Quantifying What's Better About OS X
My place of employment is a corporation with a deeply ingrained culture of using Microsoft products. When I started my job I had a temporary PC (until my permanent PC would arrive) and I tried using it. A few weeks in I brought in my disused first generation Macbook, connected it, setup my Exchange email account in Mail and I’ve been happily and efficiently working away ever since.
Now that Macbook’s lease is soon to end and I was hoping my employer would fund a Mac, rather than a PC, to replace it. This is an issue of contention. Both my boss and co-workers ask often “why can’t you just use Windows?” After using a PC for many years and now using Mac for many years the difference is crystal clear in my mind yet difficult to quantify and thus, difficult to communicate to people who’ve never experienced the difference.
Even Marco, while making good points brings it down to design, something very difficult quantify. What follows is a list of things you can quantify. It’s just a selection of features and functionality that ship with or are exclusive to OS X that make using a Mac more pleasant and productive.
Spotlight: I use Spotlight to launch apps, find files, notes, emails, people, do calculations and look up dictionary and thesaurus definitions. It’s instant and integrates perfectly with all applications, including third party applications. It’s Google for your own data but faster and more accurate.
Colour labels: I mark files that are currently relevant with red labels, personal projects with blue, old university stuff with purple. If I’m watching a series of TV shows I’ll label each one I’ve watched so I instantly know where I’m up to when I get back. It’s not a hack, they appear in every kind of file view, you can create smart folders using them as filters. It’s one simple solution to many small problems.
MobileMe: I turned on MobileMe (then .Mac) two years ago and it’s worked invisibly and flawlessly since. It’s a massively underrated service. I modify a contact’s details at home, the next day I go to work, it’s there. I find that contact on my phone, it’s there. I’m on a friend’s computer, I go online and it’s there. MobileMe is a classic case of having something just work with zero administration.
The System Wide Dictionary: Across every native application, in every text field, area, control or any slab of text whatsoever, you get the same system wide spell checker and dictionary. You don’t need to be inside a word processor, spell checking exists the same way in a webpage’s text fields, your Twitter app, your instant message client, everything.
The system wide dictionary doesn’t just provide spell checking but hover your mouse over any word in any native application and hit command+option+d for an inline, contextual dictionary definition. The fact this functionality isn’t available in Air and Flash (because they’re not native) is one of the many frustrating things about using those applications.
The Dictionary Application: OS X ships with a beautiful application that interfaces with the New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Apple’s own dictionary of terms and Wikipedia. The app works like a wiki with clicking any word taking you to the definition for that word with linear forward and back navigation. It’s gorgeously typeset and even formats Wikipedia articles into a paired-back, more readable format. Like so many other OS X applications, Dictionary also integrates with Spotlight. Every time I come across an unheard of word I I type it into Spotlight, hit enter and read the definition in Dictionary. I use it the same way for thesaurus references over and over again while composing blog posts, email messages and writing documents. (Already I’ve used it 6 times during this post alone). The time taken between wanting a definition or synonym and getting one is limited only by how fast you can type.
The Command Line and other Unix Things: I’m not a huge command line user but having powerful, lower level control of your system is useful and empowering. No matter what an application might tell you, ultimately you’re in control. Accessing your computer and others remotely with ssh, interacting with tools like irb, launcd, cURL and wget and stringing them together with bash scripts can be a lifesaver in some situations, simply fun to play with in others. Otherwise complicated problems can be easily solved with lightweight scripting and the command line. There’s applications like Git which are so conceptually complicated and difficult to visualise that text on a command line is simply the most clear and efficient method of interaction.
With the command line your entire system is totally at your disposal. Nothing’s hidden for your “safety” or your own good.
Exposé: I rarely used Exposé until I had to use a smaller screen at work, then it became invaluable. There’s simply no more intuitive method for managing many windows on a single screen.
Drag and Drop: Just some examples. Drag a file onto an application in the dock and it opens in that application. Drag a snippet of text onto Safari and it performs a Google search with that string. Drag an MP3 onto iTunes and it’s added to the library. Drag multiple files or a folder onto TextMate and it creates a new project using those files. Drag a file onto Mail and it creates a new email with that file as an attachment. Drag a folder from the Finder into a Terminal window and it inserts the path to that folder. Dragging something but can’t see the window where you want to drop it? Start dragging, hit an Exposé key, drag it onto the window you want. If your drop destination isn’t in an open window drill down through folders by hovering until it opens, there’s no need to prepare windows ready for a drag.
The extent to which drag and drop is integrated into the system is staggering. It’s totally intuitive and saves a lot of time.
Quick Look: Instantly review a file’s contents without having to sit through a slow application launch.
Preview: An instantly launching image viewer and lightweight editor. I use Preview so I don’t have to open Fireworks or Photoshop to do a simple resize, crop or pick colours from an image. It has more advanced but less frequently used colour adjusting controls. It’s an app that ships with OS X you take for granted until you’re on a Windows machine left with MS Paint or the absurdly-named Windows Picture and Fax Viewer as options.
Screenshots: Command+shift+3 takes a full screenshot, command+shift+4 allows you to select an area of the screen, command+shift+4 followed by the spacebar automatically snaps to windows for a clean single window screenshot with shadows. All output PNG files directly and immediately to the desktop, there’s no need for an image editor, no need for manual post-cropping and no need for exporting. Taking screenshots works how taking screenshots should work.
Natural Language Recognition: If there’s anything that looks like a phone number or an address in a Mail.app email message it’s recognised as one and can be sent to Address Book. If there’s anything that looks like a date and time in a Mail.app email message it’s recognised as an event and can be sent to iCal. It’s something very simple but it saves having to manually transfer data between applications that a computer should be able to take care of.
The Dock: Not just an application launcher or drag target but a notifier, application controller and organiser. Unread messages, file transfer progress, completed downloads, new instant messages, know what applications are open all at a glance from the Dock. Control applications without having to show the app’s window. Put anything in there you want quick access to: files, folders or web bookmarks without sullying your desktop.
Automator: Automator makes repetitive tasks easy to farm out to your computer, who’s much better at them. Need to crop a bunch of images with the same dimensions? Rename a set of files based on a find and replace? Or extract the text from multiple PDFs? Automator can do it for you.
Time Machine: Backup both a chore and important. I don’t want to setup backup processes, I don’t want to have to make sure it works, I don’t want to have to go through a three hour roll back restore process to get an old version of a file. Until you need it, Time Machine is invisible, when you do need it the process of restoring files is quick, simple and totally painless. It’s how backup should work.
DigitalColor Meter: Pick colours from anything on the screen, hit a shortcut to copy the value to the clipboard. Very few applications have a colour picker built in (and so they shouldn’t) so a tool that transcends applications and the operating system makes sense. DigitalColor Meter does its sole job so well I’ll often still use it to pick colours from graphics applications that have their own picker built in.
These are just a few of the tangible parts that make using a computer running OS X a joy. Not because interacting with the OS is a joy but because the OS does it’s job, letting you spend your time on what you really want to be doing. This is before taking into account the much more important but difficult to quantify experience as a whole. When these great tools and features come together with a consistent, seamless and clearly thought out design the advantage is amplified. Mac OS X is greater than the sum of it’s parts but even the parts make a pretty good case on their own.