Switching Sideways

or, how to Avoid Unswitching

Unswitching? Well, there have been a number (at least a couple) of high-profile OS-X-to-Linux-or-Windows switches recently. The Unswitchers always took pains to point out that they felt betrayed by a) Apple, b) the Mac, c) the Mac community, and after having spent a few weeks talking up the Mac with Mac-zealot friends, the crash of disillusionment seemed to hit, and hit hard.

I didn't have an Unswitching experience with the Mac (so far), but I also didn't have the experience many Mac fanboys report, of everything without exception feeling better and simpler than Windows even after using Windows for more than ten years. So this article is about why I think that is.


A Bit of My History, Mac-curious to Windows User

The first time I ever used a computer on my own, it was a Mac. Needless to say, it wasn't my Mac: this was twenty years before Macs became affordable for ordinary curious people. It was in a roomful of Macs in a library, and people were encouraged to go and try them out.

I was impressed by the beauty and coolness of it, and I was particularly impressed that the manual was elegant and user-friendly, and told you which way round a floppy disk went. If I'd had to go and talk to somebody and be let on the network, I wouldn't have tried it, because idle curiosity wasn't enough reason to bother people, but because it was intended to be used by anyone, and because you didn't have to learn or bother somebody, I gave it a go.

Actually, it wasn't the first time I'd seen a Mac. I'd hung around a roomful of networked Macs before, waiting for my boyfriend and playing Tetris or enjoying the Desk Accessories (and being completely terrified when I managed to hit the wrong keys and get dumped into MacsBug...).

It was, however, the first time I'd actually sat down in front of a computer and practised typing, word-processing and saving a file on my own. The documentation lying on the desk in front of me was good enough that somebody who'd barely seen a computer before could figure it out, which was much more impressive than anything in the PC world at the time.

This was a different world, remember. In 2006, I think most people in the UK can walk into their local library and use a computer to access the Internet without too much trouble (by logging on using their library card details, for example). My generation may have been the last one to go through college writing essays in handwriting as a matter of course--student loans followed, and it became accepted in the '90s that students would use part of their loans to get a computer to type up their work and maybe use the Internet. By the time I went to college, the first home computers were about--8-bit machines with rubber keyboards that hooked up to the telly and ran Basic in a wobbly-looking way--but computers were 'for games' or 'for business'. The multimedia explosion which makes it possible for people to put photos or audio or video on their computers as a matter of course was barely a concept.

Then I left college and got a PC-clone, because I'd seen that Mac. It wasn't possible for an ordinary person to get a Mac without paying serious amounts of money, and there wasn't anything that could only be done (or done better) on a Mac apart from high-end creative stuff like graphic design and ambitious DTP.

I had an Amstrad portable (XT-compatible luggable) and got a text-only amber screen. There was some amount of a learning curve for Dos 3, but I remember as soon as I'd got the hang of a simple directory structure it didn't seem too bad. The text screen was actually much better to look at than anything running CGA. CGA was blurry, and did four colours. It was only when EGA/VGA came along a few years later that I started to think I might be missing something by not having graphics on my computers.

Later on, I moved to using Windows because everybody else did, and I remember being frustrated that everything was GUI-based and event-driven even when that didn't make particular sense.

After the Amstrad portable, I used nameless mongrel clone boxes for a long time: get a case, get somebody to put stuff in it and fix it if it goes wrong. This was a great benefit of the PC as opposed to whatever else was about, for many years. With the competing Macs, there was a vast initial outlay price followed by the expansion price (printer, modem, anything else) being at least twice as expensive as the competing PC product--if you could find a Mac product.

I used Windows 95/98 when everybody else did, but I remember being frustrated by them and thinking they were flaky and prone to crashing. Windows 98 SE probably takes my boyfriend's booby prize for Most Horrible Operating System He Has Ever Used, in that he spent several years using it, usually in anger, and it never got a bit less crashy or flawed.

I'd always have quite liked to learn programming, in some ways, but I've never figured out how to be a Real Programmer, and I've tended to get on with things like batch files (going back a bit) or Word macros: because I've always wanted to 'glue' the things I use together rather than become a Real Programmer and make my own tools. The stuff my boyfriend does is better and more elegant than anything I could conceivably manage in a million years, but I don't think the way he does.

In about 1999, I moved to Linux for a few months. I started by setting up a dual-boot system so as not to keep all my eggs in one basket, but didn't take account of human laziness: I was spending most of my time learning Linux, so it didn't take me long to shift all the way over to it and not want to reboot just to look something up on Windows or play a game.


