Why we like Macs... After reading this post about why Charles loves Mac OS X, I had to slap my forehead. How could I forget? The general consensus (I don't agree on every point he makes) between us is that what I personally love about OS X is not what Steve's been talking about in the past few years. I don't mind Steve Jobs talking about iLife, Spotlight, Dashboard, bashing Windows, templates in Keynote, templates in Pages, templates in iPhoto, templates in iWeb (and now templates in Mail.app!!!) etc.: That's all good and lures consumers into using Macs. But those "features" (bulk) are not what make me use Macs instead of linux or Windows. It's how OS X goes out of my way and lets me work productively, efficiently. And while I could care less about nifty effects on a new integrated backup machine (Time Machine in the forthcoming Mac OS X 10.5) - mostly, because I already *do* keep good backups - I'm interested in little new additions, bugfixes etc., that make the OS move even more into the background for me. Sadly, that's not something one can easily describe in a keynote. Those little things never make a bullet-point in a presentation. The best example for me is that in Panther, you could select one item in the Finder, copy it, and paste it into a Mail.app message window. In Tiger, the long-standing bug was fixed, and you could also select two or more items and copy/paste them into mail messages. I guess many users will never ever even find out about this. They drag and drop or use the attachment-dialogue. But for me, copy/paste of two or more items from Finder to Mail.app was worth 129 USD (laugh at me, if you have to...), because I had to go back to the Finder window (which I would've closed by then) in Panther once or twice a day, which can amount to stress, leading to cancer or heart attacks or at least a mild anger I don't need in my daily life. ;)
I wonder, though, if Apple will find a similarly stupid little thing to fix for Leopard. I'll tell you when I find out. I hope the little things are not thrown out in order to find more things to make templates for. What's next? Templates for ... aaargh! :) - posted by Patrick Armbruster @ 16:23 [article link]