP.

[Cygfrydd]

You are, of course, given the option of turning off the animated character and enabling advanced search behaviour, which makes for a far more 2k-like experience.

The summary is misleading

[Dr. Eggman]

What should have been a quote from a specific part of the article, is actually summarized in a way that indicates it was an end result. The actual article affords Vista the victory. But, maybe the article should have stopped at a tie, it seems Vista won because Mac OS has less standard acceptance and because Greenpeace declaired PC's to be more green than Macs.

Fitts' Law

[Egotistical Rant]

Why on earth in OS X is the menu bar for any given application not attached to the application itself? Why is it fixed to the top of the screen, detached from the very thing it controls?

It's called "FItts' Law." The edge-of-screen menu is a much easier target to access. This has been covered to death before. Who wrote this article? A million monkeys with typewriters?

Re:Fitts' Law

[egomaniac]

Indeed. Before I switched to Macs, I assumed that (after ten years of exclusive Windows use) the single menu bar at the top of the screen would be annoying. It was annoying for maybe ten minutes, and then it felt completely natural -- and now when I have to use Windows, I find the Windows mechanism far more annoying.

They're basically complaining "But... but... we're used to the way Windows does it!". It really isn't at all hard to get used to, and once you're used to it I don't see a downside to the Mac approach.

Re:What?!

[MouseR]

The entire article is bullcrap. It goes on to decide a draw based on Vista's and it's app's crashyness and the featureless aspect of OSX's Front Row application.

That's complete nonsense.

Re:What's the the wo .. man?

[delta4s]

Probably because in Shakespeare's time the women's roles were played by men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor#History

Re Searching in Windows sucks any way you slice it

[Jahz]

There is so much discussion about Windows 2000/XP/Vista searching here... but they all three really suck! Windows Vista sometimes wont even find "easy to locate" files when I search for them by name AND its painfully slow. Its really quite pathetic! I run Vista, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX. Anybody who uses all three would definitely rank them from best to worst as OSX, Linux, Windows. OSX takes the cake because it has Spotlight, Locate, Find and Grep.

My grandmother could work Spotlight. Its fast, accurate and searches for files based on content and name at once. Its availible at the flick of your wrist and does pretty well. Though, personally I prefer Quicksilver to spotlight because I usually just search by filename and its *instant*. There are also smart folders that you can set up for searches that are done really often.

Linux comes in second to OSX only because OSX *includes* all the nifty decades-old command line tools that Linux has. The command line utilities are not for everyone... but if you know what you're doing, you can find anything quickly. Locate will instantly find anything that has been on your computer for about a day (usually). For newer stuff, its useless. Find (find / -name blah.txt) is about as fast as Windows search and much more flexible. Then you have recursive grep for locating instances of some term inside arbitrary files.

Now Windows: After using the above platforms, searching on Windows is just painful. Sometimes it finds what I was looking for... but it can be quicker to just mount my windows drive on my Mac and do it from there :)

Re:Re Searching in Windows sucks any way you slice

[na641]

linux's locate command will find new files if you use the newer rlocate utility, instead of the older, classic, slocate utility.

rlocate is an implementation of the ``locate'' command that is always up-to-date. The database that the original locate uses is usually updated only once a day, so newer files cannot be located right away. The behavior of rlocate is the same as slocate, but it also maintains a diff database that gets updated whenever a new file is created. This is accomplished with rlocate kernel module and daemon. The rlocate kernel module can be compiled only with Linux 2.6 kernels.

An easy fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Use TweakUI to turn on classic searching in Explorer and IE. Problem solved.

In fact, the lack of TweakUI and basic configurations is probably why many people find XP to be difficult to use. It's really very intuitive once you ditch MS's crappy default settings.

Re:Re Searching in Windows sucks any way you slice

[Goodgerster]

You know, Nautilus does saved searches and Beagle is "fast, accurate and searches for files based on content and name at once". It's also available in Deskbar, the handy taskbar app, and I find Nautilus' saved searches to be rather more elegant than Finder's...

More of the same

[daybot]

Talk about re-hashing an over-discussed story with a quirky gimmick...

PCs are definitely the place to go if you want the latest technology. PCs were privileged to the first Intel Core and Core 2 Duo CPU

Well that's debatable. Apple recently launched the first 3GHz dual Core 2 Quadro Xeon based computer to my knowledge by shoving these bleeding-edge chips into the Mac Pro. Also they do invent (individually and collbaoratively) useful technology, like FireWire. Sometimes you do get things first with Apple.

Bah, when did I turn into such a Mac fanboy?

Re:Who knew

[sortius_nod]

haha... for sure, the whole XP/Vista thing is leaving a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. 2k was far better.

One thing I would like to raise is that you can't trust this article anyway. Cnet being heavily biased towards M$ (if they aren't in collusion, M$ probably has a large share in Cnet). Comparing Vista to OSX is like comparing a Japanese 4cyl Sports car with an "in your face", bling bling, paint job to an elegant european sports saloon with an understated appearance.

I know which one I'd choose...

Re:Win2K had better searching than XP.

[MobyDisk]

What you say has a technical basis: The XP search is a step back from what Windows 2000 offered. In Windows XP, suppose you have a text file name read.me containing "Hello World" in it. Do a search for *.me containing "hello" and you will find nothing. This is because the .me extension does not have a shell search object assocated with it, so XP won't open it. Windows 2000 would do what a normal tool does: open any arbitrary file, determine the encoding, and search it. This mis-feature makes the XP search useless, which has created a small market for free and cheap search tools.

Re:Re Searching in Windows sucks any way you slice

[Wheat]

mdfind, the command line interface to Spotlight, allows you to perform searches similar to locate only they are always up-to-date. It's also much faster than find. From 'man mdfind':

DESCRIPTION
          The mdfind command consults the central metadata store and returns a list
          of files that match the given metadata query. The query can be a string
          or a query expression.

Very useful in conjuction with mdfind is mdls, which will display what attributes have been indexed for a given file.