A Digression on the Question of Boot-Loaders

(This is the thing that makes me wary of how dual-boot is being pushed for new Intel Macs: people's willingness to reboot to try out or run a particular program is almost certainly limited. Mine certainly was. A boot-loader may well function to sell computers with non-standard OSs as a psychological crutch: 'if necessary I can run Windows', but I doubt that'll change the way people use their computers. If the user has to reboot for a particular program, they'll use it less often or not at all. If they're primarily gamers, Apple may have shot itself in the foot on this one. It's at least as likely that keen gamers might end up 'living inside' XP inside their Mac (because they're always running their favourite game, and can get away with using all the other tools in Windows which, after all, they already know how to use) as that they'll become OS X converts. I love my Mac, but I can see the possibility even if I dislike it).

I had a couple of Tetris-style puzzle-games that ran in Windows 98 a few years ago, and had a small stub system of Windows 98 just for playing the games. I loaded it about once every few weeks, then months, then...never. I liked the games very much, but if I was in the middle of doing something (which was most of the time) I never wanted to reboot.

Fast user switching has probably had much more effect on the way people use their computers than any boot loader ever. If Intel Macs end up having a solid, fast emulation layer that lets people run Windows games and programs without problems while the rest of their stuff is running in OS X, then I'll be impressed. (I don't know enough to be able to say whether Parallels is/will be that).


A Bit More of My History, or Linux: Just Say No

I loved the way the command-line and text-processing worked under Linux, and thought 'yes! this is the way batch files should have worked'. I loved the way user accounts worked under Linux: flipping into a different context to deal with different things seemed a big change from the way Windows worked at the time. I found regular expressions interesting, without quite getting my head round them, although I understand this is fairly normal.

I hated the way it seemed to be a user-hostile OS: even something simple like getting smart quotes seemed to be difficult or impossible, and I ran as root for about three weeks because when I ran as user I didn't seem to have the permissions to do anything. I like to tweak my computers so they're doing what I want them to do, but I hate to feel I have to tweak to get them running. I hated the way there was so little standardisation: you can run Linux on whatever hardware you like, in whatever distro you like, but it's your responsibility to find a driver and recompile the kernel if you add something. You're your own sysadmin.

I'd actually have stuck with it, except for an accident of health. A few months later I had a severe bout of depression following flu, and I really didn't want to have to handle a scary computer when the most I felt capable of was a bit of word-processing--and if I went back to using Windows at least my boyfriend would be able to fix it if it went wrong.

So I went back to using Windows. I still feel a bit embarrassed about this. I did miss some things about using a Unix-ish OS, particularly the text-handling and the command-line batch-processing, but I'd learnt a hard lesson about not having the safety-net of being able to use the computer simply when you feel like simplicity. When I used Linux, I had the responsibility for security on the computer, and I had the responsibility for making it work--and sometimes had to make it work before I could use it even in the most ordinary way. If I'd had the health problem a year or two later, when I'd had a chance to get the system running the way I wanted it (or even when Linux wasn't quite as user-hostile), I probably wouldn't have moved back to Windows, because I'd have felt more capable of doing the day-to-day stuff and leaving the ambitious stuff till later.

My boyfriend and I used Windows 2000 for some time, because it was stable. More stable than the previous Windows versions, anyway. Eventually, we moved over to XP (which is apparently very like Win2K in most of the under-the-hood stuff, although the front-end looks fairly different).


iPod to Mac

After some time, I'd settled on the iPod as my favourite digital audio player, and I noticed that there were two opposite things I liked about it. It was the most hackable player (very customisable, very tight integration with iTunes, it's possible to find out how to do all sorts of things with it, from what chip it runs to how to put Linux on it) and it was the most consumer-friendly player (vast user-base, mountains of add-ons, pluggable-in to anything from a car to a hi-fi). Both these opposing points gave it an identity in a way no other audio player had.

Classic halo effect. I started to think 'wouldn't a Mac function like an iPod in both those ways?' It had the integration I'd missed when playing around with Linux, and it had a lot of unix-style tools.

Now I thought about it, some of the things I used to not like about the Mac were no longer as true. Less expensive. Less purely-for-graphics-professionals. Less of the mysteries of the old-style Mac OS (because I knew people who'd expressed themselves rather trenchantly about the vast gap between the under-the-hood and the pretty stuff the user sees). Less of a restrictive ghetto, because the move towards external peripherals with USB 2.0 and Firewire meant it was no longer a choice between normal cheap fast internal peripherals inside a PC vs expensive dedicated Mac hardware at amazing cost. The normal peripherals nowadays--printers, scanners, modems, cameras/camcorders, hard drives, optical drives--all tend towards being externals or having the option to go external without costing hundreds of pounds more than the internal equivalent.

