my only problem with the 'coloured balls' on the mac ui is that there isn't a maximize button. at all.
i mean... why? i have to manually drag a frame into the top left corner, then drag the botton right corner all the way to the edge.

with Spaces, it makes working with maximized frames completely viable, but there's no way to actually maximize anything quickly.

besides that, my only other gripe is with the fucked up mouse acceleration that requires me to get 3rd party software to make the mouse useable. i don't really know what the big deal that everyone is making about the graphical effects. you can turn off most (or all?) of them if you want and they don't cause crashing or visual anomalies. the integration of the effects is done well. 

the balls stay visible, and keep their color, but the icons inside them ( x - + ) are only visible when you mouseover them. 

for explaining this ;-) 

I can see how this is not "form-follows-function", but isn't that splitting hairs? It's not a big deal or usability disaster, in my opinion. There are far worse things than that, like for example the mouse accel curve that necros mentioned (although I believe they changed it in Leopard).

I for one prefer Mac OS over Windows because there are a lot of small things that make my life easier and allow me to work more productively. The two systems are pretty similar anyway, since they both use similar metaphors, but to me, working with the Mac OS feels more natural and simply quicker than working with Windows. Two examples of very useful features in the Mac OS are Spotlight (search function) and Expose (application switching).

Btw, I hear the no-maximize-button complaint frequently from Windows users and switchers, but personally I never missed that function. I hardly use maximized windows, and those programs that I feel make sense to have maximized windows do actually use the entire screen when you press that button (XCode and the Eclipse IDE for example). 

sleepy: i didn't bring it up, but it is something that i've noticed, so i was just clarifying the point someone else made. I don't consider it a big problem.

For me the main complaint with osx is that everything seems designed for a desktop full of overlapping, non-maximized windows, and it's not easy to do my preferred organization, which is every window maximized and alt-tab between them. First, apps like photoshop don't have a container window for documents on mac, so you either hide all other apps or you have a visual clutter of background apps. Second, the inability to easily maximize windows in some apps. Third, alt-tab (apple-tab in mac) only selects apps, not windows, and the dock likewise doesn't show multiple windows in the way that the windows taskbar does. (this is why tabbed browsing is actually pretty awesome; it's less of a big deal in windows.) Fourth, the fact that the menu bar is not attached to windows is especially problematic on dual monitors, if you have the app window on the second monitor, but still have to go to the other monitor to use the menus.

I'm not a mac hater, there are a lot of little things that mac gets right and windows fucks up. For example, mousewheel functionality should always affect the window/control that is directly under the mouse cursor, not the one that currently has focus, that's the whole point of having it physically on the mouse. Mac does this right, windows doesn't (though windows firefox seems to hack it to work correctly.) Also, filename editing in save dialogs defaults to not selecting the file extension, which is nice. The little dot in the close button when a file has unsaved changes. The F11 "show desktop" feature is toggleable, unlike in windows where it's an irreversible "minimize all" feature. The F9 windows selector is nice, and actually does a lot to help find document windows considering the problems i mentioned above. I use it instead of apple-tab most of the time because of this. The only issue with it is it relies on each window having a distincive appearance even when shrunk down, which is not always true (some apps are just white boxes with faint text and light grey toolbars, not very recognizable. Adding a watermark of the app icon might help with this.) The security approach where you have to enter a password to install software or change certain control panel settings is nice, it seems like a good balance of security and user ease-of-use.

Other things to complain about on macs? I am always dissatisfied with the "finder" window. Windows explorer makes it much easier to keep track of multiple locations in the file hierarchy, and move files between cousins rather than just ancestors and descendants. The mouse thing has been covered, there are paid apps available to tinker with acceleration to the point where it's not a big problem, though it sucks that I haven't found a free one. Also, you can't customize the dock very much. For example, it seems you can't put a shortcut to a file or folder on there. Hmm, the fact that modal dialogs appear attached to the parent window's title bar is kind of nice, but I have seen this backfire when the modal dialog is too big to see something important on the document itself, and even when the modal dialog is too long to see the bottom of it. And, there's no easy way to lock your workstation, other than turning on screensaver or putting it to sleep. Oh, and open/save dialogs disable most of the features of a folder view, so you can't delete or rename documents from inside those dialogs. It's too bad because that's a pretty convenient way to do some clean-up work in windows without actually re-navigating to the same folder in explorer.

