The Switch One man's account on switching to Apple

Author: Henrik Paul Published: 28.08.2006 In English Suomeksi

Day Five: Less Important Stuff

Now that I have everything important and serious stuff set up and working, and also figured out OS X's mentality, it's time for the lighter side of this gadget.

Dashboard, a view for widgets

What first comes in mind is probably the least productive feature I yet have found: "Tell me a joke". Have you heard about the speech recognition built in in the upcoming Windwos Vista? Well, OS X has that already, even if not exactly as advanced, but not that far off. So, one could enable speech recognition, and ask the computer to "tell me a joke". You would get a response something in the lines of following (remember, everything is spoken either by you or OSX's speech synthetication):

You: Tell me a joke
OSX: Knock, knock.
You: Who's there?
OSX: Thayer.
You: Thayer who?
OSX: Thayer sorry and I won't tell the teacher.

How cool is that?! I mean, the joke is inconceivably stupid, but imagine the giggles the developers must've had when writing that piece of code! When I first found and tried this, I was left with that unbelieving smile on my face. Then I burst out in laughter, not knowing what else to do. Of course, you can do actually useful stuff with the speech recog, such as opening applications and controlling them to some degree.

On a more serious topic, there's one feature that I especially like: the ability to close any application, but still keeping some of it in the memory. It's the default action if you close the application by the red button (x-button on Windows). This means that the next time you start the application, it's nearly instantly open. I haven't measured how much memory any given application keeps in memory in this 'hibernated' state, but I'm not too concerned either, because I'm not using my Mac that heavily either. But if you don't want to keep the program in memory, it's done with a press of two buttons. On the down side, when you browse applications with Command-Tab (Alt-Tab in Windows), the apps in stasis are still shown, even though nothing happens if you select them. They don't show in Exposé (a very neat way to switch between open apps), but I'm not (yet) used in doing it that way.

The UI feels the most pleasant compared to any UI I've used, with XFCE 4 as a good second. Even though all applications seem to load for at least some seconds, you can feel something is happening because the icon of the application is bouncing up and down in the Dock (bar in the bottom). This gives you a feel of "yes, yes, I'm loading the application, take it easy", instead of "look, I'm giving you this hourglass, and - see - it's turning, right? At least I'm doing something". Even though OS X is pumped full of eye candy, I feel that they make no compromises in responsiveness. Windows Vista, on the other hand, seems to be wanting about double the system for similar effects. Tsk, tsk.

Pages:   1 2 3 4 5 6 7