turntable / as the table turns

I’ve previously mentioned my antipathy for OSX. It’s been two years since I made a go at switching to a Mac. I can’t say anything major has changed with the Mac since then. What has changed?

• My Vaio has become unacceptably sluggish
• Adobe apps now run properly on the Mac
• There’s no way I’m going to use Vista
• Most of my work happens in a browser, so the OS is secondary

But perhaps the biggest factor: my iPhone. The iPhone has really made me lust for more. More luscious details. More speed. More fun.

It’s now been about 5 weeks since getting my hands on Darryl’s old iMac 24″. That’s 3 weeks more than I endured last go round! Many of my previous gripes still linger. Like the inability to maximize app windows. Font rendering. On the 160 dpi iPhone type is stunningly gorgeous. Font rendering on the 72 dpi Mac is a sad imitation, often resulting in butchered illegible type that makes my eyes bleed. I really don’t understand how type purists delude themselves so relentlessly.

Lucky for me, I have a couple Mac die-hards sitting nearby who have been showing me all the secret five fingered key commands, hidden settings and special software that makes working with a Mac tolerable.

So far, the best thing about being on the Mac is…

• The beautiful bright screen
• The beautiful visual design details like sublime: gradients, drop shadows, translucent windows, and animations
• The beautiful hardware
• Networking is finally acceptable
• It’s fast and stable, unlike my experience 2 years ago

Overall, I’m happy with the Mac experience. I certainly don’t think it’s flawless. But the speed, the lickable graphics (in spite of the type rendering) and the hardware win me over. I admit that it’s starting to make my eyes hurt whenever I go back to using Windows.

There does seem to be an interesting correlation between the increasing number of iPhones and Macs at Xero. Everyone seems to be switching. Even Grant switched.

With the abject failure of Vista, the mainstream switch-to-Apple tipping point is truly upon us. Jobs is well on his way to resurrecting Apple from the dead, while Microsoft have dug their own grave.

Fifty or a hundred years from now I suspect history will smile broadly on Jobs as a monumental business and cultural icon, while reflecting on Bill Gates as a one-time antagonist in the Steve Jobs story.

My beloved K750 has crapped out on me. It’s not beloved anymore.

To replace it, I almost bought the N95. Then I played around with it. It has a killer feature set, but it’s extremely expensive and it has the absolute worst hardware and software design. It’s pitiful. For half the price I got the iPhone. Thank god for that.

The iPhone is almost certainly, as my friend Wayne put it, the best 1.0 product ever. I’m really dying to know how they pulled it off. How did they manage to design such a refined user experience in a 1.0 - without news of the phone’s details leaking?

I say that even though my version of the iPhone lacks the ability to make or receive phone calls, text messages, or email/web on-the-go via GPRS!! I can NOT wait until they work out the crack.

So what’s to love?

• The drop dead beautiful UI design and hardware. That’s obvious just looking at screenshots, but using it is far more impressive.
• The touch keyboard works extremely well. I often use one hand to type and I’m definitely much faster typing on it than a standard mobile keypad. Admittedly, I was never one of those hyper-thumb freaks.
• The speed of the interface. It’s incredibly responsive and smooth. Just like Macs, putting it to sleep and waking it up is instantaneous.
• The photo quality is very good. I thought the K750 took decent shots, but the iPhoto pix are significantly better (however, I do have some gripes about the camera).
• The apps (calendar, maps, notepad) are stunning. Purely from a UI design perspective it’s beautiful. The interactions are very quick and very smooth, with nicely anticipated shortcuts and navigational details.

Gripes?

• I can’t transfer songs from different machines. WTF?! That’s absolutely fucked. That is just stupid, lame and IMO really cripples the device.
• Camera controls. The thing I used most on my K750 was the camera and the MP3 player. Same goes for the iPhone. The K750 definitely had better hardware controls for both. The iPhone is sorely lacking a hardware camera shutter button. The touch screen shutter is awful. It’s the one time I desperately need tactile feedback and precision. The touch screen sensitivity doesn’t always work and that is maddening when you’re trying to capture a split second moment. It also could really use auto-focus and a macro. Plus, they need to move the lens - my finger always shows up in photos!
• Audio playback controls. The volume buttons are great, but I also need controls for play/stop and next/previous without using the screen. I know the Apple headset has those controls on the mic clip, but I don’t use Apple’s headphones and that controller isn’t so elegant anyway. My K750 would do next/previous by holding down the volume up/down. I wish the iPhone did the same. For play/stop it should use the camera shutter button I want added. Finally, scrolling through long audio files like This American Life episodes is hellish with the scrubber. Here’s a great suggestion from Chris Fahy: an on screen jog dial for scrubbing audio.

  

  It looks like Apple already has that in the works.

• The wifi reception is really weak. And it doesn’t always activate automatically.
• As I mentioned, the touch sensitivity is not always reliable, which can be pretty maddening sometimes.
• The predictive text is terrible and it always messes things up. I wish I could just turn it off.
• I constantly want to use the home button as a back button in the iPod
• Here’s an idea: Wifi syncing. Duh. I’m sure they must be working on this.

What I miss from my K750?

• The LED light. It was ostensibly the camera flash, but I used it mostly as a flashlight and reading light. It came in super handy on many occasions, especially camping.
• The radio. I expect a radio will be available on future iPhones. It’s really nice to listen to the radio sometimes.
• I won’t miss…the flimsy/broken connector jack, the flimsy/broken thumbstick, the flimsy/broken camera shutter button.