So there's my quasi-rant on OSX. I think it's still got fewer things wrong with it than windows, but both OSes have problems and I wish they would just make some uber-OS that did everthing right. 

I agree with some of your points, esp. menu bar + multiple monitors, the finder (although I think that the column view is a great feature), sheets (modal dialogs attached to the window (it has some advantages though; you always see which window the dialog belongs to and it's much more clear why an application is currently blocked than with floating dialogs), locking (this is really idiotic).

Other things you mention don't bother me so much because I have a different workflow than you have.

Btw, you can get Windows-like Alt-Tab behaviour using witch:
http://www.manytricks.com/witch/ 

those things i mentioned might not be big usability hurdles, but it shows that the mac designers aren't what every other mac fan thinks they are.

It's interesting how different user experiences seem to be:

On my (slow) linux laptop, i seldom use anything besides emacs/console/opera, so all the mac features would be lost on me. tab switching with 1/2 in opera and alt + number in a terminal is essential though. Also, i really like my mouse enabling the window it moves over without bringing it to front, very handy with a small resolution. All visual effects disabled.

On my main rig (windows), i also use maximised apps like ps, gtkr, modeling. For navigating the fs i use the norton commander style total commander, as the shell/terminal in windows sucks so much (and totalcmd really has loads of useful features). I can't stand using explorer, it feels so goddamn slow compared to shell/totalcmd ;). I seldom use the startmenu, mostly it's the quickstart and another quickstart toolbar in totalcmd. My task bar is on the left of the left screen as small as it gets, so it only displays icons. Mouse wheel not scrolling window it's over is annoying. Windows classic skin, most visual effects disabled besides cursor shadow.

I've always been a very alt-tab based user. 

technically the windows "show desktop" feature is togglable. I was using windows-M, which is literally "minimize all" and not reversible, but windows-D does toggle the way you want, like mac's F11. 

You know, once you get used to it, you sort of stop maximizing applications as you are used to doing in Windows.

It's an application specific thing -- ToeTag, for example, will maximize to fill the entire screen because as a level editor that's the right choice. As does Photoshop. But text editors don't really need to take the entire screen up, nor do web browsers. They just need to get "as large as the application needs them to be" which is what that button does.

It's not a real issue once you start using it day-to-day.

You start to navigate differently after awhile. F11 to show/hide the desktop (which actually works correctly in OSX - in Windows it minimizes all the apps which is dumb), F9 to see all the running apps in Expose, F10 to see all documents open in the current app, etc.

ALT+TAB is the same as CMD+TAB in OSX so I'm not sure what people are going on about there.

Don't get me started on Spaces - SO nice.

And a quick note about the colored ball buttons ... there are 3 of them there and they are colored. It's not hard to remember what does what.

As always, this conversation is pretty controversial and will be plagued with flames and trolling as well as ultimately being pointless. The best you can hope for here is clearing up a few misconceptions people may have but nobody is going to be convinced to switch operating systems because of it.

And megaman ... you're trapped in a time warp. They don't design operating systems for people like you anymore. Walk into the light. 

well, i've only been using it 8 hours a day for 16 months, so maybe i shouldn't be so quick to form judgements. :)

apple-tab isn't identical to alt-tab (doesn't show multiple windows for the same app) but F9 is a pretty reasonable alternative.

photoshop doesn't fill the screen for me, but i'm using CS3 so maybe your version does.

the colored balls are fine, but take the point that hiding the icons (which are somewhat informative) and only showing colors (which have no inherent meaning to a new user) has no functional justification. It merely looks nice.

Anyway, you may be tired of OS talk, but I find it useful as a software/game design type person to examine software/game design and clarify why things work or don't work. Getting into the details about it also helps clear up misconceptions, as you say. 

well, i've only been using it 8 hours a day for 16 months, so maybe i shouldn't be so quick to form judgements. :)
As I said, nobody is going to change their minds. If you don't like it, you don't it. Nothing said here will change that. The only reason I really post in these threads is maybe learn something and hopefully clear up misconceptions that other people might have.

photoshop doesn't fill the screen for me, but i'm using CS3 so maybe your version does.
You might be right there. I can't remember clearly. At any rate, it's an application specific thing. In OSX that button means, "get as large as you need to" not "fill the screen".

the colored balls are fine, but take the point that hiding the icons (which are somewhat informative) and only showing colors (which have no inherent meaning to a new user) has no functional justification. It merely looks nice.
Arguably, it fits into the overall aesthetic of OSX which is minimal UI and clutter. Removing those symbols cleans up the UI in a small way which is fine with me. I don't need those symbols there to remember what the buttons do - and if I do need to be reminded, I'll be shown when I move the mouse up there.

