The Big Switch to Mac part 2 – Apple Software and Mac vs PC

For those of you just joining us here is the summary so far – I have bought a Mac and spent the last post giving a brief history of why I think there is an Apple resurgence and what I believe the two defining Apple design concepts are: a simple to use interface and the need to make a well designed desirable object.  Obviously one of these will transfer over easier then the other, so how do you go about making software desirable?

At the very base of it all what do all operating systems have in common be it on your phone, laptop, set top box, watch or microwave?  They all provide the structure for you the user to interact with the device.  How they go about this is a very different matter and indeed causes many an argument over which operating system is better on many Geek forums across the land.  The argument has three sides and goes something like this:

• PC: We are the everyman solution, everyone uses windows and because everyone has one the computers are very cheap.  We are the defacto choice for business and our office suite is again the industry standard.
• Mac: Windows is just a rip off of Mac OS and always has been.  Name one thing the PC can do that the Mac can’t.  Oh yeah and our hard ware is better to!
• Linux: will everyone keep it down I am to busy typing in commands to deal with all of you, and oh yeah my OS is free!

Do they have a point? well they all do in some cases.  Ignoring the Linux issue for now (and to be honest that is likely to continue) and concentrate on the Mac vs PC debate.

Taking a look the stats it is hard to argue about who is winning with Microsoft having between a 96% and 98% market share, with Apple coming in second and other OS’s making up the remaining decimal places.  That right there is a tough figure to argue with, do you know any other industry where one corporation holds such sway over a market sector?  Windows is the industry standard with nearly every computer sold coming with it in one form or another and when most people think of computers they don’t think of the typically boring beige box but the interface that comes with it.  Microsoft really spearheaded the movement of computer strictly for business to the idea that it is something that can be found in most homes in the world. 

However if you look at the evolution of Windows against that of Mac OS you seem some disturbing trends in which Microsoft lags behind the Mac OS and implements an idea that Apple had, and normally that is done badly.  Examples? sure taking Windows Vista and Windows 7 and comparing it against OS X you have:

The Aero interface.  included in Vista was the much touted Aero interface.  This graphical overhaul included translucent windows and a “Rolodex” style rotational system for switching between applications with active previews of each app as it goes.  Also included in Aero was the preview of programs on the start bar.  These are al ideas borrowed from OS X, firstly the translucent display came with OS X and wowed users with it’s smooth implementation and lack of system over head to use.

 

(The Aero Interface)

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Expose)

 

 

 

 

The “Expose” system allows users with a single key or button press to arrange all of their active windows so they can all be viewed at once, these windows are all live and displaying current data with the user just having to click on the app they want as opposed to scrolling through.  The dock in OS X (the bar at the bottom of the screen) doubles as both an application launcher and a preview of minimised apps.  The MS implementation of this has been taken forward with Windows 7 in which they have done away with the application tittles in the start bar and have taken to an icon based system just the same as the OS X one.

Active Corner.  In Windows 7 if you move your cursor to the lower right corner of the screen it will minimise the current application, this is very similar to an option in OSX called Active Corners.  Active Corners allows you to assign an action to each corner of the screen should you so choose, for example I have the upper right hand corner set to activate the screensaver, but all four corners of the screen are customisable for what ever action you like.

The Search and Lunch bar.  Vista brought in an integrated search that would allow you to type the name of a file and executable and run it with a few simple presses.  Windows 7 builds on this by allowing you to use the name of programs.  For instance in Vista if you wanted to launch Word you would have to type winword.exe and not just Word as you can now in Windows 7.  This is a very basic implementation of the OS X feature named Spotlight  However spotlight does much more then just index files, instead it integrates a calculator, a dictionary, it searches all your contacts, calendar entries, emails, “to do” items and Web favourites and allows you to bring any of them up with a “natural” word search that begins as soon as you start typing and with each additional key press is further refines the results.  These results are categorised into top hit and then by the category each result would fall into and are selectable with a mouse click or enter.  The reason the search is so quick is because all the items are indexed, which is nothing new but for an out of the box feature Spotlight is very well implemented and integrated will all OS X apps.

There are others but after the first few examples it starts to get tedious.  So just what is it about the Mac os that is so good?  well for a start it runs incredibly well, mainly because there are so few hard ware combinations out there that Apple can really focus on the important bits.  It is very user friendly in that it isn’t obtuse in the way it asks you to interact (Shutting down the computer by clicking on start?) and not everything is nested in layers upon layers of menus.

As an example of it’s simplicity I will take one of Leopard’s (the latest version of OS X) apps :Time  Machine.  At its heart Time Machine is incredibly boring in the fact that it’s a backup system and I know how we all find that dull.  So what makes Time Machine Special? the fact that I don’t have to think about it, or do anything with it at all in fact, ah I see you are slightly more interested now, allow me to expand on this.  Before you first activate Time Machine (ok going to refer to it as TM now) and you connect an external hard drive Leopard ask would you like to use it as a TM drive? If you select yes it brings you to the time machine menu where you move a big switch from “off” to “on” and that’s it, the end of your interaction.

 

The Mac will now take a complete backup of everything on there (this one took a while) and after that it backs up like this:

• Hourly backups for 24 hours
• Daily backups (takes the last backup of the day) for a week.
• Weekly backups (last backup of the week) for a month
• Monthly backup (Last backup of the month) for as long as you have disk space.

Now while this is certainly impressive its by no means more impressive then some of the third party apps out there for windows so what is so impressive about it?  Well remember I said that spotlight indexes everything? well it keeps that record for your backup files.  So say you lost some files for work and you had searched for them using spotlight but with no avail, you activate TM and while keeping what you have searched for in mind shows you loads of windows going back for each time it took a backup of your file allowing you to preview the file select the one you want and restore it easily.  

 

 

 

 

Very impressive I hear you say but what about laptops, they have a tendency to move round don’t they? well yes they do and I was somewhat concerned by this until I found out that even if you disconnect the TM drive and go about your business when you reconnect the drive it compares the last backup with what is now there and backs up all the changes without any user input. Magic.

At the start of this, much longer then expected, post I asked how do you make software desirable?  It turns out the the answer is very simple, make it powerful, make it user friendly and make it attractive.  I think that Apple have got this down to a fine art now but they are not without there problems, but that is another post.