Travel Technology - switching back

I hate to say it, but it has been a frustrating experience for me to use the apple powerbook after using windows, and I think I'm going to have to send it back.

Reasons:

1) Not all of the websites that I have to go to for my work will accept safari (even hidden as something else with the debug menu changed). So I end up having to use several different browsers, instead of just one (yes, I've tried them all, and not one will work consistently accross the board)

2) It seems to be impossible to open a window and size it exactly to the screen size on opening, as you can with windows. You have to resize it/move it around, etc. Who has the time for that, and why I ask you would Apple build computers with large screens if the windows only open to half the screen size??

3) The "finder" window is the only thing similar to windows explorer, and isn't half as easy to use. Another thing, once you change settings in the finder window (ie: move things around so you can see the whole name of a file), it "forgets" them, and doesn't save the next time you open it.

Since my productivity depends on the computer I use, I am going to have to send this one back. I am really disappointed that it isn't as easy to use/user friendly as I was led to believe.

Whatever you feel most comfortable with will be most right for you.

For me, I prefer my Apple (fairly recent switcher) although it took me some time to get used to some aspects of it.

1. You may be unlucky with websites. Every site I use regularly is fine with Safari - the only one I haven' t been able to use is Yahoo's Launchcast but it's not essential so I don't mind.

2. Why do windows only use half the available width of the screen? Clicking the green button will take them to full height and as wide as Mac OS thinks you need them. The idea is that you can work on more than one window at the same time. I spent the first week or so resizing them all to fill the screen until I got comfortable with being able to see them all stacked. It makes it very easy to switch between programmes which I do regularly.

3. Not sure what settings you're talking about. If I ask the Finder to save things in Column View with small icons, it does remember that...

Sorry, it wasn't right for you - good luck with the next computer.

You mention the 3 exact reasons I'm still on a PC. Sometime I just WISH I could use a Mac as my main PC, I'd really want to... But it just isn't for me...

"You may be unlucky with websites. Every site I use regularly is fine with Safari - the only one I haven' t been able to use is Yahoo's Launchcast but it's not essential so I don't mind." Almost every secure work website of the three companies I am working with now will not allow me to use the intenet unless it is "disguised" and then I still have to use 2 different browsers.

"Clicking the green button will take them to full height and as wide as Mac OS thinks you need them." Excuse me, but why would Mac OS be the one to decide how wide I want the screens to be?? I actually started wearing glasses because of a previous job where I had to look at small digits all day. I don't my eyesight to get any worse because Mac OS won't resize the windows to the full screen! I might as well have gotten the 12" screen, because that is the biggest that the screens open up to in Mac!

"Not sure what settings you're talking about. If I ask the Finder to save things in Column View with small icons, it does remember that"

It doesn't remember how you may have resized it so you can actually see the entire document name in the view in column view. Column view seems to be the closest thing Apple has to explorer, and it just isn't the same.

I'm getting a thinkpad!

I have been trying out Mozilla Firefox lately, and so far, almost all the websites I frequent are compatible, YMMV. The tabbed browsing feature makes web browsing with a consistent window size an absolute breeze, I can't believe I've done web browsing any other way for so long! I will acknowledge that some web browsers will not browse all websites correctly, I find the same thing with windows based browsers as well, IE included.

In terms of being able to maximize a window, you already know about the green button on the top left of each window. The reason why it does not duplicate the maximize button in windows is quite simple: The mac user interface from day one allows one to have many windows open on the desktop at the same time, so what's the sense of having one window take over the entire desktop? Maybe twisted thinking from your point of view, but it makes sense to me. I have always hated the maximize button on my windows desktops! ;)

I think the bottom line is you're trying to make a Mac work like Windows...it simply won't! They are decidedly different GUI's, with some similarities. I use both for my work, but look forward to the day that everything can be done on my PowerBook. I recommend to all my friends making the windows to mac transition a healthy reading of David Pogue's excellent book "Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual" it will make it a lot easier, sorry, my copy is already lent out to a good friend! After reading it, the "Mac" way of doing things makes more sense to those who have been windows users for a long time and are frustrated with their Mac.