Anyway, you may be tired of OS talk, but I find it useful as a software/game design type person to examine software/game design and clarify why things work or don't work. Getting into the details about it also helps clear up misconceptions, as you say.
I tire of trolling and random flames and "my OS is better than yours" crap. I'm all for discussing pros and cons of design in a mature manner. 

Oh, and in OSX's defense, one thing that mitigates the need to mimic the Windows maximize behavior is that applications remember where they last were on the screen. I believe it's a magic feature that everyone gets for free. So once you size the app to where you like it, it will remember that position and size every time you open it.

Windows relies on the individual applications to write code to do this and they seldom do - so maximizing is a quick way to remove the issue. 

And to complete my posting hat trick, let me throw in a gripe about OSX that I don't like. I don't like having to use the bottom right corner to resize windows. I think Windows has a far better solution where it allows you to drag any edge or corner to resize a window.

So there's a point for Windows design IMO.

I guess it's arguable. In OSX you get a little more screen area for working since you don't need the thick border around the entire window and from a UI design point of view, it's very clear that when you see the ridged box that you can use that to resize something.

Still, I find it annoying many times. 

From what i've heard it's getting good feedback, and they may have finally straightened out some of vista's bugs. But the real news is they're giving away licensed copies of XP (running under Virtual PC), with expensive versions of Win 7.
http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/04/24/secret-no-more-revealing-virtual-windows-xp-for-windows-7.aspx
At first i thought "well... they know it's shit, and are giving away what people want [XP]. What a joke", but the bigger issue is this, and it's positive. The Windows code base is a ponderous mess because they've always offered backwards compatability. By including a virtual box for legacy programs (especially business apps) they can cut that shit out of the new operating system, and finally move forward. Security, bugs, performance and UI consistency should all benefit.

To what degree they can achieve this is debatable however. Obvious problems i can see are
1. Gamers are still in the cold as virtualisation is of negative
benefit to them, and gamers made microsoft imho.
2. Windows still has UI-design and strategy issues that are unresolved, which are huge issues the company has
never had to properly address before, unlike Apple.
3. Removing legacy functionality from the core OS ~will~ hurt people, and do they have the will to really do it ? 

> technically the windows "show desktop" feature is
> togglable. I was using windows-M, which is literally
> "minimize all"

Doesn't shift-windows-M un-minimize them ? 

I've just learnt something...

That's very useful. Thanks! 

Always behind whichever the curve is, but this sounds like its worth it. 

I'm going to ditch Windows and install Archlinux now instead. See you next week! 

Vista is alright but damn is it slow doing some basic things. My work machine takes no less than 10 minutes to get from from power up to "ready to work" state. And most of that time is spent after I log into Vista.

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.

My home desktop (which is well average by today's standards: E6600 2,4 Ghz, 4 GB ram) goes from cold boot to a usable Vista desktop in under a minute. Even the retarded Fujitsu testbed machines we have at work with 1-2 gb ram launch in under 1,5 minutes and this is with Antivirus and all the regular crap. 

My nearly 7 old Windows desktop is 2 Ghz.

You'd think in the last 7 years that the CPU speed would have evolved more. 

i think there are some design limits that single CPUs have hit in recent years, that's why everything is switching to multi-core. 

Only possible explanation for this is that you have a really silly amount of software set to launch upon logon and this would slow down the boot process of any OS to a crawl.
Not really. It's a work machine. We have a virus scanner and a messenger app and that's about it. There's nothing in the task tray that would explain 10 minutes of disk thrashing every reboot.

This is AFTER you've logged in, mind you. You've entered your password and you're now at the desktop. However, the machine won't be usable for another 5-10 minutes. 

Willem used quote tags!

Have a beer ;) 

We use a similar one. 

Archlinux was easy to setup and runs so very nice.
And thanks to Linux I could transfer all my settings by simple copying files over.