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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'"
[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.
XP's searching capabilities are shite compared to Windows 2000. What the hell is up with that stupid dog image when using the XP search? So it's better to compare Vista's searching with that of Windows 2000. At least then you're comparing Vista's capabilities against something that's usable.
Same with the Start menu. It's really simple and sensible under Windows 2000. But then XP came along and made it really awkward to use. So again, don't compare against XP, since it was a step backwards. Compare against Windows 2000!
And yet again poor old linux if left alone in the corner with only a lute for company..
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At what point can you call a spade a shovel?
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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.
I believe you are hitting a sore point for many. The tireless ability of people to call MS products the 'standard' that all other products should emulate is, in a word, tiring.
Even if you invent something better than Windows it will still be compared to Windows and declared lame because it isn't Windows. This is what Apple and the Linux distributions are up against. As pointed out, it's arguably fair to say that Vista isn't the best product that MS has ever rolled out, yet it's the new 'standard' that people will use.
Reviewers shouldn't be comparing OSs head to head. They should be comparing them to a neutral set of standards that judge ease of use, performance, stability etc. If the top score possible on such a test is 10, and Vista only gets an 8 it is no longer 'the' standard, at which point people can make the decision for themselves. If both Apple and Microsoft only get an 8, then the choice between them is one of taste, not perceived performance.
In that vein, if a Linux distro only got a 6, well, it lets the community in general know what to fix next.
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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?
What's it say about these guys if they can't find a real woman to play the part of the woman? ;P
Today, I had to get a new Mac Mini. Turning it on and getting to the desktop took all of 3 minutes. I had it updated, and configured to my liking in about 45 minutes (most of which was taken up downloading a ton of updates, as his Mini had been on the shelf for a while at CompUSA.
In contrast, a few weeks ago I was working for a company that needed a new laptop. The laptop we got was very similar to the Mini I purchased today. Intel Core 2 Duo, and it actually had much more memory stock in it (still need to crack open the Mini and upgrade to 2GB). It took a full 45 minutes to get Vista to boot for the first time. Between just getting the software updated (which was a super painfully slow process in comparison), it took over 3 hours to get it even usable, let alone the hour it took to install Microsoft Office 2007, and then update it. Then it took another few hours to figure out how to Vista actually, well, less like Vista. This was some Acer laptop BTW.
I liked Windows XP in comparison a lot, and still think that Windows 2000 was super-stable in comparison to XP. I still haven't figured out what Vista does for the end-user that XP doesn't do- asides from being a PITA and making you purchase new hardware. In fact, I'm going to do a Bootcamp install of XP in a few minutes.
Tibbon
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That it would take XP and Vista for people to understand that Windows 2000 was "simple and sensible."
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
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
Actually the Vista dude would have a chaperone too.
"You are attempting to take off her bra. Cancel or Allow?"
Am I missing something?
Microsoft buys more ads than Apple at C|NET?
Actually, it's more complex that that - C|NET can't go recommending OSX over Vista, even if they want to.
They depend on people thinking they're in-touch, relevant, right, have some foresight, etc. If they truly love the Mac (and it appears they do), let's think about what would happen if they recommended OSX over Vista. First, 5 years from now, I don't expect OSX to have over 50% marketshare in the commercial PC OS space. So, Vista will be what more people use. If C|NET starts recommending OSX, people will start to think that nobody listens to their recommendations, that they pick the wrong racehorses, that they don't 'get' what their readership wants [to hear], and that's going to affect their bottom line. Part of this is recognition that even with their industry presence, they don't have enough power to influence something this big.
But declaring a tie -- that's the strongest possible recommendation C|NET can give to OSX and by using their prose to point out its advantages, while ignoring them in the executive summary - read between the lines. Just don't expect to find what you're looking for on the lines.
My God, it's Full of Source!
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