Great article - many thanks. I have a bunch of DOS scripts and Perl scripts that I run on my PC - will I be able to run these on a Mac?

I am voting against Vista and am about to buy a Mac but want to know if I can run Activestate etc. on it… also will DOS scripts run under Boor Camp?

Can you refer me to a document for those PCers that use DOS alot?

Thanks for any consideration.

Terry

I tend to sell my Apple equipment on e-bay after 2 generations (2-3 years) and then buying new. I think I get perhaps 30% of what I paid that way.

Scott.

Here are some replies to your questions. Sorry if they seem to the point, I’m actually at work right now.

1. I’ve been using virtual desktops on Windows and Linux for quite some time, but the Mac OS X 10.5 “Spaces” feature is a much cleaner implementation of the concept.
2. The DoJ may not be going after Apple for bundling iLife simply because Apple also “makes” the hardware. The entire thing is one package — whereas Windows is an operating system you can install on any computer.
3. The iTunes experience on the Mac makes you feel like you’re right at home, I’ve only got 12 GB of music in my library but it’s very peppy, doesn’t even take one bounce in the Dock to load iTunes and I’m up and running.
4. I’ve done work with both Win32 and .NET, haven’t really tried Cocoa yet. Still getting my way around in everything.
5. iPhoto is absolutely amazing. I’ve never been able to straighten crooked photos so easily before. Tagging & events works perfectly.

I completely agree that Microsoft’s original focus of software instead of software+hardware was the initial correct decision and the one that propelled them to their current heights.  I wouldn’t eschew their current approach either I’d just like to see another facet, in the vein of Zune or the XBox 360 or their keyboards/mice.  Perhaps if Microsoft would start offering their own PC that both worked well and looked good then the other hardware vendors would step up.  I must give points to Dell and Gateways recent attempts though with their “One” PCs.

I don’t mind Win32 as much, mostly because I do native Win32 apps in Delphi, which I think is the best native Windows development tool out there.  I do love a lot about .NET, though most that’s on the C# ASP.NET side and less WinForms.

http://artlung.com/smorgasborg/C_R_Y_P_T_O_N_O_M_I_C_O_N.shtml

Here’s a long quote from the very end of the article that pretty much sums up what you just referred to in the “illusion of choice:”

Even this user interface would begin to look awfully complicated after a while, with so many choices, and so many hidden interactions between choices. It could become damn near unmanageable–the blinking twelve problem all over again. The people who brought us this operating system would have to provide templates and wizards, giving us a few default lives that we could use as starting places for designing our own. Chances are that these default lives would actually look pretty damn good to most people, good enough, anyway, that they’d be reluctant to tear them open and mess around with them for fear of making them worse. So after a few releases the software would begin to look even simpler: you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft’s Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as Advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.

What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem, and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don’t like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.

Neal Stephenson also talks about just how important it is for Microsoft’s succes that they didn’t get into the hardware game when everyone else had - I must say, I fully agree with him. Perhaps now that they already have the monopoly it might work off (anti-trust aside), but as far as initial choices go, they definitely made the right choice.

You’re right about the anti-trust thing - Apple seems to get away with stuff that Microsoft can’t even think about without being fined billions by the EU - then again, Macs are most popular in the States [citation needed].

I too am intrigued by the question of development on OS X. I’m a long-time Windows client software developer and have come to hate Win32’s rather hideous and ill-designed API but have fallen in love with the grace of .NET (it’s problems are greatly outweighed by its benefits).. I wonder which side Cocoa development is more similar to.

1. Mac users usually can’t stop raving about the hardware, which I agree is awesome, beautiful, powerful and well-designed.  What gets me is how they compare it to “Windows”, which is obviously just an OS and not hardware yet at the end of the day people say “I love my Mac, it’s just so much better built and designed than Windows”.  To a nerd that’s a very stupid statement, comparing an OS to hardware, yet it shows how much the average consumer links the OS with the hardware it’s run on.
2. Microsoft must get into the PC hardware game.  Consumers don’t understand the difference between HP the hardware maker and Microsoft the OS supplier.  If they created an upper-end hardware tier they could ensure a 100%, “just works” experience, yet since they allow so much mix and match little issues abound.  Sure hardware vendors would freak but if MS kept the price-point near Apple’s the other vendors would still have the lower rung.
3. You mentioned ‘Spaces’, which I always thought an odd feature since virtual desktops abound, even Microsoft shipped a free on as the Virtual Desktop as a free PowerToy about 5 years ago.  Did you know about this before or are you just discovering VDMs now?  How is Spaces better than the Virtual Desktop Powertoy?
4. Agreed about the current state of uninstalling on Windows, it’s still voodoo for the average consumer.
5. Any thought on why shipping the iLife suite isn’t being looked at by anti-trust the same way shipping Media Player was for Windows?  I’ve always wondered how in one breath people can condemn Microsoft for bundling applications while praising Apple for providing everything out of the box.  I agree with the Apple method by the way.
6. How large is your iTunes library?  Is the iTunes experience on a Mac better than on Windows?  On Windows it’s horrible, the UI looks like a bad corporate database browser.  I also found on Windows iTunes chokes on my 80GB music library.  Curious if it’s a better fit on OSX.
7. All of this confirms to me that users don’t really want choice, they just want the illusion of it.  They’d much rather have an end-to-end solution that fits neatly together and is designed by one company as long as it’s done well.  I know I’d prefer there be only one cell provider in the States, as long as it did everything at least as well as Apple (on their good days that is, not the bug-filled Leopard launch).  I’m just fine with monopolys, as long as they work for me.
8. You mentioned you’re a developer, is that just web apps or actual native applications?  I’m curious how easy/hard programming Cocca is compared to say Win32 or WPF.  I’ve always wondered what the Mac dev tool suite looked like compared to the Window stack.
9. How does iPhoto compare to Live Photo Gallery (not the one that shipped with Vista but the updated one from the recent Live suite)?  I think Live Photo Gallery is finally a great photo management tool and would love to know how it stacks to iPhoto.  How does iPhoto’s Flickr publishing compared to Photo Gallery?  Do tags import correctly (as they finally do now in Live)?  How is the tag support actually in iPhoto?  Tags are pretty much the way I organize things these days and I’d expect Leopard to have a nice system.

Anyway, sounds like you’re having a blast and it’s nice that you have the Windows experience to give us a hopefully critical and fair comparison.  I almost bought a MacBook Pro when I was shopping for a new dev lappie but the price difference between a top-end HP dv9000 compared to the top end 17″ Mac laptop was almost $1000 and I just couldn’t swallow that difference, even as lovely as the hardware is.

Sorry for the huge comment, I’m just very curious, wish I could load up Leopard in a VM to test it out.

I’m an ex-Windows user (now on Linux, long live free software!) myself; so this is something i know pretty well. I agree with a lot of your points, but I feel it is only fair to point out that almost all of them could work in reverse too, no?

Cmd key is too close for comfort; Spotlight’s features could get annoying if you know what you want; Windows has had the virtual-desktops powertoy since the days of windows 98 (long before mac spaces); OS X does not perform well on 7-year-old hardware.

But, at the end of the day, you’re right. “it just works.” Windows may be on-par or better in theory, but the implementation (that is to say, in practice) it doesn’t work out like that…. but with os x it does.