#2

A few nights ago, I was at a party and found myself in a discussion that had to do with communication and social media. Well, that's not entirely true. I kinda had my eyes on this gorgeous guest to whom I wasn't introduced, and when I saw her talking to the hostess, a dear friend of mine, I managed to sneak into conversation. Anyway, in my attempt to look intelligent, I brought up the idea of how we need to consider different individuals and communities, and their special needs and concerns, when suggesting technology solutions. Something we tend to forget in today's "technological fashion show", when a new technology comes and divides us into cool people who use it and uncool ones who don't. Digital media have the advantage of being customizable in so many different forms. Taking one possible configuration (for example the traditional desktop computer with monitor, mouse, and keyboard) and expecting everybody to accept it as "standard computing device", is an oversimplification. When I was a kid, there was this saying about doctors who only know one drug and always prescribe the same thing to everybody. The "single prescription" approach to technology will result in the technology not being used properly or not being used at all, when a bad format is provided or suggested to users. Take Facebook for example. Do you think a social tool that works great for your 16-year old sister will be good for your grandfather too?
 
To make the short story even shorter, when I woke up early next morning I thought about the subject again (By now you've probably noticed that I do a lot of thinking in bed. It happens when you have nothing better to do there). I realized that interestingly enough, this is quite related to my Mac experiment. It can be a good starting point for my review to say that probably there is no unique superior technology (company, computer, operating system, input device, etc) that works for everybody and everything. The single prescription approach sneaks into our lives in so many different ways. It's up to those who claim to know the technology, to find the proper solution for different cases. Sometimes it's a desktop PC, sometimes it may be a MacBook Air. In some cases a smartphone may be all you need, and in some other cases we need to design a new computing device that is embedded into our non-computing equipments and simply adapts to what we normally do rather than us adapting to the way the computer works. A little too Sci-Fi for you? Google ubiquitous computing. BTW, the actual morale of the story is that if you want to impress someone at a party, geek talk is probably not your best choice, and you might want to consider exchanging contact information before they leave.
 
Now without further ado, let me give you my first real report on my adventures in the Mac world. So I got my MacBook Pro a day after the first post. The last few days were spent mostly on getting used to the new interface, installing Windows and some Mac applications, and deciding on my evaluation process. Here is what I came up with as evaluation criteria:
1-    Hardware; including things from ergonomic design to devices and parts
2-    Software Usability; especially the interface design, the ease of finding things, performing tasks, etc
3-    Applications; availability and quality
4-    Development; the programming tools commonly used
5-    Stability; including issues such as non-responsiveness, crashes, failures, etc
6-    Security; protection against all sorts of malware 
7-    Interoperability; including issues such as compliance with open standards and portability of data/code
8-    Connectivity; including networking and connecting to devices
9-    Performance; mainly speed
10- Cost of Ownership; including the base system and applications
11- Coffee-shop Cool Factor!
 
I decided to list my items in three categories:
1-    P (for positive, Mac "likes")
2-    N (for negative, Mac "dislikes")
3-    X (just different, not significantly better or worse)
 
In my judgment of these categories, I'll try to consider not just myself but other types of users.
 
Before I list my items for this week, here are some general observations, probably not mature enough to be considered a review item:
1-    I'm not a big fan of many native applications on Mac such as Safari. So I'm installing 3rd party ones. One was Google Chrome. It generally works fine but crashed once!
2-    I installed Windows 7 in a Bootcamp partition so I can boot my computer with Windows. Using Bootcamp was pretty easy. So was installing and setting up Windows 7.
3-    I installed VMware Fusion 3.0 to run Windows on a virtual machine while booting with OSX (the other serious alternative was Parallels Desktop 5.0 but they seem to be more or less at the same level of reliability and features). It didn't work at first. Windows wouldn't start and I had to un-install and re-install Fusion. Then it worked. So much for computers being deterministic. You see that's why we study Probability and Statistics. Way too many random things happening. But it made me wonder: PCs have all sort of configuration so it's expected for programs to act differently, but isn't Mac supposed to be a lot more "predictable" because there is just one configuration?
4-    Some of the other programs I installed are listed here for your reference:
a.     Blender, 3D Modeling, free
b.    OpenOffice, MS-Office compatible office tools, free
c.     Macintosh Explorer, for those like me who prefer Windows Explorer hierarchical 2-pane view over Mac’s Finder. Not free but only $15
d.    Fugu, the best FTP client I found on Mac, free
e.    Skype, free
f.     GIMP, 2D graphics, free
g.    xCode, Apple’s native development tools for Mac and Phone, free
h.    Audacity, audio processing tool, free
i. VLC Media Player, free
j. Corel Painter, has a lot of Photoshop features plus better painting tools, Carleton University has an educational version for $10  
k. Adium, instant messaging compatible with most IM tools like MSN that I use, free
l. Firefox, browser, free (I set each one of my browsers to remember a different "identity" so I don't need to log in and out)
 
