Man Plus Machine

In these Windows Vista days the differences (or lack hereof) between Mac OS X and Windows Vista are discussed endlessly. Mitch Ratcliffe over at ZDnet has started a series of articles where he compares the two operating systems more in-depth. It’s been running for some months now and has a good hour of interesting reading to offer.

In the latest article, Mitch compares the usablity of the two desktops with focus on the mouse and the functionality available here. Mitch digs up a few good points about usability that you might know of feel but not really think of. In short: Mac OS X is flexible, simple and user friendly, Windows Vista tries to be but fails a bit in being too friendly.

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When I bought my iMac a few months ago, one of the first things I needed installed was office applications. Switching from Linux, the logical choice was OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org suited all my needs, and I would never dream of paying the price for Microsoft Office - I don’t write THAT many documents.

However, I was incredibly disappointed. OpenOffice.org isn’t ported to Mac OS X yet (far from it), but it is still possible to run OpenOffice.org under Mac OS X using the X11 server. X11 is located on one of the Mac OS X Tiger DVDs that came with your machine and it is easily installed (like most other programs for Mac OS X of course). The only problem is that running OpenOffice.org under X11 is so damn slow! It takes an eternity to load and leaves an extra icon running in your dock (the X11 icon). I don’t want to run one program just to run another!

Fortunately there is a solution. Some clever people evolved the OpenOffice.org package into what they baptized NeoOffice and now we’re talking; It runs faster that its cousin and it also comes in Universal Binary for us Intel Mac folks. No more running X11. NeoOffice is more or less OpenOffice.org ported to Mac OS X giving us an enormous amount of features such as MS Office compability, OpenDocument format, 60 languages and much more. Besides that, the developers added some Aqua looks to the buttons, added support for Mac OS X native printer services, drag-and-drop, integration with some mail applications, and support for Mac OS X built-in fonts. Also, NeoOffice comes with extended support for Spotlight enabling your documents to be indexed by the desktop search facilities in Mac OS X.

I highly recommend NeoOffice if you are in need of an office application. Actually, I’d say you need to have very special demands such as a high degree of interoperability with other users’ documents before it is necessary to spend any money on Microsoft Office. NeoOffice does a great job much along the way.

Today, the NeoOffice team released version 2.1 of the application and I’m downloading it this very instant. I bet the upgrading process runs smoothly and problem-free and in ten minutes I’ve forgotten everything about it. But hey, that’s what good software is, isn’t it?

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When switching from Windows or Linux (or most other operating systems for that matter) to Mac OS X, one of the first things to annoy you is the strange beaviour of the Page-Up, Page-Down, Home, and End keys when moving around a document. It can drive most people insane when the cursor doesn’t move along with the viewpoint. There is a perfectly good explaination for this and it is a good idea to sit down and really understand it.

If we look at the groups of keys between the regular letter-keys and the numeric keypad (if you have a normal keyboard - don’t know much about those laptop keyboards, unfortunately) there are two groups to look at: Above is the group of keys containing what we are used to call Home, End and so on. Beneath that we have the arrow-keys. We are familiar with these. When you navigate a text document using the upper keys, you only move the viewpoint within the document. That is, the two keys in the middle bring you to the top and the bottom of your document. The two keys on the right take you up and down one page at a time. But… the cursor doesn’t move along with you! This is because these keys are for viewing.

But how do I move the cursor up and down one page at a time? By using the arrow keys, of course. You use these keys to move single lines - why would you move your hand to other keys to move pages? If you press and hold the option/alt key and use the arrow keys up and down it will take you AND your cursor up and down the document. Using the function key (the one with the apple on it) will take you to the top or bottom. If you use the option/alt key and move left or right, it will move the cursor one word at a time, and by applying the function key it will take you to the beginning or end of the line. See? No need to move your right hand just because you need another kind of cursor movement. Practice this a bit and you will curse PC manufacturers the next time you use one.

Of course, you can apply the shift key along the combinations mentioned above to select the text you move across.

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The AppleTV hacks are here already. A site called Apple TV Hacks has already found a way to swap the built-in harddrive for a bigger one and installing extra codecs and get AppleTV to play Xvid video.

Read the Apple TV Upgrade Tutorial here.

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The AppleTV reviews start rolling in and I already linked to one for you. I’m not going to give you every review available out there but I do  want to point you to a review by Mr. Apple-reviewer David Pogue from N. Y. Times. David Pogue is known for being one of the first to review Apple’s products (he was the first to get hands on the iPhone back in January and the author of The Ultimate iPhone Frequently Asked Questions) and yet he is honest all the way. In short; Pogue’s Apple reviews are some of the most important reviews of Apple products on the net.

Pogue has not only reviewed  AppleTV but also compared it to two other products, namely the Xbox 360 and Netgear’s brand new EVA8000 (what kind of a stupid name is that?). These comparisons only help AppleTV stand out from the herd.

Go on and read the review. I just got a bit more convinced that I need an AppleTV but I’m also more convinced that I’m going to wait for the next generation. AppleTV 1.0 simply can’t be all of it.

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