Global Reset

It barely took a week...

Posted by shughes Thu, 26 May 2005 01:16:22 GMT

I’m a Mac zealot.

It didn’t take long. It’s funny thinking about how I’d refer to “those mac users” as being in a cult. Seriously… I would stress that the whole platform was based around a quasi-religious cult. Now I’ve learned that there is a such thing as a “rational cult”. People are fanatical about it because it is good. I am in the cult… That isn’t to say I’ve pledged blind devotion to the Mac (well to the Mac Mini, running OSX 10.4, so we’re very clear what I am not pledging my devotion to), because it has certain quirks that frustrate me. And most of that can be fixed if I put a little code behind my bitching. For example, Mac users seem to not care much about the “path” of files. When I’m browsing in Finder, it is more difficult than it should be to find the full path of the current folder. Apparently, this information is not important to most Mac users. Also, when I execute a file search for a file which appears in many different locations, it doesn’t show the me the location of each file (the information I was actually after).

The annoyances I’ve found are far overshadowed by the features and (mostly) by the integration of those features with each other. Let’s take Spotlight as a great example. The first time I tried it, I gave it a “meh”. I thought it was the same thing as the desktop search that I had already been using on Windows. And, I guess that’d be true if the only facet of Spotlight was the handy magnifying glass in the upper corner of your screen… i.e. It would be the same if it were not integrated into every single damn application. Okay, well, not every application but most of them. It’s an API that application developers get for free.. A free, fast, indexed search for all of your applications. Know how GMail searches your email so fast? Yeah, Apple’s Mail.App does that, thanks to Spotlight. And every application can use Spotlight to filter it’s own files. Spotlight’s scope, in a sense, is limited to the context in which it is run (at least from the desktop user’s perspective, developer’s may not find it so easy.. I don’t know about that yet, but I will).

Sure, you can point your WinXP’s desktop search app to a specific subfolder and think you are getting the same thing. But until you try it for yourself, until you see how much it simplifies common file usage scenarios in every application you run, you may remain a member of the ignorant non-cult.

Another aspect of Spotlight that blew me away is the smart folder. Say you build a spotlight query that goes something like: “every folder whose contents are >1gigabyte ordered by size”. This gives you a quick idea of where all of your diskspace is disappearing to. Now, you can save that query as a “Smart Folder,” immediately retrievable with just a click. From the Finder, it looks like any other folder, except that it’s contents are dynamically determined by the query. Smart Folders are a feature that I’ve loved in Outlook XP, but that is the only place I’ve been able to use them until now. Smart Folders are another one of those things that all of your applications get for free, so I can use them anywhere. I know that iTunes has always had a smart playlist, which is an implementation (available on WinXP) of this exact concept. Imagine all of your apps with that kind of feature!

Now, faithful reader who has held on this long, imagine you have opened up your Control Panel on Windows (System Preferences on Apple) and you forget which one of the myriad icons before you has the necessary option to adjust your keyboard repeat rate (just for example). With Spotlight, you just start typing, something like “keyboard” or “repeat rate”. Just beneath the search dialog box, you’ll get a list of results which matched. But a cool aesthetic feature is that Spotlight has highlighted the most relevant icon with a spotlight! The whole control panel is cast in a shadow, and a circle of light highlights potential matches. The stronger the match, the brighter the beam.

That’s just one feature, people.. I could go on forever about how much I love that one feature, and never tell you about Automator or Dashboard. Much less Quicksilver. Or how Spotlight, Quicksilver, Automator, iChat, iPhoto (etc,etc) are all integrated so well together.

Fair warning: If you see me walking down the hall towards you.. You had better run if you don’t want me to try and convert you to a Mac.