And here are my review items:
 
P
·         Installed applications are easier to manage (e.g. copy somewhere else, etc)
·         Fast start up and shut down. Windows 7 also starts and shuts down fast but OSX is a little faster.
·         Nice-looking. Seems that the design objective was to make it look good rather than comfortable. See the following notes.
 
N
·         Sharp and a little uncomfortable edges especially when using the TrackPad for mouse. You'll get used to it though.
. Controls such as volume and eject are through software, so if for any reason OS is not responding (e.g. at start up) you can't control hardware (e.g. lower the volume)
 
X
·         fn-delete for delete, and other similar combinations for page-up, page-down, home and end keys
·         Default application for "open with" is by default for a file not a file type. You have to go to Get Info menu to change for all files of the same type.
·         Windows can be resized only from bottom-right corner. This is harder if you want to resize only horizontally or vertically, but less likely to resize by mistake
·         Close button doesn't really terminate the application. You have to use Quit command.
·         Maximize doesn't really maximize. It automatically decides the size based on content.
·         Dock doesn't show all open windows. You need to use other system tools.
·         Top menu is shared by all programs. Kinda strange for Windows users but easy to get used to.
 
That's it for this week. Next step: more applications and more on interface.
 
I'LL BE BACK!
 

#1

Are you tired of hearing about how wonderful (or crappy) Macs (or PCs) are? Have you ever felt that you are not getting an unbiased opinion about what computing platform to use? Don't you wish you could be rich and famous, or just not using a computer at all?

If your answer to the first two questions is YES then I'm talking to you (I don't particularly care about your answer to the third question. I kinda came up with it half consciously, as I just woke up in the middle of the night).

Anyway, here's the thing. Camille and Pauline are two sweet French girls I met in Cuba a few months ago who study in Canada. I saw them again yesterday (they are visiting Ottawa) and we had dinner. Being a geek and considerably older than them, the result of this dinner, instead of me falling in love and following them to France, was eating a lot of food at a nice Indian restaurant and topping that with my favourite cheesecake at Zak's, going to bed relatively early (by myself), and waking up in the middle of the night, which I mentioned before. Ironically, here is when things start to make sense. In that wonderful half-sleep state, I came up with an idea.

I recently bought my very first Apple product, a Mac Book Pro (in fact it's been shipped but I haven't received it yet). I have used Macs a little, and also Unix/Linux systems (and now-extinct SUN workstations when they were around), but I'm a PC user. I have used PCs since MS-DOS, all the way pretty much through every version of Windows (I currently have XP, Vista and Windows 7 on different computers). But I've been surrounded with a lot of Mac users and like most of you I have seen all the TV commercials where cool-acting young Mac makes fun of un-cool but lovable-in-a-geeky-way PC. So I always wanted to see what the hype is about. Are Macs really much better? So I decided to buy one and see for myself, especially because you can install Windows on it too, in case you have software with no Mac version. And of course, it fills a gap in my computer collection (I have a Linux box too) and it looks kinda cool.

Yesterday I was joking with some students of mine that I would report my comparison results. Like many other things I tell my students, I wasn't really planning on doing that (can you keep this a secret?), until I woke up about an hour ago with the brilliant idea of starting a blog.

So for the next 52 weeks (that is a year for those of you who are mathematically challenged), I am going to post once a week and tell you about my experience comparing PCs and Macs, Windows and Mac OS (and possibly other platforms and operating systems) . I will try to be as unbiased and impartial as possible. This is particularly important because I’m amazed by how closed-minded people can get when it comes to something they are used to or they like for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, Mac and PC users I know are very intelligent and open-minded people in general, but when it comes to their computers and phones (and some devices with no apparent real use, not even as any sort of pad), they can be religiously fanatic. Not exactly a good thing when you are looking for information.

I will be doing all sorts of tests, running all sorts of programs, and performing all sorts of tasks; on Mac and on PC, Mac OS and Windows on the same hardware and also on different computers. I will be open to suggestions for things to test but of course I don’t promise to follow those suggestions. This is my experiment. Do your own if you don’t like it!

This is it for now. I need to go back to sleep, but I’LL BE BACK!