Some of the things I used not to like about the Mac revealed unsuspected plus points as well. There's less software. This has a couple of benefits. For one thing, the Windows world has the hundreds-and-hundreds-of-slight-variations-on-not-very-good-software in its vast universe of shareware. I'm not saying it's all rubbish, by any means, but there's a bewildering variety of stuff out there, and a lot of it is rubbish. Google for something to edit multimedia files sometime, for example: some of the top hits are parasite search engines that come up with endless variations on multimedia crapware that does a poor job of re-encoding, cutting and joining media files. If you Google further, you will eventually come to decent programs like GoldWave or Audacity or Virtual Dub, but there's a distracting flood of pointless quasi-spam filling up Google before you get to the good stuff. On the Mac or Linux, because they're not the main commercial platform, it's easier to find reviews and testimonials that aren't purely advertising.

The other benefit is that although the posh software for graphics professionals is very expensive, a lot of ordinary people with Macs stick to using what came with the box. It's relatively easy to find help online for iLife applications, Safari and Mail, for example. Again, because Microsoft is where the money is, a Google search for help with XP programs is much more likely to find people trying to make money out of you than a Google search for help with OS X or Linux tools.

I'd tried out lots of different hardware on PCs, but after a while I settled down to more ordinary things (most of the stuff I tried out of curiosity has gone on ebay). Straightforward consumer hardware is likely to work on a Mac, if it's USB or Firewire and a well-known type of thing like a printer or scanner or camera or hard drive (as opposed to digital pens or fingerprint readers or specialised label printers. Some of these things do (or can be coerced to) work on a Mac, but you cannot rely on the support being there).

For the first time, I'd started to notice there were things that were only available on Macs that I wanted to run. I wanted to learn about enhanced podcasts and chaptered audiobooks--most of the audio I have is spoken word, and there's no real point in dividing everything into what may be hundreds of three-minute tracks--and the Mac is effectively the only tool for this. Unix-style OSs like the Mac's are much better for a lot of text editing tools, and on Unix there are text expansion tools (which replace typos or shorthand) that aren't priced towards legal or medical practices like the ones on the PC. The Unix approach to backup also seems to be cheap-ish and simple: buy something for £10 that scripts copying the directories you want backed up. The Windows approach is much more opaque: buy something for more than £50 that creates whole filesystems inside a secret backup file containing everything, which can only be read by that backup program.

I love the design of the Mac mini, and I always liked distinctively-pretty but ordinary Macs, from the little box with the smiling face on its screen through the early iMac/iBook to the Mac mini. And it was cheap, which was a consideration because I was certainly not going to sell my perfectly nice Dell XP box to fund getting a high-end Mac.


Switching Sideways

With Linux, I'd left myself no way out other than to install a clean Windows system over it and leave it forever. Having learned from the Linux Disaster, I decided to switch sideways. My XP box had the DVD burner (and it's much cheaper relying on that than getting a Mac with a Superdrive). The Mac mini is well-designed for switching sideways. Apple was aiming it towards the 'non-committed' PC user who might run a Mac if it was easy and cheap enough, and it's small enough to share space with a PC desktop if necessary. It looks like an attractively-designed external drive enclosure rather than a computer, after all.

I was expecting to use a KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch to flip from one to the other, but this never quite happened because at the time I switched I was using a cordless keyboard and mouse, and KVM switches won't work with cordless. So I set my Dell box up at the other side of the room, networked everything together, and installed Microsoft Remote Desktop on the Mac mini.

As it happens, I moved back to an ordinary corded keyboard and mouse after a while, because although I loved the Microsoft comfort-curve keyboard, the mouse had RF interference issues (which I could now test were not software-related because it would go haywire on both PC and Mac). By that time, however, the Dell box was comfortably ensconced across the room, and I could easily do all the things I wanted to do on the PC over Microsoft Remote Desktop from my Mac, so I couldn't see the point of buying a KVM switch for about £40 to do stuff I was already doing with slightly more speed and comfort.

The historical accident of using different modifier keys on the PC and Mac has led to some very useful behaviour being implemented here. Use Alt-tab to task-switch on the PC and Cmd-tab to task-switch on the Mac, for example. The similar-but-different clipboard keys mean that you can use Cmd-C to copy to clipboard on the Mac and Ctrl-V to paste the same thing on the PC.

Fancy graphics become ugly, and audio becomes hopeless because of lag, so those are the only things I'd advise people not to use on MS Remote Desktop: but if you've got a Mac it's probably better to do audio, video, photos and graphic design using the Mac. If you merely want to get at ordinary data and programs, it will work fine, although don't even think of using MS Remote Desktop to play games, because games are both media-intensive and resource-hungry. I've never tried this (the only games I use are little puzzle games anyway), but it's only common sense that the 'big' games which want the best processor/memory/audio/video etc wouldn't work.

My objective was a low-stress migration where I could retreat to the PC whenever I couldn't figure anything out on the Mac, and where my old documents would still be on the PC while I moved.

