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

Neville,

Thank you for your contribution to what I have found a very interesting discussion on the capabilities of Mac vs Windows for those who think and deal with words for a living/past time. It has made me more tolerant of my never ending battles with Vista. And I have steeled myself for upgrading my machine to Win7. I, too, have come to appreciate MyInfo, UltraRecall, MindManager, etc.

BUT what was most thrilling about your post in particular was the off-hand comment about the new release of Surfulater. I've come to not only appreciate, but be very dependent on it. Thanks for your good efforts.

Cheers and congratulations! Julie

Hi Julie,
Thanks for the reply and comment on Surfulater. I was hoping to see some discussion from the Mac folks here, but so far that hasn't happened.

I'm using Windows 7 on my new Acer Notebook and have to say it really is a big improvement over Vista, which I never liked. I've heard people say "Win 7 is Vista done right" and would have to agree. My suggestion would be to upgrade.

The new Surfulater release should be out today. ;-)

Neville, http://www.surfulater.com

Okay, Neville, I'll take the bait ...

I was a dedicated PC person from the early 1980s until 5 years ago. For much of that time I really liked the programs I was using but I felt I was spending too much time solving problems with incompatibilities or things just not working as they should. And there was a certain - I don't know - let's call it "inelegance" about the OS and many of its programs. And yet I stayed - mostly because of Ecco Pro. I loved it passionately and used it for a wide variety of things. It was so customizable that I was constantly surprising myself with different ways of utilizing it.

About six years ago I decided to take on a video project for a friend, and since it involved video and music, I decided I wouldn't even try it in Windows. I'd had too much frustration with Windows in those areas. So I bought a PowerBook thinking I'd use it only for fooling around with video. And I got hooked. I greatly appreciated the way things did "just work", as the commercials said. I also found the OS to be a more pleasing environment to work in. Not just from an eye candy perspective, but from a design perspective. But still I stayed with Windows. My feeling was that APple had better hardware and a better OS, but the Windows world had a greater variety of useful programs. Most particularly Ecco and Outlook (which I still think is the Microsoft's best designed work.)

But over the last five or six years, the Apple world - in my opinion (YMMV) - saw a terrific growth in useful, beautifully-designed, reliable productivity apps. And Apple - which I used to think of as being more about graphics and a/v - now impressed me as a very powerful business tool. I write and I manage projects. I miss Ecco, but I find the combination of OmniOutliner, DevonThink, and OmniFocus work very well for me. OmniOutliner is a very useful, reliable and elegant outliner, but I deeply miss Ecco's abiltiies to view the same information from different perspectives. DevonThink - with its Replicate function - is actually a better match for Ecco, and I've been finding new and more interesting ways of using it, too. And it's a rock-solid, bullet-proof, industrial-strength app. I also use Apple's built-in Mail and Address Book, and find them far better than Entourage (which is far inferior to Outlook). It did take me a little while to get used to the different conventions, but now they seem completely second-nature to me.

In the end I discovered that while my preconceptions about Apple may have been accurate in the 90s, they now were outdated. I respect the Windows world, and certainly understand people choosing to remain with it, but speaking just for myself, I have to say I'm very happy I switched, I believe I am more productive, I KNOW I'm spending less time as my own I.T. troubleshooter, and I haven't regretted switching for a minute.

I have the same problem with you. I was bored.

Neville Franks wrote:

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.

OK Neville, here's my 2 pence.

I'm not sure that there are big differences such as these between Mac and Windows applications. If you have a look at the forums of some of the major applications, there's the same clamour for additional features as there are on Windows applications forums. Just like Windows developers, many Mac developers strive to turn out reasonably regular updates (except when they're chasing iPad apps!)

Some Mac developers, just like Windows developers, do add what seem to me to be features that are "at the margin of necessity". For example, is it really necessary for DevonThink, which is not fundamentally a writing application, to have writing features with a full-screen mode? And if you want to find just about the most complicated consumer software on any platform, look no further than Tinderbox.

Clearly the Mac market is less Microsoft-dominated and the customers for Macs less "corporate" than is the case with Windows. So this may enable more "quirky", if not innovative, developers to survive. But I expect even that statement could be contested.

What the Mac does have is a user-interface that allows different apps to behave in similar ways and play pretty well together, so that you can patch together fairly seamless workflows if you want. That may encourage the development of single-purpose applications. I'm not sure. But it certainly does enable a user to develop, for example, a workflow which goes websearch to database to mindmap to outliner to writing tool to word processor, without too much difficulty. This sort of thing never seemed to be particularly easy under Windows. Even NoteMap, one of the most fully-featured writing outliners, couldn't talk reliably to Microsoft Word!

This may be better now under Win 7, however. And anyway it may not be necessary with the latest generation of Windows tools.

P.S. But, as I'm reminded every time I switch back to my PC, it really is very nice not to have to spend so much time updating security features and scanning for viruses (although this plus for Macs may not of course last forever!).

Hugh wrote: > But it certainly does enable a user to develop, for example, a workflow which goes websearch to database to mindmap to outliner to writing tool to word processor, without too much difficulty.

Well put. In my experience, it certainly does feel like Mac apps play nicely with each other to a greater degree than the WIndows programs I used to use. In some cases that's a small detail in that it contributes to OS X being a more pleasing environment than Windows - but in other cases, such as the example Hugh gave, it's a big deal. For me, it increases productivity and lessens heartburn. But, as always, YMMV.

hugh & rogbar, thanks for taking the time to reply. From what you've both said it seems that the Mac and Windows software worlds may not be as different as I've always imagined. One of the issues I see time and time again in the Windows world is folks downloading, installing and trying lots of software, most of which gets uninstalled. A lot of this is crapware, which lends towards the issues people have with Windows behaving badly. Then of course there is all the malware & spyware targeted at Windows users. It is reasonable to think these issues are far less pronounced in the Mac world and in turn help it to be a more stable platform.

Neville, http://www.surfulater.com

Hi Neville,

I can't say with scientific certainty that there's less damage from crapware in Macs than in Windows, but I can certainly say that it sure as hell seems that way to me. In over 20 years of using MS-DOS and Windows, I often felt my computers were bogging down due to the detritus left behind by lousy programs. There would be whole libraries of .dll's, and God-knows-what-else, filling up the hard drive without easy ways to determine if they still belonged to anything or not.

Again, I can't prove this with hard-and-fast numbers, but in my experience being on a Mac for the last 5 years I have a much higher success-to-failure rate when trying out new apps, and when I delete an unwanted app, it doesn't seem to leave very much behind. And what is left behind tends to be in easily-identified folders (such User:Library:Application Support) that are easy to delete without affecting anything else. So far, to my knowledge, I've never been snake-bit when removing an unwanted program from the Mac.

I know some people bristle at how tightly Apple controls how apps for its computers are designed and must behave ... but there are a lot of advantages to it, and this is one of them.

Anyway, that's how it strongly feels to me. YMMV.

(And FWIW, the way I finally took the plunge into switching was to rent a PowerBook for a week and just hack about on it in every which way. Since most apps let you try before you buy, I was able to load it up with lots of different apps and really give it a good test. You might try that.)