Marketing Ninja

First, let me apologize for the delay in posting – it’s finals week here at Vanderbilt and I’ve also had a lot of graduation stuff to attend to, but now for the business at hand: the results from my OS X vs. Vista experiment, which I blogged a little bit about on Sunday.

Where We Left Off

The premise of the experiment was to have a hardcore OS X (Leopard) user and a hardcore Vista (Ultimate) user switch computers for a weekend and see how they compared relative to their standard preference. I’m not sure when my friend plans on writing up his experience, but we spent about two hours going over what we liked and didn’t like about each other’s systems.

What I Liked About OS X

The biggest thing that I liked about OS X were all of the little things – automatic detection and configuration, less bubbly notifications than Vista, and so forth. All of those little things add up to being a really nice touch overall. Here are the things that I liked about OS X:

1. Spaces – I really liked being able to stick stuff in the background when I was trying to do work; when I was installing Vista on Parallels I had it sit in the background while I watched Deadliest Catch via EyeTV in the active Space. Being able to have full control over my visual area was pretty nice – the fact that my friend’s MacBook Pro had a 17″ monitor helped too, I might add. My XPS has a much smaller monitor.
2. Automatic Gmail POP3 Configuration in Entourage - I had to set up my Gmail POP3 access by hand in Outlook 2007; in Entourage all I had to do was provide my login information and it figured out the rest for me. While this isn’t a “major feature,” I think it’s a nice touch. Ironically enough, that was Microsoft’s decision – not Apple’s. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when I set up my Gmail account using Apple Mail I’m pretty sure that it also set itself up automatically.
3. Download Integration with Safari – I downloaded a few pieces of software and installed them on my friend’s MacBook Pro; I really liked the fact that when I went to install those pieces of software hours after I downloaded them I received a pop-up notification from OS X letting me know when I had downloaded the file via Safari and warning me that I was about to install it. I thought this was a nice, unintrusive security feature.
4. Automatic Detection of my External Hard Drive as a Possible Backup Device – As soon as I plugged my USB hub into the MacBook Pro OS X detected the external hard drive linked up through the USB hub and asked me if I wanted to use it as a backup location for Time Machine; again, that’s pretty cool. I had to set that drive up manually for Windows Backup.

What I Didn’t Like

I hope you weren’t here for yet-another-glowing-review-of-OS X, because to be honest, I was surprised at not only the lack of software that came out of the box with Leopard but the software that was bundled with Leopard was utterly inadequate at satisfying my business needs. Here’s what I didn’t like about my experience with OS X:

1. Not Enough Software Out of the Box – One of the things that I hear people complain about in a lot of Apple vs. PC rants is the fact that Apples typically cost more – but most of those comparisons only go as far as the price tag of Macs out of the box. Those comparisons typically don’t include all of the other stuff that you have to buy in order to get the same level of usefulness out of a Vista Ultimate machine. For instance, you have to buy EyeTV if you want to get any of the TV tuner functionality that Media Center has, and the biggest irony of all – you have to buy a copy of Windows in order to play most video games on the Mac.
2. No Built-in SharePoint / Shared Document Control Functionality – I complained about this earlier in the week but Office 2008, Safari, and Apple Mail don’t support SharePoint or any other large document versioning/control systems natively. I assume that Microsoft’s didn’t include any SharePoint functionality in Office 2008 intentionally, but that doesn’t explain  I had to install Firefox in order to view one of my client’s web-based SharePoint systems in order to get access to some drafts that I needed for work. If I hear any Apple fans going “OH WELL, YOU CAN USE SVN FOR DOCUMENT CONTROL *HYUCK*” then I am going to scream – SVN works great for coders who feel comfortable using command lines, not typical business people or even most Apple users.
3. No Surprise – Parallels and VMWare S-U-C-K for Gaming - I decided to opt out of installing Half-Life 2 via Parallels since it takes like 6 discs to install and I didn’t want to pay that much attention to the install process; instead I loaded up my copy of Medieval Total War 2, which takes two DVDs to install, and play that on both emulation platforms. The result? I couldn’t get the loader for MTW2 to launch before Parallels threw a “not supported” error; the loader for MTW2 doesn’t even use the game’s graphic engine. When I was told that VMWare was actually worse than Parallels by my roommate, a MacBook gamer, I said “screw this” and stopped my MTW2 installation. All of the hype I’d heard about Parallels didn’t have much substance behind it apparently. Stick to Boot Camp if you want to game.
4. Crashing – I didn’t expect my friend’s MacBook Pro to crash at all when I used it, given that I only used the system for about 12 hours. It crashed twice – the OS didn’t crash, but some of Apple’s other software did. Safari crashed for no apparent reason at one point and in one other instance the Java VM tanked (that’s SUN’s problem.) My counterpart, who used my XPS for the same duration I used his MacBook Pro – reported no crashes whatsoever. This tickled me pink. For the record, the only crashing that I’ve ever experienced on my Vista Ultimate machine are crashes from Firefox and the infamous “Google Desktop Kills WinSock32.dll” incident.
5. EyeTV is Great – Unless You Want to Change the Channel – I thought EyeTV was pretty cool until I had to figure out how to change the channel. Instead of going to the program guide and clicking on the television program that is currently running I have to look at the guide, flip over to a channel screen which doesn’t show the full names of the network (KYWN vs. ABC for instance) and try to remember what was playing on the given channel. I guess when EyeTV was replicating Media Center’s interface it forgot some key usability issues. Side Note: My counterpart didn’t think that Media Center was very usable at all.

Other Thoughts

1. Mono is No .NET 3.5 – I gave Mono a try as was recommended by my readers; I used Monodevelop and all of the native Mono function calls. While I think Mono has come a long way since I first looked into it a couple of years ago, it still has a ways to go before it’s .NET 3.5. Also, the IDE (Monodevelop) reminds me of Eclipse, an IDE that I love to hate.

Overall I thought the MacBook Pro was a decent ride, but it falls short in a lot of key areas (for me, anyway.) Hopefully my counterpart writes up his report soon, although last time I spoke to him about it he said “I’m going to have to try to think of something nice to say about Vista.”

So there goes my challenge. It’s always good to branch out and try new systems, but it looks like my addiction to video games and my need to consume key services provided by Microsoft software has me hooked on Windows.

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