There are people who've been using the Mac for twenty years who believe it's transparent because they've been using the Mac for twenty years. After all, it's perfectly intuitive that dropping a folder on a folder that contains another folder of the same name obliterates that other folder rather than copying the contents to it, or putting a disk in the Trash ejects it, or command-clicking on a title bar shows a drop-down path to a file. For someone who grew up with all this, it is intuitive, because it's just how computers work. If you didn't, it isn't. If you grew up with Dos and Windows, it seems perfectly logical to press Alt-F4 to close an application or hit the Start menu to stop your computer.

I think it worked, by and large. I remember being confused by any number of unimportant things, like how to sort out what directory to save stuff in (use the little triangle thing on the Save box, or use the Sidebar folders), which traffic-light button did what, where the Properties sheet was (under Preferences, usually). or why my text editor came up with rtf in a file I thought was text... The knowledge that I could always get back if I needed to made it a lot less worrying, and decreased the likelihood that I might have to move back out of sheer incomprehension.

I stopped using Microsoft Word, which surprised me because I used to practically live in the thing. I miss a few things about it (mainly text-entry stuff like 'always initial-cap sentences' and 'change common typos', and a few complicated things like revision and collaboration), but I don't miss it enough to think it's worth its whacking corporate price-tag, especially since they want to make Mac users buy the program a second time just because they've switched. I tried NeoOffice (the open-source replacement), and found that although it was very good it ran like treacle on my 512Mb Mac mini. I may try it later when I get more memory, but at the moment I don't really care enough. I write simple word-processed documents in TextEdit using RTF and simple text documents in TextEdit or pico.

I used to try making my own automation scripts using Word macros, which was never an entirely satisfactory experience. I'm much happier using Applescript and shell scripts, because they feel unified and complete in a way that Word macros never did. I never found a standard 'glue language' on the PC that would say 'the next set of 10 files are part of the same project, give them a name in sequence ending with a date in yyyy-mm-dd format and open them in the application I choose', for example. On a PC, you can find scripting languages, but there doesn't seem to have been one 'for everybody' since batch in MS-Dos.

I used to use Excel as well, mainly for text entry for flat-file lists of things. I now use text or XML files for that, and Spotlight to keep things organised. I used not to notice how much time it took to load a file, even a small file, in Excel, but I think I'd notice if I went back to it now.

I'd say it took me about a month to feel reasonably comfortable using the Mac, and about six months to feel reasonably comfortable using scripting. During all of those six months I never felt impelled to leave OS X because I couldn't get something to work, because there were ways round things, even if the ways round things seemed awkward. If I really want a script to automate something and can't figure it out, I do the stuff by hand and post a message on a mailing-list asking how it's done in a script. When I was using Linux I had a lot of help and support from Linux evangelists, but the system wasn't exactly geared for any Plain Dumb User way of doing anything. With Linux I felt the system was so unforgiving I was brought to a dead stop every time I couldn't figure out how to do something. With both Windows XP and Tiger I feel I can get stuff done while trying to work out how to do something complicated.

Many things have not turned out quite the way I expected. I was hoping to use the Mac mini as a luggable desktop because it's almost like a laptop without a display and battery, but I had not appreciated how much difficulty the cables and power-supply add to taking it from room to room.

I was also assuming I'd run MS Office because I'm used to it, but this hasn't turned out to be true; the scripting stuff I used to do in Word macros has all been replaced by scripting stuff in Applescript and shell script that works better because it scripts Your Computer rather than Your Microsoft Office Environment, and the text stuff I write by hand is just done in Text Edit. TextEdit is the Mac equivalent of Notepad (for text files) or Write (for word-processed RTF files). I miss one thing in MS Office that I used all the time, which was Autocorrect capitalising initial letters of sentences, but even if I am lazy I'm not lazy enough to move back to a resource-hungry Word (or Word-alike) just for that. I used Autocorrect's typo-munging features all the time. Now I use Riccardo Ettore's TypeIt4Me all the time, and ought to get round to paying for it (except that I want to make sure the one bug I notice can be fixed before I buy it). This is cheaper and faster than Word, because the two most complicated things I used really heavily in Word were macros and autocorrect, and I now use other tools for scripting and text expansion.

I would say (with a sigh of relief) that switching to Mac eventually worked very well for me, as an ordinary consumer with quirky tastes and nobody else to please. In an office environment where you have to get things working (and cooperating with other stuff) immediately, it's probably harder, although not as hard as it has been in the past. With what I've learned by my own experience of 'switching sideways', I'd actually recommend that anybody thinking of switching to Mac in their ordinary office environment should get a Mac laptop as their home machine, get used to it before they bring it to work, and plug it into their work network as an additional machine at first. It's not that I think that anything is bound to go Horribly Wrong, but mixing the changing-operating-systems learning curve with the mixed-network learning curve while being expected to get on with your normal work is putting a strain on things.