You might want to take a look at www.versiontracker.com and maybe find a free (or cheap) utility that will enhance the functionality of the mac desktop. I just did a search under OS X for the word "desktop" and came up with 11 pages worth of downloads, and 5 pages worth of downloads for the word "finder." Perhaps you might find a cool utility that will make panther behave the way you want it to? :p

I hate to say it, but it has been a frustrating experience for me to use the apple powerbook after using windows, and I think I'm going to have to send it back.

How long have you been using the Powerbook? Have you read any books for switchers, or books/tutorials going over OS X and how to navigate it? There are ways to use/set up OS X that will not result in most of the issues you've brought up. It just takes a little time to become familiar with them and to learn the best ways to navigate the GUI.


1) Not all of the websites that I have to go to for my work will accept safari (even hidden as something else with the debug menu changed). So I end up having to use several different browsers, instead of just one (yes, I've tried them all, and not one will work consistently accross the board)

I get by with Safari about 97% of the time and Exploder the other 3%. Personally, I don't find it difficult to use two browsers at one time when needed. Since both can be open at the same time, it has very little impact on my workflow. It sounds like you have the advantage of knowing which browser you need to use to access the site you're going to (most have to try in one browser and then try in the other, but since these are sites you go to regularly, that's one step fewer for you). If both browsers are open, it adds one additional keystroke to switch to the other browser. You'd probably need to do this anyway if you were using another application before accessing the web site.


2) It seems to be impossible to open a window and size it exactly to the screen size on opening, as you can with windows. You have to resize it/move it around, etc. Who has the time for that, and why I ask you would Apple build computers with large screens if the windows only open to half the screen size??

Have you made use of the "Zoom" command? That will, in one stroke, set a window to whatever size it was last. That said, the fact that you can resize the windows like you can, and that they don't by default take up the entire screen is because the gui is designed to be more conducive to multitasking. The idea is that you can have several applications, several windows open at one time. Windows users are more used to looking at one window at a time. That's why, by default, each window occupies the entire screen. The Mac OS gui was designed to work more like the desktop, with several layers of documents that you can switch between, maybe with another document off to the side that one refers to while working, iTunes minimized in the corner, etc.

I typically have my iChat buddies on one side of my screen, 6 SAP windows cascaded across my main work area, an Excel spreadsheet below them, iTunes in the corner, a Real Audio stream of This American Life going above iTunes when iTunes isn't playing, mail either stashed in the dock or at the bottom of the screen, and other, less frequently used applications stashed in the dock. Works great for me. I switch between them all using Exposé if they're hiding under too many windows.

3) The "finder" window is the only thing similar to windows explorer, and isn't half as easy to use. Another thing, once you change settings in the finder window (ie: move things around so you can see the whole name of a file), it "forgets" them, and doesn't save the next time you open it.

There's no solution to this one yet, but the next version of OS X is coming out in January, and it may address it. If it doesn't there may be a third party app that does.


Since my productivity depends on the computer I use, I am going to have to send this one back. I am really disappointed that it isn't as easy to use/user friendly as I was led to believe.

When changing platforms, it's inevitable that one's productivity will be affected for a while. Eventually, the things one can do faster on the new platform will equal or surpass the things that may take longer.

It's all pretty subjective though. Everyone's going to have a different solution that works best for them. Maybe you've given it time, looked at the books, tutorials, etc, and it's still not for you. That's cool. But if you haven't and are willing to try out a few things you haven't yet, there are some resources out there.

3) The "finder" window is the only thing similar to windows explorer, and isn't half as easy to use. Another thing, once you change settings in the finder window (ie: move things around so you can see the whole name of a file), it "forgets" them, and doesn't save the next time you open it.
Very strange...I'm running 10.3.4 and I'm able to move icons around in the finder window, then close the window and reopen it with the icons exactly as I left them! I even went into list view, resized the column, closed and reopened the window, and the column remained the same size as I had modified it to. My computer doesn't seem to be forgetting anything! Or am I missing something here with what you're experiencing?

What ScottC said.

