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Monday, January 15th, 2007

MacBook / OSX Review Part I

The hardware -

Obviously it’s slick. Everybody loves Apple hardware, I’m no exception. The backlit keyboard is great when the lights are dimmed. That little magnetic power coupling makes it sooo easy to grab the laptop out of your office when you want to sit down and look something up from another room. The sleep feature of Apple laptops is also excellent - close the cover, it’s off, open it it’s on, while the wireless networking of OSX does an excellent job of getting connected up. (Is it always connected or is OSX just fast at acquiring an IP address from your DHCP server? I’m not sure but it really makes no difference, the end result is what counts. Open the cover, and start to surf.)

The software -

Ok, here’s where I start to rant a little (but not completely.) Apple affectianodos, be warned.

First off, where the heck is right click? Right click makes it so easy to get things done, I’m surprised Apple has yet to embrace it. My first “right-click envy” experience was with the dock. I wanted it to auto-hide instead of sucking up all that valuable screen real estate. In Windows, right click anywhere on practically anything and your presented with a “Settings…” menu item. This is the logical place for accessing settings specific to any user interface element. Apple doesn’t support this, so you have to go hunting for the right menu option up top. I’ve wasted more time in OSX hunting for menu options I should have found through a simple context menu than anything else. Sometimes it feels like your working with one hand tied behind your back, which is very frustrating. Apple should support right click.

I’m going to center on my Safari experience a bit, since it’s the only app I’ve really put to any real use. Overall though all of these points reflects the operating system in general.

First, again, no right-click! Actions in Windows which take two clicks of the mouse require 4 and sometimes 5 actions in OSX. A good example would be editing the links on your favorites bar. In Windows, if you want to delete a favorite (common when you open up a browser on a new computer) you simple right click the favorite and select delete. In OSX, you first have to select the favorites panel on the upper left, then you highlight the favorite in the view on the right, then you hit delete, and then to finally get back to the web page you were viewing, you have to “unclick” the favorites panel on the left. This is not by any stretch of the imagination, user friendly compared to Windows.

Second, resizing windows. There’s just one, veeery tiny and hard to grab area on OSX windows which allow you to resize. You can’t grab a window edge and resize, you have to use that little nub. This felt like a restriction, something that slowed me down when i was trying to get simple things done. Further, I also find that when I move windows around, that little resize target often ends up off screen. So to resize the window, you have to first reposition it to gain access to that little nub in the corner. For a Windows users accustomed to being able to grab a window from any location, this can be incredibly frustrating.

Additionally, what’s up with the maximize button on the application title bar? In Safari, this button will reposition the window to the left, and maybe open it up a little bit more, but it never opens to full screen. I’m now completely avoiding maximize all together, and manually resizing windows larger using the nub at the bottom. This is too time consuming.

I won’t make this a complete rant - the text rendering in Safari and every other application I’ve opened is excellent. I imagine this has to do with the fact that Apple has a limited set of display hardware to support. In Windows, while the text rendering is good, it doesn’t match Apple’s.

Lastly, two Safari specific rants and some raves -

First, Safari doesn’t support Open Search. I realized just how useful this search feature has become after I tried working without it in Safari. Search is a bear in Safari. Apple really needs to add support for Open Search so you can add additional search providers. In Internet Explorer, I’ll go directly to the search provider I know has what I’m looking for - Wikipedia, Google, Google Images, Answers.com, Amazon, Technorati, MSN Search, MSN Image Search. I use them all, regularly. Apple should add support for adding providers to their search drop down through Open Search.

Second, Safari has this funny habit of not returning to the location on the page you left when you click a link. Open a large page with a lot of information, scroll down, click on a link, then click back. Until the page loads completely, you’ll be sitting at the top of the page while it loads. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer will take you back to the precise location on the page you left. Apple really needs to work on this, especially since Safari seems to take forever to load and render pages. (Was that three rants? oops.)

Some positive comments - the UI in Safari is really clean and well laid out, everything seems to fit together. In Internet Explorer things feel like they’ve been bolted on as extras. (Like one of those cars you see on the road loaded down with cheap mod kits and some punk behind the wheel.) I’m also impressed with Apple’s decision not to include favorite icons on the link bar. These icons are often ugly and poorly designed and dirty up the interface. You can always count on Apple to choose simplicity and look-and-feel over “neato” features other application developers feel compelled to support. The problem is somtimes it feels like Apple takes their comitment to simplicity too far, as with right click functionality, sacrificing usability.

That’s about it for now. I’ll try to keep the reviews even handed. My first impressions seemed to have come out more negative than positive. Part of this is due to my lack of familiarity with OSX, and some of it is just plain bad design in the OSX / Apple hardware. More to come. I’ll be trying out Boot camp when I get some free time, should be interesting to see how that goes.