I think Macs may be simpler than PCs for people who have never used a computer before. I also think this isn't much of an issue for most people. For older people who have avoided computers consistently for the past twenty years, yes, Macs will be better. Most other people are much more likely to have used a computer than I was in the late '80s. I think there is still going to be a learning curve going from one OS to another even if it's the most intuitive known to man or fanboy.

If you're considering switching, think about switching sideways. Think about your reasons for switching. You may well discover new things you can't live without (or things you can live without and thought you couldn't) in the process of switching, but don't go too fast and disillusion yourself, as I probably did with Linux. I dug this article up from a less-frequented area of my hard drive when I'd read a blog entry by somebody who hated Apple and all their works because he'd switched to Mac and found the experience a horror.


Here are my ten tips for switchers:

1. There will be a learning curve from Windows XP, whatever the Get a Mac adverts say. A lot of things are very similar. A few things are drastically different.
2. Try not to sell your PC if you can avoid doing so. Your PC should be your backup as well as your way to run those programs that you think you can't live without, and any hardware you don't yet have on your Mac. If in several months' time you never use your PC despite having every opportunity to, you've proved the point that you wanted to switch, and can sell it on e-bay, donate it to friends or family, or simply farm it out to a specialised task on your home network, like a print/file server. You'll have lost a bit of cash with depreciation if you do decide to sell it after some time, but gained peace of mind (if your PC is New and Fancy enough that it is worth a noticeable amount of money, it might be worth getting a very cheap secondhand desktop PC to serve as your 'switching crutch' and then selling your pretty one...). In particular, you'll have minimised the risk of doing a sudden emotional unswitch if you find yourself needing something PC-based. As well as that, since PCs are so cheap and there are so many secondhand PCs, you may well get more value out of it using it as an adjunct to your Mac than you would selling it to fund your Mac. For several months, I used my XP box as a backup and DVD burner. At the moment, I currently use it for doing rips of old and scuffed-up CDs, because there aren't any good error-correction things like Exact Audio Copy for the Mac. (I think. Would be pleased to hear of it if I'm wrong).
3. Keep all your document files on your PC and/or a backup hard drive as well as your main Mac. Hard drive space is cheap nowadays, and backing up as you go is a good habit to get into, especially if you fall foul of the putting-in-a-folder-of-the-same-name-deletes-the-folder problem.
4. Use the PC when you just can't figure out how to do something on your Mac, but make your Mac the-machine-you-sit-at. This is why Microsoft Remote Desktop was so useful for me: I could still do the stuff that needed a PC, but the slight-but-perceptible-lag meant that I wasn't doing too much on the PC, and I was spending enough time on the Mac to get used to it.
5. Be honest about your reasons for switching. If advertising has given you unrealistic perceptions about Mac ease-of-use and you're already comfortable with using your PC, try to read Mac books and magazines and think about what (if anything) you'd gain from making the switch. Even moving to Mac because it's prettier is a better reason than because it's 'easier', because if you then find you have all sorts of assumptions about what you're used to you'll feel really conned because the Mac becomes more difficult in comparison. If you have things you want to do that are only possible on the Mac, or you know Mac-friendly people, or you've been bashing your head against Linux and want to try something Unix-y with more of an identity...all of these can give you a better incentive. If you want to switch for ease-of-use reasons because you've used Windows for several years and it's never got any easier, that's a good reason. If you grew up using Windows and feel by-and-large comfortable with it, you're going to want another reason in addition.
6. If you don't have any Mac-using friends or relations, find a user group. Almost everyone knows people they can ask for help about Windows, but Macs need a little extra.
7. Hardware: what's written on the box or the shop label isn't always the best guide to what will work or not with a Mac. Most external DVD burners will probably work with a Mac, even if some of them need extra software like Patchburn. None of the external DVD burners on retail shelves in the UK mention this on the box, they just mention Windows. If hardware mentions on the box that it supports Mac OS X, it will. If it mentions specifically that it does not support Macs, that's probably right as well. If there's no mention of anything but Windows on the box, Google for that model number. If you don't find anything about Macs apart from increasingly-frantic consumer questions about how to get it to work on a Mac, assume it won't. If you find specific mentions of OS X, including people saying they are running it on OS X, that's a lot better. Assume all external USB hard drives or flash drives will work on a Mac if they say 'no driver required except for Win98'. This means they are implemented as USB Mass Storage, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux.
8. Try to learn to do stuff several different ways. If you learn the Finder, also learn Terminal and various other file-shoving things. If you want to learn scripting, also learn the long way round and practice doing your normal tasks by hand. Avoid getting stuck so what you want to get done depends on one particular trick. The problem I had with Linux was the fact that there were sometimes one or fewer ways to get something done, and it had to be done right to start with, and the next few things you did had to depend on it.
9. If you can learn at least one app that will be the same, try to get used to it before you get your Mac. I moved to iTunes when I got my iPod, and on days when everything else seemed new and strange when I switched to Mac, it was a great relief to find that at least one app worked the way I was used to. This can be very comfortable if you have just spent an hour or two struggling to use QuickTime without getting much idea of it, for example.
10. If you can, switch sideways like me. Avoid setting hard-and-fast deadlines, particularly ones allowing only a day or few for switching your entire life from Windows to Mac before getting rid of your PC or being able to send other people stuff from your Mac. If you get it right, the switch is almost imperceptible; you start with 5% of your stuff being on the Mac and end with 5% of your stuff being on the PC. The Mac can be The Machine You Sit At at once, because there's no substitute for learning keyboard shortcuts and menu commands, but if you also start out by keeping the PC available you're less likely to find yourself stuck because you cannot figure out how to transfer a file to a Windows user, for example. Don't drop the PC because 'Macs can run Windows' if you're thinking of dual-boot; very few people keep up the habit of rebooting into a different operating system to run a specific program.


