A friend of mine, Paige Harris, recently had her laptop motherboard give up on her. She’s owned a Sony VAIO for a while and with its passing, she asked a few friends what they’d recommend as a replacement. Since I switched to a Mac a couple of years ago, I’ve been extremely pleased with the operating system and how it has directly benefited my work flow, so I recommended it to her with very few caveats.

Since I promised Paige that she’d be impressed with what Mac OS X could do for her, I thought it would be a nice idea to highlight some of my favorite features.

  1. Exposé with Active Screen Corners

    In Windows, the desktop is a static kind of place where clean-freaks keep nothing but a Recycle Bin, and the utterly unorganized keep everything (many enjoy this—I know).

    Using Mac OS X, however, the desktop actually became a useful place for me to store related things that I was currently working on. Because of Exposé—a feature that, among other things, lets you swish all of your currently opened windows away to “expose” the desktop—I could access my relevant “current items” as I would on a real-life desk top.

    Imagine the Windows alternative: you would have to drop what you’re doing, “minimize” all of your open windows to reveal the desktop, and then continue with your workflow.

  2. Drag and Drop: The way it should be

    One of my favorite features is the way that Mac OS X takes full advantage of the Drag and Drop concept. While it’s true that you can drag a thing or two in Windows, most switchers will be utterly amazed by what they were missing once they have a short training session.

    For example, even some seasoned Mac users don’t know that the little “document icon” in all of their applications’ title bars is actually clickable and draggable! How’s that useful? Well, let’s say that you’re writing a Word document (OS X supports Microsoft Word for Mac). As you finish writing it, you realize you’d like to email it. How do you tell your Mail program, “Hey, just mail that thing I was working on 2 seconds ago”?

    In Windows, I would open my Mail application, create a new mail window, click the ‘attach’ button, and then search my files and folders for the document I was just working on.

    In Mac OS X however, things are very different. Instead, I click the “document icon” in the title bar, and drag it to Mail. BAM, I have a new mail message open with the file pasted in as an attachment. Same goes for pictures, videos, whatever.

    Combine this drag-and-drop ease with the fact that you can “swish” your windows out of the way (by moving the mouse to the corner of the screen) to reveal the desktop, or shrink them all so you can move your focus to another window (again, using exposé) this is a killer workflow feature in my day-to-day use.

  3. Installing and Uninstalling Software

    I remember when I was a kid, I used to use DOS for most of the games and programs I used. Installing new software was not necessarily obvious—whether you had to use the INSTALL.EXE program on the disk, or just copy things over was 50/50. But uninstalling was a dream: just delete the directory (folder) it was installed to!

    Then I moved to Windows. Things started to get complicated. You couldn’t just copy things over from your friend’s computer anymore—that almost never worked. No, you had to have the original install disks or CD and use the install program. Why? Because the number of locations on your system that the new software was sent to was more than 1. Installing also meant that things like the Registry would have to be modified. In short, installing software on a Windows machine is messy—and that makes uninstalling worse. If you were lucky, either the software itself was shipped with an uninstaller, or the Windows system uninstaller was notified of the program and would provide some way to remove the software. On more than one occasion I resorted to formatting my hard drive and re-installing windows just to start with a clean system slate.

    What’s different about OS X? Drag and drop to Applications to install. Drag and drop to the Trash to uninstall. The first time I did that I was like, “That’s it? Wow. Why can’t Windows be like that?”

  4. No Start Menu, No Floating Hierarchical Mess

    Everyone knows how to use the Windows “Start” menu: click Start, go to Programs, choose a folder, slide your mouse, let go of the mouse button. How often have you used anything other than “Programs” in your start menu? In my case, aside from the occasional need to access the Control Panel, almost never.

    In Mac OS X, you get a simple Dock—always visible and always open (unless you configure it to hide itself)—where all of your most common applications go. One click and your program opens.

    The interesting thing here is that nothing goes in this “one-click” applications Dock unless you put it there. Psychologically, this helps me more than the Windows solution—that is, in Windows, your most commonly accessed applications magically get chosen by the OS to go in the Start menu’s direct access list. Rather, when I make a conscious choice to put something in the OS X Dock, I know exactly where I put it and that it’s not going to disappear by atrophy.

  5. A Hundred Other Things I don’t have time to describe each of my favorite features in detail, but let me list a few others here:
    • Crashes: If an application crashes (and they rarely do), it doesn’t bring the system down with it.
    • Application Preferences: You can access each application’s preferences consistently by going to the same place under the same menu! What an idea!
    • Cameras and Printers: “it just works”
    • Apple Warranty: my LCD monitor died last month, two days before the one-year warranty expired. The $800 piece of equipment was replaced free of charge.
    • Viruses and Spyware: I heard once that a Mac OS X virus actually exists. I haven’t seen it yet.
    • Unix Foundation: While most people won’t know or care much about this, the fact that it exists says a lot about design, engineering and security.
    • TextMate: The text editor that’s so good, some people buy a Mac just to run it.
    • Packaged Software: You get nice stuff like iTunes, iMovie HD and Mail with a new Mac.

So is there anything I don’t like about a Mac? Well, yes. They aren’t show stoppers, but here are a few things I’ve experienced that I wouldn’t wish upon anyone else:

  • I once had a bad printer driver that consistently caused a kernel panic. Some drivers, it seems, are less supported than their windows counterparts.
  • Like Windows, I do occasionally get an application to crash. Losing data sucks, no matter what OS you’re using.
  • I can’t run Internet Explorer for my Web Development testing. Although I would never use IE unless forced to, unfortunately being a web developer means my job forces me to :)
  • When I get more than about 10,000 mail messages in various boxes, the Mail application gets sluggish. Occasionally it crashes.

As you can tell, if you’ve read through the article to this point, I’m a sort of a fan. I wasn’t always thus. I used to think Linux was the coolest thing ever, and that I would never leave for a commercial alternative. But my switch to Mac OS has been two years old now, and I can’t imagine moving back. I don’t have much to say to deride Apple’s operating system. Conclusion: I’ve benefited from switching, and if they ask me, I tell all of my friends that they’ll like it too.