I tried. I really, really tried. For six months I tried. It's so...pretty. But it's also psycho and thinks it knows better than I do how I want things, with no option to change.

And I don't care *how* fast that chip can do Gaussian blurs in Photoshop, the OS in general crawls compared to Windows on a comparable machine.

I get by with Safari about 97% of the time and Exploder the other 3%. Personally, I don't find it difficult to use two browsers at one time when needed. Since both can be open at the same time, it has very little impact on my workflow. It sounds like you have the advantage of knowing which browser you need to use to access the site you're going to (most have to try in one browser and then try in the other, but since these are sites you go to regularly, that's one step fewer for you). If both browsers are open, it adds one additional keystroke to switch to the other browser. You'd probably need to do this anyway if you were using another application before accessing the web site.

This could quite easily turn into a nasty academic debate, but... almost all of the time, I have found Safari to be a far superior browser to IE on Windows as far as properly interpreting and rendering the W3C's HTML and CSS specifications. It does what it has been told to and what is right.

Where it all goes wrong is that IE typically doesn't do what is right, and due to their large user base (and the fact that a lot of web designers only test on IE), a lot of people "code around" IE's problems, which ends up breaking other browsers. Then there's also the problem of certain web sites which browser-detect and only let their "approved" browsers through (like my old bank did). My solution was to grab the URL of the site after I passed through their "browser detector," then Safari worked fine.

Overall from the perspectives of security, speed, and adherance to proper web standards, in my opinion (since this is all pretty much opinion-based!), Safari is superior.

I will concede that the Mac isn't for everyone. Some people have learned the ways of Windows and don't want to lose their old habits, and that's fine. That's one of the reason I'm glad that Apple is making some of their products (iPod, Airport Express) available on the Windows platform, so they're able to still able to see the benefits of their innovation from people who aren't ready to or don't want to make the full switch.

My two cents :)

The comparison with IE doesn't fly, as Mozilla seems to work perfectly on 99.9% of all websites for me...

The comparison with IE doesn't fly, as Mozilla seems to work perfectly on 99.9% of all websites for me...

And Safari seems to work perfectly on 99.9% of websites for me :) I'm just commenting that Safari's rendering engine seems to be more standards-based than IE's (to Mozilla's credit, I would say its is, too). This is just my experience, though, and like I said, different platforms for different folks :)

Excuse me, but why would Mac OS be the one to decide how wide I want the screens to be?? I actually started wearing glasses because of a previous job where I had to look at small digits all day. I don't my eyesight to get any worse because Mac OS won't resize the windows to the full screen!

Generally, having a bigger window won't make the text any bigger unless you also increase the font. You're not changing the resolution of the display - just how much is displayed in the window at any one time.

The Mac doesn't open windows and leave acres of empty space in the right hand of the window. If you're looking at a spreadsheet with 10 columns of data, why do you need to see the 22 columns that you do if it's full screen. The Mac figures that it's better to show you the 10 columns and let you see what else you're working on, whether that's the data input document in Word, the music you're listening to in iTunes, your desktop picture or whatever. As I said, when I first switched, I spent valuable seconds dragging things to full-size. Now I spend valuable seconds trying to persuade Windows to open at less than full screeen and rearranging documents to recreate my Mac desktop working style - personal preferences, how boring life would be if we were all the same!

Thinkpads are nice laptops - the only non-Mac I'd consider personally. But try to get somewhere you can look at the screen before you buy if you're concerned about the smallness. IIRC Thinkpads and Viaos have a higher native resolution than Powerbooks but that will mean that the things on the screen are smaller. You can, of course, reset the resolution but it may affect picture quality if you're watching DVDs etc.

One more thing...

In another thread you mentioned that you began using your Powerbook on Friday. That's really not nearly enough time to acclimate to a new platform. Give yourself at least a month to really learn the ins and outs. During that time, as mentioned before, it would really be a benefit to have some books to reference, or go swing through a tutorial. Tacky Shirt (http://www.tackyshirt.com/) has a decent one.

You have noticed a few areas where the interface may be slower than your previous platform, but to learn the areas where the interface is faster may take some time to discover and then to integrate into your routine.