How to Not Unswitch

I would expect Unswitchers to be people who moved from one operating system to another much too fast and got disillusioned. This is the experience I had with Linux; there was so little user-friendly Linux stuff out there at the turn of the century (there may be more now) that there was very little I could use to do simple tasks if Linux system administration scared me. The great thing to avoid is needing something to be in place before you can get on; I can remember problems I had with Linux because I couldn't do something simple and ordinary because I had no drivers for some equally simple and ordinary hardware like a sound card or a printer, and therefore I was stuck.

I'd also expect Unswitchers to be people with unrealistic expectations. If they wanted to do exactly what they did on a PC and find the experience better in some strange quasi-mystical way, they might be setting themselves up for disappointment. If they were gamers who always wanted the latest and greatest hardware, they might be better off going for one of those strangely-coloured PCs from Alienware. If they were looking for particular tools or ways of working that turned up on the Mac either because it was a Mac and 'good for creatives' or because it was Unix and 'stick-togetherable', that's generally more hopeful. There are a number of tools I like that don't seem to be commercial enough to appear on the Windows side of the fence, and I love Applescript, because it automates the-stuff-on-my-computer in a way that doesn't seem to happen in Windows, and because it's a tightly-integrated part of the system. The things I use have certainly changed over the nearly-a-year I've had this Mac mini, but my desire to use something that had a fold-away Unix layer with a pretty front end and un-confusing hardware stayed fairly constant.

Switching towards something you can only get on your target system is fine. Graphic designers or musicians might well do that, particularly people who know people who work with Macs and see something they like.

Switching away from something you don't like on Windows machines is also fine. There are many people, including me, who find that not having to worry so much about viruses is a great benefit. I was switching away from the commercial bias on Windows as much as anything; a frustration born of years of trying to do the things I wanted to do, and finding that if there wasn't a place in the market for these things nobody would write a program even for the biggest operating system out there.

The wrong way to switch is to have a sudden emotional desire to use a Mac based on people telling you it's easier--when you haven't been having difficulties with Windows. That's when the learning curve hits and disillusionment sets in, because the salesmen and Mac zealots have told you there isn't a learning curve even if you've been using Windows for the last twenty years. So you feel cheated when it turns out not to be true. There are some people who do find the Mac intuitive after using Windows for a long long time, but they tend to be the people who have been feeling that Windows is a painful and horrible experience for that long. People who are comfortable with a modern version of Windows like XP shouldn't switch that way. I'm inclined to think they shouldn't switch at all without a reason. Not a reason that makes sense to other people, necessarily, but a reason that makes sense to them. Because it's the reason that keeps you hanging on during the two or three scary weeks when your new computer seems much harder than your old one.

If you switch slowly and without forcing deadlines on yourself, you're more likely to have the experience the salesmen and Mac zealots--and Apple--want. After a while, you notice that the Mac has gradually come to feel 'like home'. Mac programs you switched for, or programs you never even thought of, have become a part of your life you'd miss if you went back to Windows. There are still annoyances--there are still some things that XP does better than Tiger, in my opinion--but this Mac suits the stuff I do, for the foreseeable.

Malware, or What The Hell Is This Sodding Popup Doing On My Mac

I happened to mention to Beloved (diehard PC user) that I'm getting a lot of irritating popups about ringtones and casinos recently. He said 'Turn off pop-up windows in your browser'. I said, 'They already are'. He said, 'Turn off Javascript'. I said, it is.

He said, "If it's not your browser settings, it's malware. I've seen a lot on the web lately about stuff targeting OS X'.

