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

[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

[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.

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: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 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: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.