I work as a university professor, so I do a lot of editing of student papers, writing, and power point. A pc has been fine for this, but like you, I like how reliable MACs are. Any thoughts?

PS — Your website pics are amazing!!

- Home and End on the Macbook Pro are Fn-left arrow and Fn-right arrow. An extra keystroke, but I think they’ll behave the way you’d expect.

- In terms of window management, the F10 and (less so) F11 are incredibly helpful. By default, your F keys are mapped to their special functions and you have to use Fn to use them as plain ‘ole function keys, but you can turn that option off under the “Keyboard and Mouse” section of the System Preferences page.

- For closing apps versus windows, you’ll probably get yourself in the habit of using apple-q to quit, and then forget about the issue. But, I agree it’s confusing.

- The command/apple and control buttons, I agree, are totally messy and inconsistent. One place where they work really well though is if you’re using the Terminal. Command-C is copy and Control-C is the typical Unix kill command. It’s so nice (I think) having both of those shortcuts work the way I want in that scenario.

Some cool features you might not know about:
- Apple-shift-4 gives you an awesome built-in screenshot utility which lets you pick what part of the screen to grab. Throw in the spacebar and it will do the whole window.
- You probably already know this, but two fingers on the touchpad does the scroll. What you may never have noticed is that holding control and doing the two fingers up will zoom the whole screen (handy).

Solution: Cmd-~
It also works with other applications.

This was super helpful. I am considering a switch to a Mac and have been dragging my feet, mainly because a) it seems that the Macs cost 150% the price of a PC for similar specs and b) like you, my 20 years of using a Windows interface leaves me completely befuddled as I stare blankly at a Mac screen, wondering why the various programs I was using disappeared and where they went. Plus, I will likely need to buy a new laptop in a year to last me through grad school, so I’m beginning to think maybe economy is the way to go to last me through the next 12 months until then.

Your post makes some strong arguments…. Keep me posted on whether people help you with your UI gripes!

Miss you!
Brittany

Applications and data are not the same thing. When I quit the last document, I do not want to have to re-open the application to open a new document. Windows quits the app. I didn’t tell it to do that – I told it to close the document. Yeah, that’s intuitive.

Firefox, and many other ported Windows application developers do not have the mindset to produce a consistent look and feel, or functional operation. They do it there way, in both interface and implementation. The fact that Firefox, at version 3, still chooses to ignore the system wide secure Keychain for storing passwords and certificates is appalling. Any time you have to store more than “one version of the truth”, errors abound. Try Camino (Mozilla.org) – the Firefox rendering engine in an OS X native approach.

Minimize / Maximize. Talk about counterintuitive, and that is Windows. When I max a window in MSWin, it takes the whole screen, even if the document width only amount to half the screen. What a gross waste of screen real estate. Now I have to manually resize the window so that I can get to the remaining real estate to put up another reference document. Or is it that Windows users can only deal with one thing at a time? These extra steps, as well as the need to switch windows to see and remember other information that one is referring to, is a gross productivity waste. Talk about counter-intuitive and just plain abysmal design. I don’t know how many times I have given a user a large screen display, with the innate knowledge that this is the #1 productivity improvement, only to go back and watch them decrease the resolution, and open Word in full screen, with half the monitor white. Arghhh!

Installing apps by a simple drag and drop, to whatever folder you want, and the ability to drag and drop it someplace else to clean up . organize directories without corrupting the damn Windows registry is bad? Wow, to think that one should enjoy going through 12 Wizard dialogs, entering cryptic information into text fields. Talk about counter-intuitive.

So having each window with it’s own menu bar, not only wasting screen real estate, but not providing a clear idea of what app is in focus (the Mac menu bar always shows the current focus app in plain text, not just some color highlight around a window) is better? Window’s approach severely constrains flexibility in placing windows, and I only have the application window to work in, not the entire N number of displays hooked up. (BTW: Mac has had multi-monitor support since 1988 in the Mac II and IIx – even the SE, unlike Windows flakey support since XP)

If you are not thrilled with the diversity of keyboard shortcut (few people are), there are multiple applications out there to remap functions, including SYSTEM PREFERENCES > KEYBOARD AND MOUSE > KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS.

The consistently inconsistent MS Windows UI is a source of major training issues in corporate environments (I’ve run ones with over 250,000 desktops, so I speak from a position of experience). The massive diversity of Windows applications cause significant support issues, and the typical Mac user runs over 3 times as many applications as a Windows user, primarily due to minimal learning curve, once the basics are established. Apple has consistently encourage conformance with published human interface guidelines, providing a toolbox of UI elements to programmers since day 1. Many Windows ported applications chose to roll their own, increasing diversity in even common interface elements, like a save or open dialog (Office programs are a prime example, even in one suite from one developer!)

One of the biggest hurdles, which you do not touch on, is the barrier to exit built into Microsoft programs. The data formats are all proprietary, with translation being either non-existent (Visio, Exchange Calendar, etc.) to incomplete (Office suite) to standard ignorant (Internet Explorer, ActiveX, etc.) MS has build major hurdles to overcome in platform transitions, holding your data hostage.

Enjoy your newfound world, and the radically increased productivity you will realize. With less than 25% of the support time requirement (again, from large scale empirical data), and quicker adoption of new programs (less learning curve for each), along with the stability, ease of installation, and “it just works”, it should be a fun transition.

Welcome to the Mac! I found this blog by David Alison detailing his switch to the Mac. I found his writings to be entertaining and helpful to me. Seems that he encountered some of the issues you have and found ways to make it work for him

Chris
http://www.davidalison.com/2008/02/hardcore-windows-guy-switches-to-mac.html