Anyway, main point: a weekend isn't long enough to make a conclusion on whether or not OS X will work for you.

Some other Mac resources:
http://www.versiontracker.com shareware
http://macsurfer.com Mac news, links to Mac web sites (resources, guides, forums, tips)
http://support.apple.com Apple's support pages (the discussions are particularly useful)
http://www.peachpitpress.com (good resource for books, Williams' The Little Mac Books are good for new users)
http://www.davidpogue.com David Pogue's web site

Finally, consider visiting the nearest Apple Retail store (http://www.apple.com/retail) and attending the workshops they offer regularly. There's a schedule of upcoming events on the page for each store.

I would offer that a weekend is enough time to determine if one has the time necessary to devote to learning to switch to OSX.

I'm a *NIX user. I have been for 20 years. I use the 'vi' editor, as for the first several years, it was the only one I was exposed to (barring more primitive ones). I would love to learn the 'emacs' editor, but I lack the necessary time to devote to making the switch.

I would offer that a weekend is enough time to determine if one has the time necessary to devote to learning to switch to OSX. I would love to learn the 'emacs' editor, but I lack the necessary time to devote to making the switch.

This is another issue that I didn't even really bring up.. if the OS is so easy to use, why should I need to have to spend a significant amount of time (that I don't have) modifying it to suit my needs? Why should I have to read a book about "switching" to sell me to the idea?

It really isn't as though I didn't want it to work for me, I guess I just wasn't prepared for the OSX way of multitasking (live and learn).

I guess I am a multitasker, because I always have tons of windows open, when using Windows (my boyfriend even makes fun of me about it), however I like to maximize the amount I can see when I am working on one document/spreadsheet/whatever.. With the tabs on the bottom of the screen, I can easily switch from one program to the next.

Now, I know that with the toolbar in OSX, I can do that also, but I still have to resize most documents to make them fit the full screen, since the max screen is only half of the actual screen.

Actually, I was kind of curious how small the windows are for the 12" monitors, if they are only half the screen, that means that they are probably 5" across! Compressed text/data more difficult to read?

Here's another couple of things I noticed that were missing, over the brief weekend: the keyboard has a "delete" key, that is really a backspace key on a PC, and no "forward delete" key (which is really the "delete" key) on a PC. And, there is no "home" key. Maybe those are things that I can modify or use some kind of shift "apple" key for, but frankly, who has time to learn all of these things?

And to put the final "nail in the coffin", I just don't think the powerbook is quite as good for the "road warrior" as a Thinkpad or other laptops. I decided to bring it on the road with me this week to give it a final "test drive" before i sent it back, and after putting it in my laptop bag only once (in the protected PC section), I pulled it out to find that the sides were already scratched up!.

And low and behold, after doing a little research I found several websites that showed others having similar problems:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=225060

http://www.powerbookcentral.com/features/pbquality3.shtml

http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-84137


I guess it wouldn't have mattered to me before, but it sure is an eye opener to read some of these websites after hearing so much about Apple's customer service and support!

I am still in the 14 day grace period, so I should have any trouble returning it... I hope!

I'm a *NIX user. I have been for 20 years. I use the 'vi' editor, as for the first several years, it was the only one I was exposed to (barring more primitive ones). I would love to learn the 'emacs' editor, but I lack the necessary time to devote to making the switch.

That reminds me that I still have to order a vi mug. ;) Even though Yale T is my all-time favorite language, I've never managed to get into the Emacs mindset.

Anyway, to also angle at the subject from the Un*x side of the fence, over the past 10 or so months I've been coming to the conclusion that the Aqua interface on the Powerbook is "neither here nor there." I was hoping for NeXTstep with some concessions to pre-OS X users, but the elegance just isn't there. (Point-to-focus is impossible?) I daily use Windows, OpenLook under Solaris, and OS X. That the Sun interface is the least aggravating is a bummer.

This is another issue that I didn't even really bring up.. if the OS is so easy to use, why should I need to have to spend a significant amount of time (that I don't have) modifying it to suit my needs? Why should I have to read a book about "switching" to sell me to the idea?

because you are used to something that is different. a mac user would have similar issues moving to windows.