I was honestly surprised at this. The current wisdom seems to be that there are (not many? less than ten?) proof-of-concept exploits, none of which have been found in the wild, and we had better keep good security habits, but the only people trying to talk up a scare are companies like Symantec and McAfee, who have their own axes to grind.

Googling now, I have found there are indeed several nastywares out for OS X, although most of them seem not to be getting out onto ordinary users' machines.

I have found no reference at all to some damn adware pop-up involving 'mediaplex', 'ringtones' or 'casino' in a context involving OS X.

Mogcow (...not scared, just annoyed...)

I'm still getting damn pop-ups every so often asking me about ringtones and casinos. What is happening here? I will do what Beloved suggests ('Run whatever Task Manager's called on a Mac') and see what appears in Activity Monitor when the popups pop up.

Letting the Side Down

...after having seen the nth Frothing Mac Advocacy Zealot's blog this month (and the nth Jeez-Why-Are-These-Apple-Fans-So-Freaking-Bitchy blog), I can't help feeling all this advocacy is letting the side down a bit.

I can see why it happens, from the moderately creditable (sense of fun, quirkiness, desire to defend one's own 'tribe') to the moderately discreditable (fashion victim, desire to cover uneasiness about money spent on computer by talking it up, desire to attack the other 'tribe').

I love my Mac. Sometimes this love is expressed through gritted teeth and beneath madder-than-usual hair, but that's actually recognisably-similar to how I loved all my other computers (all PCs), and a lot of it's down to how computers are such ambitious devices, seductively promising to organise and collect our entire world into one tidy box, so that when they inevitably fail we feel mildly betrayed.

I really don't get all the 'This Computer Will Change Your Life And Suddenly Computers Will Make Sense' side of Mac advocacy. As a switcher (December last year), I found a steep learning curve in some areas, quite a lot of recognisable similarities, and some things seemed better while others seemed worse. Many of those 'worse's I accepted philosophically as to do with my growing up on a different OS, and if I couldn't live with them, I found workarounds.

One of the motivations to start this blog was to have a place to post the essay on 'Ten Things I Prefer on Windows...and Ten Things I Prefer on the Mac' that I desultorily started writing about three months ago after the last time I read one too many advocacy-zealot blogs. I'm not sure if it's finished, because I keep adding to it and taking things out as I find things out (for example, I took out the bit about viewing a PDF in a webpage being more difficult on a Mac once I realised you actually can zoom, just not with CMD+ as with webpages).

The immediate cause of my taking it up again was reading various advocacy zealots going after some marketing type working at a law firm. He'd essentially been sold a whole bundle of unrealistic expectations (This Computer Will Change Your Life/You Will Never Need To Pick Up A Computer Book Again/Lo The Mouse Will Become Even As An Extension Of Your Hand). As one might expect, these expectations didn't come true, and the man went through a lot of grief trying to get his (now Mac) Microsoft tools to work with the Microsoft tools and Microsoft tool-users already in place in his office. So he started a blog entry to vent his pain at these expectations not being met. It's very reminiscent of the amusing video 'Mac Killed My Inner Child' in some ways. I started reading it thinking 'well, he is a bit of a twit, especially for somebody whose job is advising people about technology', and when I finished reading it I clicked on the 'rebuttal' a Mac fan came up with, and ended up thinking, 'well, maybe the man had a point. Is it unreasonable to want not to keep bashing his head against something he finds uncomfortable to use?' It used to be IT departments for mainframes and PCs that told us it was our duty to adapt to the machine. Now it's Apple fanboys.

Somebody (the chap who does Designtechnica, I think) once mentioned in a podcast that if Mac advocacy goes too far people will just start edging away from us in public places, as with the person who thinks we need to know all about their religion or mail-order business or political party.

I feel that maybe we ought to try to be nicer than we would otherwise be: more mature, considered, reasonable and accepting. If we try to meet criticism of the Mac that way, rather than sputtering, 'but it just is better!', the long-term effects can only improve. We want something from mainstream society and mainstream tech-support departments, after all. We want ordinary people to think 'that's interesting' and we want tech-support departments to think 'oh, they've got a Mac, let me just look that up'.

The less we can get other people to think 'Go Away', the better.

iTunes 7.0 Annoyances

The first time I saw iTunes 7 I was quite impressed. Device management feels more integrated: it's much easier to see which of your sources is an iPod or CD than it used to be in the last major version, and there's a lot more detail about managing your iPod than there used to be.

The downside to this is that your Library is over-managed. I want to have a library called 'Library', not 'Music', thanks. Aside from anything else, most of my library is spoken-word: audiobooks, radio plays and serials, podcasts etc. It was quite disconcerting to have all this suddenly dumped into Music, and find it's much, much harder to see what's on your iPod.