The iPhone is definitely giving me Apple love. I’m still not quite compelled to switch to a Mac. I’d really just love to use my iPhone as my primary OS. If I could connect my iPhone via wifi to a big screen and keyboard then BAM…I’ve got my pocket computer that has most my data in the cloud and acts as a Web OS client device.

Based on some of my previous blog posts, I don’t think Apple would be too keen to hire me for this job…

Senior Human Interface Designer

Complete mastery of the Mac OSX platform.

Deep understanding of Apple’s human interface design language and the ability to translate it into future designs of Apple’s professional applications.

Read: must drown yourself in Apple flavored kool-aid.

But I do like these skills criteria:

Exceptional understanding of fundamental design disciplines (typography, composition, information architecture, color and animation) and principals (affordance, clustering, consistency, usability etc…)

Attention to detail and pixel-perfect fit and finish worthy of “one of the crazy ones.”

The ideal candidate is not afraid of a blank white board and can wield dry erase markers with divine-like inspiration.

UPDATE: I sincerely appreciate all the comments people have left. I’m shocked anybody found this blog, but good on ya. I’m not going to argue against anybody. You’re all right. I think it boils down to two things:

• It just didn’t feel right…for me. I wanted to love it, but I didn’t. It felt wrong, to me. It’s different, but not different enough to blow my mind. It’s different enough to annoy me.
• I wasn’t unhappy with my existing system. I wasn’t unhappy or unsatisfied with my experience in Windows. Therefore, I had no real motivation to switch. The fact that I have a lot of work to get done is a motivation for me not to switch.

Ultimately, my experience lead me to stick with XP until Google OS or something similar comes along.

And now back to the original post…

You know those popular Apple ads featuring a smug, partronising Mac boy? The computer itself even comes shrink wrapped in that same smug, partonising state.

I found the Mac OSX experience to still be incredibly flawed. Despite so many top designers gushing over it, I have to say that it is a really poorly designed product - both the hardware and software. I am truly baffled how anyone can tolerate it, let alone gush over it and pay a premium, to boot. Then again, label whores do that. They love to suffer, as long as they are making a fashion statement.

The fundamental flaw was the nose dive in my productivity. I completely acknowledge that there’s a necessary learning curve when making such a conceptual leap. There’s a period of adjustment. I recently switched from Photoshop to Fireworks, which is widely acknowledged to be a relatively significant mental switch. So it’s not that I can’t switch, or that I’m not willing to switch.

So why do I dislike the Mac so much?

• Expose looks sexy, but it’s worse than a schizophrenic girlfriend. Once you start using it, you quickly realize that it seriously disrupts your workflow, often inadvertently. A simple flick of the mouse and you’re suddenly thrown into an unwanted screen warp. It’s like getting tangled up in a fishing net. On the other hand, when you actually do want to quickly jump to another document, then the travel time to get your mouse over to the opposite corner of the screen takes forever, at which point you need to bring it all the way back again. That’s when the real fun begins: it’s time to start guessing which of the puzzle pieces is the one you want. It’s like doing a jigsaw. Is this it? No. Is that it? No. It’s not just a first timer issue - I’ve seen Mac zealots doing the same head twirling jigsaw hunt. In Windows, I can instantly locate my document in the task bar; it takes a fraction of a second to jump to the proper place.
• All of the Macromedia and Adobe apps are dogs on the Mac. They look twice as ugly and they run half as fast. I spend a large portion of my life working in those apps. That alone is a deal breaker.
• iPhoto is pitiful. I rely on Picasa, not only for my personal photos, but more so for my screenshot collection. I have 4500+ screenshots that I’ve collected over the years. When I grab a screenshot in SnagIt the image instantly shows up in Picasa, automagically. On the Mac, Snapz is the closest thing to SnagIt, and it can’t grab a scrolling window. That in itself is a serious problem. I wound up installing the ScreenGrab Firefox extension - which partially solved things. Then with iPhoto I needed to import the images manually, so more wasted time and effort - assuming I could even remember everything I captured. It also meant that I had two copies of every image, archived in different places, in different ways. My blood was boiling.
• Welcome to the Micky Mouse Club. The Mac is a computer that begrudgingly has a keyboard attached to it. Apple would love to ship with just a mouse. The only reason they provide a keyboard is so people have a way to activate the right-button keyboard combo (yes, I do know that the clit mouse does have right button functionality).
• ClearType? Is that supposed to be a joke? Design wankers love to point out the typographic superiority of the Mac’s font rendering. The simple truth is that computer screens cannot render small type sizes properly. Blurring fonts to render them more “accurately” only makes it more obvious that screens are still low resolution. Most importantly it’s harder to read. I don’t care how theoretically accurate it is.

Shall I go on? I could, but I’d rather not. I am a little ashamed that I made a stink to get the Mac, only to give it up so quickly. In the end, I just wasn’t able to get things done on it. And I did sincerely try. After I made the final call to end the abusive relationship, I was overcome with a powerful sense of relief to get back on my Vaio. I immediately started getting things done once again.

I’m pretty confident that my next platform is not going to be Vista or OSX. I’m holding out for Google OS. I love Gmail, calendar, docs, spreadsheets, Picasa, maps, Earth, etc etc. Bring on Google OS.

I am a Google.