As some of you may know I just recently installed OS X on my PC. I’m dual booting between Vista and OS X 10.5.1 right now. I’ve been using OS X more then Vista for the past week now and I think I can give a preliminary review of it.
The first thing I felt when I entered OS X is that it felt a little hollow. I think this was due to the lack of configuration available. When I went into the configuration there were fairly few options with very little in depth configuration available. After a little more time spent in the OS this feeling went away.
My biggest concern with going over was window management. I was so used to maximizing windows and things like that that I was concerned that my desktop would just be a mess. In addition I was expecting a pain getting windows the proper size. I was impressed that I almost never had to worry about resizing windows. However, many of the window management issues I was concerned about were true. Using spaces with a consistent system for what goes where helped with this but I found that alt+tab was the only decent way for me to go from window to window. I’m really missing switcher for Vista. Switcher is an expose clone with much more features. Switcher allows you to activate it via any type of mouse jesture/keyboard shortcut you can imagine, it also has the added benefit of being able to filter your results as you type. For example, I launch switcher with win+space and start typing fire to get my firefox window. This workflow has allowed me to get to each of my windows very fast regardless of whether I’m mouse or keyboard surfing.
I should explain, I like to work using either only the keyboard or only the mouse. I absolutely hate having to switch back and forth durring my workflow. Spaces help with organizing images but this brings up several issues: if I want to find a particular window I first have to alt+tab to the program then option+tab to that window which often will spin me around though several spaces, the other issue is that it’s a pain to move windows from one space to another. I hate having to hit F8 with my keyboard then find my window and drag it over and click on the other space then switch back to the keyboard. I would love it if I could just do option+ctrl +arrow and it’ll pull the currently focused window to that space. This brings me back to the issue that there’s a great lack of customization options in OS X. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a fix out there for this but I havn’t been able to find it.
The biggest issue I have with using OS X is the web browsing experience. This problem is several fold:
- Safari is beautiful and works great but it lacks the customization firefox has.
- Firefox for mac doesn’t have a lot of the extensions I use commonly
- Firefox on OS X is buggy and works far worse then on windows.
- My back/forward buttons don’t work because my OS wont recognize the mouse (I realize this is an OSx86 issue)
Bottom line here is that I spend so much of my time browsing the web that it is possibly the most important aspect I look at with the OS. Web browsing for me on windows is by far better then anything I’ve done on OS X.
With that being said, a lot of the small applications is where I love OS X. Things like CSSEdit, Textmate, Awaken, Colloquy they’re all great applications to use, they all look great, and they all don’t have eqivalents on windows. I really don’t understand how people cant make nice looking applications on windows.
With all that said I think I will continue to play in OS X quite a bit and I definitely plan on using it for all my web design and rails dev. The web browsing isnt nearly bad enough to make me not want to use it I’m doing other things that are better in OS X. Overall OS X is nice and probably better then Vista on the whole, but not significantly better.