I actually took the trouble to visit an Apple Retail Store recently (I'm in Ipswich, UK, so that means the easiest one to get to is in London, so it took me the better part of three hours in travel there and back) at least partly in order to go to a presentation on iPod/iTunes, which I naively thought might give me some tips on moving up one major version, after all there are no books available yet on 7.0.

It wasn't a completely wasted trip, as I also picked up a Belkin Stereo Voice Recorder and had the chance to test it immediately and see it works with my nano, but the presentation was an utter waste of time. No reflection on the nice lady giving the talk, but it was essentially a slideshow reiterating all the things in the advert and playing clips. It was on the level of 'this is a pop song, and you can fit x many songs on your iPod' (plays pop song over the talk) 'and this is an audiobook about John F. Kennedy' (plays clip of audiobook about John F. Kennedy for five minutes). Yes, iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod are an amazing technical and marketing achievement, but I already knew that.

In fact, I went up to her and asked her a simple question after the talk, and she did not understand it. What I actually wanted to know is, 'how do I get a different view of my podcasts so that it's a listing of tracks rather than a listing of subscriptions?' She carefully explained that I use the Podcasts tab to manage my podcasts, and I actually thought 'maybe there's a context menu or view I didn't realise was there', which would actually be quite helpful. So I went home and checked--nope.

At the moment, I'm moving a long audiobook from cassette to my 4Gb nano (using high-quality stereo and compressing it later). This shouldn't be a huge problem; after every few tapes, take the nano upstairs and dump the contents into iTunes.

Right.

The iPod management that is now built into iTunes seems impressively detailed until you look at it. It now tells me what's synchronised but not where the space is going. The 'other' tab is getting bigger and bigger, and when I look at where that space is going in the Finder shell I see 4 16k files (contacts/calendar). If I try to look in iTunes, it tells me that the 'other' tab is taking up over 1Gb. My best guess is that I need to reclaim the blank space that was taken up by the rather large WAV files, but it's not obvious how to do that. I know it's not the files in the Voice Memos playlist, because I don't synchronise that.

It's probably possible to sort all this out eventually, but since they've put a lot of effort into device management, it's a Huge Nagging Pain to find that one cannot effectively use all this to find out what's on there, what's taking up the space, and which old-no-longer-available podcasts are throwing error messages because they became unavailable since I synched the iPod.

The whole feel of this is that they've spent a huge amount of time and effort sorting out the Store's integration, but management of your own content is lagging behind. This is probably true because it's a subsidised device (like a printer or mobile phone (they sell it cheaper than it would naturally be and make money on consumables/calls/songs).

I've ripped a lot of my audiobooks as MP3s, and I don't appreciate them being considered 'Music'. Even AAC audiobooks ripped by the user seem to need to be re-imported to turn up on the audiobook tab. What kind of content you have appears to be respected if it's a download from their Store, but it feels as if your own content (CD/cassette rips, radio recordings etc) has become a bit of an afterthought.

PS. If anyone has any constructive comments about useful things I'm missing, please tell me (Mac-only, thanks)! Particularly if I'm having a brain-free day and there's some Perfectly Obvious Thing I somehow failed to notice.

Cannot believe how hard it is to think of a blog-name

It's distinctly lowering that I cannot think of a single pun or amusing saying which is one-word-long, punchy, pretty, and incontrovertibly my own. I hope that this is because I drew a mental blank when put on the spot with 'think of a name for your blog', rather than that I have never come up with a single non-verbose witticism in my entire life.

I started going through several bizarre-and-interesting words which I thought had a chance of not having been thought of already. They had been. ('Octothorp', for example, isn't in the Shorter Oxford but evidently that one was taken).

Most of my favourite t-shirt slogans turned out to be Too Many Words, so I turned to the Jargon File. Many of their obscure-but-interesting words were too long, or had already been done. Including 'dogcow' and 'moof'.

Did Clarus start a line of Confused Animals, though? I started thinking up a 'mogcow'. It stretches out in fields, waiting for milk with a thoughtful expression, because it has never quite worked out whether it's waiting for a bowl of milk or to be milked. A slow, rather soothing rumbling arises from its tired body. This could be something to do with its complicated digestive system, or a purr. Its colouration could be described as Friesian, or British Standard Moggy. In inclement weather, it curls up. And, of course, its name is 'Claw-Us' and it goes 'mewf!' (Yes, I realise this breaks the pun a bit, but it's what you get after having been sitting here for twenty minutes typing non-existent words into Blogger and finding it's already got a blog for all of them...)

The pity is, I cannot come up with a nice little cartoon for this, even if I can visualise it quite well. In the first paragraph, I managed to draw a blank, but doubt my artistic abilities can carry me much beyond that.