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Wallet loosening Macs

Mac OS X has an amazing ability to loosen the wallets of its users. In all my years of Windows computing I personally bought exactly one application; Winzip. And that purchase was more out of guilt for having used it for years and never paid. Funnily enough I switched to Mac OS X a short month after buying Winzip. Most of the other software I had installed was free or provided by a MSDN subscription.

In the few months I have had a Mac though I have bought TextMate, Omnigraffle, Photoshop, Fireworks and now Synergy.

The initial reaction to this is that Windows is better because “it has more free software for it and so you don’t need to pay” which is technically true. On another level though Mac OS X is better; The level of the computer as a productive tool and not an end in itself.

Synergy proves this out for me. It is a $5 utility app. that controls iTunes. I would never have paid for a Windows equivalent because nothing on Windows comes close to the quality of Synergy. It integrates so beautifully with the Mac OS X menu bar (and system-wide keyboard shortcuts) that after a few days of free use I realised it was worth more than $5.

Synergy feels like it is part of my daily Mac OS X experience. It is there when I need it, out of the way when I don’t and it works as if I had personally told the developer exactly what I wanted and he had gone and made it.

A lot of Mac OS X software is like this.

I can’t think of any Windows software like this. Maybe iTunes on Windows…

If I had read this post a few months ago, when I was still a Windows user, I would have scoffed at it. I would have said it was some air-headed Apple fanboy under the influence of Jobsian spells.

Now I think the reality is that Windows is the one casting spells on its users. Spells of illusion, of forgetfulness and of tolerance for poor quality. More to the point; Windows casts the spell of practicality which pervades enterprise thinking. It is the grey-suited men telling you what is good for you and you sucking it down for your rationalised life.

And before you say it; If I’m going to suck anything down I’d rather suck it down from a black pollo-neck wearing wizard who dares to dream.

Macs and Mac OS X are something you have to use to appreciate. It changes your computing experience, from the frustrating chore that is Windows where you spend more time dealing with a computer than with what you are trying to achieve. With Mac OS X I find I get more done and in a more pleasant manner. That is important, that I enjoy what I am doing while I am doing it.

I don’t expect Windows users to like hearing this or think it is even remotely true. It takes actual sit down time with a Mac and Mac OS X to have the spell lifted.

Remember, I was a Windows user for 14 years. I developed with Microsoft technologies, used Microsoft tools and thought Apple was a high-priced toy that had lost touch with reality. How things change.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 1st, 2007 at 8:02 pm and is filed under Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Post, Software, Windows, applications, mac os x, synergy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 9 Comments

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    Welcome to the cabaret. The symptoms you describe are referred to as Maclash, the result of obtaining a Mac. :) On a more serious note, you've hit the nail on the head with respect to getting more done. For years, even as a Windows user, I ran dual-boot with SuSE so that whenever I could I'd nip into Linux and get a buzz out of what I was doing. Plus I had the wonderful excuse of saying that I was ensuring I was writing POSIX compliant C code. ;) These days the offering of parallels is doing the same in reverse for Mac users, it's a case of having to check something on Windows instead of doing something on Windows (outside of J2ME anyway). I really need to find a way upgrade my G4 though before I can start to experience that joy. Then my only worry will be running low on battery power or as I affectionately call it "Apple juice". :)
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    Ah, one day I will know the joy of the Mac :) I'm more than happy that I moved away from windows to Ubuntu though. Programs don't die every two seconds now and startup is almost instant in comparison. The negative to Linux is that I can run software such as photoshop and fireworks on my machine, hence I have to boot into windows. Mac prodvides you guys with the best of both worlds and now with parallels it seems to pretty much be the Ultimate platform for developers. Im green!!!
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    Parallels is also available for Linux and Windows... :)

    I switched back to my Dell workstation today, the default Fisher-Price inspired XP theme reminds me just how pretty my Mac is. Still, it's 9:50am and I've only rebooted twice (1: Forgot what my USB wifi dongle was. 2: Thunderbird has some weird DLL issue, fixed with a delete-reboot-reinstall)
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    AFAIK it is not legal to run OS X on a PC. Plus the guide I read made it out to be a bit of a hack.
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    I meant more Chris' problem of having to dual boot Windows. I don't think Parallels will virtualize an OSX instance -- some agreement with Apple to maintain a friendly relationship.
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    >> I don’t expect Windows users to like hearing this or think it is even remotely true.

    What, your starry-eyed attempts to cast using a Mac as an experience somewhere between "religious" and a John Stewart-esque "using a computer *on marijuana*"?

    Or the thing about utilitarian apps...? ;-)

    'Cause, i'll agree with the latter. I've had a policy for... years now, that pretty much boils down to, "I'll buy it if i want it and can't write it". Or, to put it another way, if i think i could cook up the app myself in a Saturday's worth of hacking and drinking, then i expect to get it free. Notable "utility" apps i've laid out money for:
    * Trillian
    * TV Tool (a nice little utility for bypassing the onerous DRM restrictions and sad TV support implemented by NVidia drivers).
    * Nero
    * Firebug (ok, this was a donation... but i'd have paid it if i'd needed to)

    They all do things i needed, couldn't get free, and would have spent months working out on my own. And with the exception of Firebug, they all have terrible user interfaces. Heck, just about every single app i use has a rotten UI. VS2005 is probably one of the better apps, but it's huge, written by hundreds of developers, and... still has a lot of problems. I certainly would never use words like "beautifully" (or even "seamlessly") to describe how they integrate with the core system. Indeed, if there's one thing common to most of the apps i use, it's how eager they are to *make you aware that you're using them*. Splash screens, heavy UIs, custom dialogs for things that the system does better, modal dialogs for things that should be non-modal...

    ...but i could go on like this all day. If there's one thing you know about me by now, it's that i hate software in general, and programmers in particular, with a passion. So i'll just give one, white-hot-brilliant example: source control.

    At this moment, i have four source control clients installed on this machine. Three of them offer "integration" by way of a Visual Studio plug-in. But only the fourth actually integrates at all well into my workflow: the TortoiseSVN client makes source control *almost* seamlessly available from any OS-provided file system view, including the standard Open and Save dialogs. The rest all provide pale imitations of the old two-pane Fileman/Explorer interface, usually with a few more panes tacked on for for status or other information. All three, *without fail*, require me to have either a command prompt or an Explorer window open on the "working directory" for whatever project i'm viewing, because they don't provide a UI for common file management tasks. And that token nod at "integration"? VS becomes slower with it turned on, and continually locks files i don't want locked. In short, they provide the worst of both worlds: UIs i could have written on a drunken Saturday, but *would never have wanted to*. Tortoise, for all its problems, comes the closest to something i'd willingly pay for out of pocket: i'm actually more productive with it than without it.

    So yeah. I'll believe your little "software so great i'm happy to pay for it" trip. Because i'm such an optimist that i want to believe it happens *somewhere*...
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    @Brian W: I think you may have picked me up wrongly, I was just saying that parallels running on Mac as yet another plus for the OS, not something thats differentiating it from the chasing pack. Indeed, I do run a VM on Windows XP on Ubuntu so that if I need to do something quickly with windows, Ill just fire that up, where as if its something thats going to take me a while I'll boot into Windows fully.
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