Here's another couple of things I noticed that were missing, over the brief weekend: the keyboard has a "delete" key, that is really a backspace key on a PC, and no "forward delete" key (which is really the "delete" key) on a PC. And, there is no "home" key. Maybe those are things that I can modify or use some kind of shift "apple" key for, but frankly, who has time to learn all of these things?

fn+delete = forward delete (this one admittedly is not obvious).
fn+cursor keys = home/end/pageup/pagedown. and if you look at those keys you will see home/end/pageup/pagedown written on them in a color that matches the fn key.

space is limited on a laptop keyboard, so lesser used keys need a modifier key. however, you can always plug in a full sized usb keyboard (and it need not be from apple).

I am still in the 14 day grace period, so I should have any trouble returning it... I hope!

you might have a restocking fee, depending on where you bought it.

I was hoping for NeXTstep with some concessions to pre-OS X users, but the elegance just isn't there. (Point-to-focus is impossible?) I daily use Windows, OpenLook under Solaris, and OS X. That the Sun interface is the least aggravating is a bummer.

it is not that it is impossible (there are some utilities that can add it), but that it is fundamentally incompatible with the single menubar at the top of the screen. if you had focus-follows-mouse, the menubar would need to change depending on which application owned the window to which you pointed.

it gets even more interesting when you are using an application and move the mouse to the menubar to select something, and in doing so, move it across several other application windows. then what happens?

it is not that it is impossible (there are some utilities that can add it), but that it is fundamentally incompatible with the single menubar at the top of the screen. if you had focus-follows-mouse, the menubar would need to change depending on which application owned the window to which you pointed.

Aside from switching to X11, pray tell!

[Edited to add: The dock could be used to control the menu bar. I just want non-autoraising talk to the window of choice.]

If it takes a month to get used to the Mac then it's no wonder that it's not much of a success.

(please note: Apple user baiting here ;) )

This is what ultimately put me off buying Mac. Yes, they are nice. Yes, I know a Windows user who switched and is very happy. Yes, I know its just supposed to work but and for most people I'm sure it does but......... When you give something that is designed "just to work" (case in point, me and a Blackberry over the last weekend) to someone who is used to "creatively coercing things to work exactly how he wants it", sparks wlll fly.

I once had a really bad time with a Mac at a Cyber Cafe in Suva and it was fortunately just so obvious to the owners of the place.

The unfortunate fact is that any modern operating system has to do complex things with a complex piece of machinery. You can't control a 777 with the user interface of a tricycle.

Therefore, no matter how much simpler and intuitive the Mac interface may be than Windows, someone whose mental model of the world matches that of Windows cannot switch in a weekend. This has little to do with making the computer work and everything to do with adjusting his/her mindset to the differences - things like default window behavior, for example. Neither is inherently better or worse, but if your entire background tells you that it should do A and it does B, it feels wrong.

Same for the "real" Delete key. Did God, however one may conceive of him/her, ordain what the Delete key should be? If not, there is no such thing as a "real" Delete key. What the post that mentioned this key means, if we think about it, is that the poster is used to one kind of Delete key. To him/her, that kind is "real." Any other kind is not. That's not a technology issue. It's a mind-set issue.

That's the value of the books on switching. They alert you to the subconscious speed bumps.

I don't know how many people here remember switching from character-based to GUI word processors, but I watched people do it. With the character-based ones, you'd say "italicize," then use the arrow keys to tell it what to italicize. With the GUI kind, italicizing existing text works the other way around: first you select what you want in italics, then and only then do you say "italicize." If you try to do it the way you're used to, you get frustrated. Neither approach is inherently better than the other, but the mind-sets are 180 degrees apart.

So I'd say, if there's any objective reason to switch, to give it time. You didn't get used to Windows in a day or a week. Getting unused to it and getting used to anything else - different, regardless of whether better or worse - will take time too.

(Truth in advertising: I use both, prefer Mac.)

I recently ditched all my PC junk for a 17" G4 Powerbook. Best thing I have done in a long long time. :) ^