waffle

Recently, I vowed to document the things I hate about Apple’s products. However, because I find it hard to, off-hand, list some of the reasons why I use a Mac in the first place, I will also vow to, here, keep a list of things I love about it.

I believe a big reason why the “Cult of Mac” bullshit is allowed to continue is because no sensible compilation of its upsides exist. Thus, half-assed “journalists” decide that the upsides really don’t exist, and that anyone who claims to love said upsides (or even worse, actually deny the greatness of alternatives) is an irrational cult member. (How “rational” of a conclusion, by the way.)

Thus:

• Proxy icons. They’re a feature of OS X and go way back. Almost everywhere you see some kind of pointer to a document (such as in every document’s title bar, where it’s an icon), you can drag it off to somewhere else to copy, move or create a reference/alias to the file. By holding Command (a modifier key like Control and Alt) and clicking the icon in the document’s title bar specifically, you get a menu showing where on the hard drive (or DVD, network, etc) it is, and you can pick any of the underlying folders or volumes to open a window right there. This is something I continually miss when working in Windows, especially when juggling lots of similarly-named documents.

• Extremely fast PDF-rendering. It’s almost an axiom that clicking a PDF in a browser is the most painful thing you can do. Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat has to load up, which takes centuries, even though recent versions have brought it down to mere ages, and removing plugins can help reduce the wait. Mac OS X has built-in lightning-fast PDF rendering, and the default tool for viewing images and PDFs, Preview, is a very competent PDF reader with very fast searching even on slow hardware.

• The Dock. The Dock is a thing that hangs out on the bottom or one of the sides of your screen and shows a bunch of programs. The programs being shown are the ones running that have windows (some run in the background altogether) and the ones you have dragged in by hand. This has the advantage that you can drag down a bunch of programs you use commonly and start them in a second. Technically, the Dock has been assaulted for trying to do too many things at once and having been forced to compromise, but in actual usage, it scales better for me than programs pinned to the Start menu in Windows XP.

  There’s a few other pros with the Dock - because you have an icon for every open program, the program can affix a sort of status icon - a “badge” - to say that something has happened. The bundled email client, Mail, uses a badge for the number of unread emails in your Inbox; Transmit (an FTP client) shows a small arrow describing that an upload/download is in progress; Adium (an excellent IM client) shows the names of people from whom you have unread IMs from, and so on. If it’s urgent, the icon can bounce a few times or repeatedly, and whether you like this or not is a matter of personal taste. I find myself liking it most of the time, but it can be annoying when it shows up for the wrong reasons.

• Dashboard. Dashboard is a layer of widgets - small HTML-based programs - that swoops to the front with the press of a key. There’s a plethora of widgets that do useful functions, and I personally found it easy to stitch together a few for my own use. The concept of widgets isn’t new, and neither are small HTML programs, but in active use I’ve found more pleasure and use from Dashboard than any other solution.

• High-quality system utilities. Mac OS X already comes with an Address Book that’s actually competent, and that you can actually use as your primary “little black book” kind of program. A solution to sync this with mobile phones and some PDAs - iSync - also ships for free, works and is continually updated. Furthermore, the system-level Address Book is integrated into both Mail and most other programs that can make use of it.

  Good Bluetooth and wireless networking (”AirPort”) support is also bundled, as well as a competent graphing calculator called Grapher. When you double click a font, you actually get a button to install the font and won’t have to drag it to C:\windows\fonts. Genius!

• Halfway decent photo editing abilities. iPhoto is a program that comes in a package called “iLife”, bundled with a new Mac. iPhoto does portend that you give up exact folder arrangements of your photos, but in my opinion delivers more than enough upsides to make up for it. Photos can be shared across the network without any setup by checking a checkbox. Keywords, ‘albums’, folders and filtering makes organization easy. Real-time photo correctional facilities far beyond the ken of Microsoft Photo Editor exist, including a “straighten” tool with a live grid and tilt-and-zoom, and the ability to hold down a key to show the original, uncorrected photo for comparison. Most corrections are also available in the previously mentioned Preview system tool, and another system tool called Image Capture can take care of transferring photos from a digital camera or scanner, so these who are not fans of iPhoto can keep working the way they’re used to.