Is the Mac application-starved? Our intrepid reviews editor investigates in the second part of our special Mac feature.If you haven't read week one of A month with the Mac, it can be found here.
Ask any PC fanatic what's wrong with the Mac, and they'll trot out some fairly standard answers. "They're too expensive for what they are" will pop up, as will a somewhat jealousy-tinged "They're only for people who don't understand computers". Those statements are highly, highly subjective, but the third most common complaint against Macs has a certain amount of truth to it: that they lack a critical mass of applications.
Mac fanatics, for their side, are most likely to counter with a "quality, not quantity" argument, and in my second week using the Mac for everyday business tasks in my role as ZDNet's Reviews & Gamespot editor, I was keen to see if either side would sway my opinion in any measurable way.
First up, browser selection. We ran a Mac browser comparison feature (you can find it here) recently, but I knew going in that I'd need to be using IE, at least some of the time. To preface this, I'll say that I'm not a PC IE user, at least not by choice. I have to say, though, that the Mac version of IE almost (but not quite) makes me like the PC version; it's a truly sluggish piece of work that makes me scream every single second that I use it.
On the PC, I'm nominally a Mozilla Firebird user, although I've used Opera in the past, and Netscape back when it was actually attractive to do so. The Mac, of course, offers me all those alternatives, as well as the Mozilla offshoot Camino browser and Apple's own Safari.
In terms of browsing, I suspect my needs are much the same as everyone else's; I just need to be able to browse around sites as quickly as possible before the boss realises I'm goofing off (note: remember to delete this bit before publishing). ZDNet's content system means I have to use Internet Explorer, and normally that's all I'll have IE open for on a PC, but owing to Mac IE's total inability to actually, well, work, I have to run it and another browser window just to do my job. For reasons best known to itself, Mac IE hangs for minutes at a time on specific pages. It once again highlights the problem that the entire web faces if pages are coded for PC-specific IE. I also miss the ability to see an image's properties (normally the last option on PC IE); opening it in a new window just doesn't cut it.
While both Camino and Safari show a lot of promise, I'm sticking with Firebird for the moment, primarily due to the available extensions (especially the excellent TabBrowser Extensions) which Camino flat out doesn't seem to support, although I presume that's something that'll become more of a reality as Camino progresses. As I'm somewhat of a tabbed browsing addict, the separation betwixt the application and its program bar hits me less in a browsing context.
So on the browsing count, I'd call it as a slight advantage to the PC side, merely because the Mac version of IE is so, so painful to use. If you can get by without needing pages that require IE, however, it's an absolute flat draw.
There are fewer shareware applications -- especially in the OS X space -- than on the PC front, but that's pretty much to be expected; if the audience for an OS is smaller, it's not surprising to find that smaller audience can't compete for sheer quantity of programs. I'm still hunting for a simple text-to-html converter, but at least I have found the second most important part of my armoury -- an application to remind me to take regular breaks.
I'm currently using the rather spiffy Dejal TimeOut!, which fades the screen out at a predetermined period. Remember folks, take breaks early and often, lest your wrists, fingers back and eyes crack alarmingly. I must admit that the LCD screen on the iMac does seem to hit my eyes a little harder than the CRT monitor I normally use after a full day's staring and pondering.
I've only just started to prod and poke at Office v.X for Mac, although I do have one initial observation; it comes in the stupidest box I've seen any application ship in. I'm sure someone at Microsoft said that the lava-lamp styling of the box would appeal to the Mac designer community; to me it just says "Hello, I'm a software box with several unsightly tumours". It is good to see that the proud tradition of shipping a large software box with a very small CD and little else of value besides isn't something that's limited to the PC world.
Random weekly observations
- If anyone can tell me why half of the Mac's apps head to the end of a document when I hit end, and the other half go to the end of a line (which is what I'd expect from a PC heritage) I'd be all ears.
- I'm somewhat torn on the whole Dock thing. The visual idea of combining (in effect, from a PC perspective) the system tray and taskbar isn't a bad one, but I just can't find a comfortable medium between having it hide and/or having it permanently present, especially with the generally more floaty nature of Mac application windows.
- I'm also clearly over the culture shock mentioned last week, and it's now started to reverse, as I find myself hitting Windows+C to copy stuff on PCs now due to the placement of the Mac Command key. On the subject of keyboard shortcuts, I'm also at a loss to find a simple equivalent to Windows+D (minimise all to desktop); a quick Google search shows me plenty of Mac shortcuts, but not that one. Perhaps I'm just being inordinately dim.
- Some playing around in the system preferences have cleared up a few things for me. While many may find the swooshy minimise effect that applications use cute, as far as I'm concerned it's just a time waster, so I was quite glad to switch it off. On the subject of time wasters (and this is going back quite a way, and showing my age) -- has anyone made an OS X version of the highly copyright-infringing Oscar the Grouch trash animation? I'm just asking out of curiosity, of course...
Next week: Mac it so: Investigating Microsoft's contributions to the Mac community.
Alex Kidman is ZDNet Australia's Reviews & Gamespot Editor. You can send flames, unmarked bills and advice to him here.
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