A Mac & Daly follow up.

Posted by Neville Franks
Aug 16, 2010 at 08:25 AM

I meant to reply to Daly’s “Profound Disappointment” thread but time got away from me. (I’m just wrapping up the next release of Surfulater.)

I recently came very close to buying a Macbook Pro to replace my aging Dell Inspiron. I’ve been interested in getting a Mac for some time now, primarily to try and understand why so many people are so enamored by Mac’s and to see how the User Interface and design of Mac software differs from Windows Software. And to see of I could learn anything useful to carry across into my software in the Windows world. In the end I purchased one of the new Acer TimelineX Notebooks for several reasons.

- I couldn’t justify spending so much more money (over twice the price of the Acer) on a PC whose OS and Software I would likely never seriously use, instead running Windows 7 on it most of the time.
- I couldn’t easily get to see and touch a Macbook Pro - no Apple shops anywhere near where I live.
- And little things like no right mouse (trackpad) button when running Windows apps.

I wanted to touch on the discussion of Mac applications doing just a few things well and using several applications to cover the same bases that one Windows app might. I can see some merit in this, however not enough to sway me. The least most applications I have to learn and use on a regular basis the better.

Another related point was a about Windows applications having too many features and Mac applications not suffering from this problem. I have two observations here. Maybe the fact that there is less competition in the Mac software market plays a part here. ie. Software companies aren’t having to keep adding so many new features to match or exceed competitors products. There is also an expectation in the Windows world that new releases come out regularly and these contain new features requested by customers. It is always a challenge for us software developers to weigh things up, maintain a sensible balance and still try and keep most of our users happy, most of the time. Saying “no” to some new feature request can be difficult, however this is something I’ve been getting better at over the years. Cases need to be stated and discussed and the merits or otherwise assessed. Again maybe Mac users have different expectations and Mac developers are less pressed to continually add new features. Or maybe Mac users prefer simpler applications and instead use multiple applications as mentioned earlier.

Enough of a rant from me - you can go back to your normal viewing now.

Neville