Dreadful Thoughts

Introduction

I have a terrible confession to make. I am not a spiritual man so, rather than seek penance through the church, I shall document my reasoning here on the web and you can make your own conclusions.

Please go easy on me.

My confession: I can see myself buying a Macintosh later this year.

To some, that may not sound like something to be ashamed of but it’s all a matter of perspective. By trade and education I’m an engineer or scientist; I have short hair, no piercings and virtually no artistic ability (I present the evidence of that here on this web site!). My computer of choice tends to have a barren, baroque user interface. Let’s be honest here, it’s Unix.

The Macintosh and Unix sit virtually on opposite ends of a spectrum. It’s usually called usability, but I think it’s even more precise than that. The Mac makes it easy for people to learn how to use it. Apple make things easy to use and they sacrifice power and flexibility in order to do that.

One of the best examples if this extreme position is the mouse. In Unix you tend to have three buttons. Windows originally had two but now seems to have spawned wheels and more buttons than a Space Shuttle. In each case although it only takes a short time to realise that the left button does most of the useful stuff, Apple decided that one button was less confusing. They’re right, of course. But it does limit your options as far as, say, short-cut menus are concerned.

Unix is the opposite. It has a huge learning curve, but an expert can quickly do just about anything. After spending a lot of time on that curve, I’d actually say that Unix was more usable than a Mac. I’m under no illusions, though, that it’s more difficult to learn.

I guess these extremes, to some extent, explain the success of Windows. Ignoring Apples mistakes and the fragmentation of the Unix market in the early nineties, we can see that Windows is easier to use than Unix but much less so than a Mac. It has the Start menu, Wizards, pop-up help and often hides information rather than bombard the user with difficult, unnecessary detail. On the other hand, it does have rough and ready multi-user facilities, solid TCP/IP networking and a command-line interface (for the brave). It fits the middle ground doing neither task especially well.

The battle ground

That’s how they stand right now, but six months from now things may be very different.

The Unix side probably isn’t going to change much. Linux, especially, will continue with its vast range of incremental upgrades. distributions will eventually come on-line with the new 2.4 kernel, and improvements will continue in both the KDE and GNOME environments.

In the same time-frame, the next desktop version of Windows, XP, will be unleashed on the world. The beta’s are currently doing the rounds and people seem generally impressed. The interface is easier, more consistent and more aesthetically pleasing, and its built on the Windowds 2000 core which has generally been well recieved.

Normally it might have been enough for me to upgrade from my old copy of Windows 95. But for two things: you can’t, you can only upgrade from Windows 98 or above; and MacOS X.

It would be an obvious choice to buy a new PC preloaded with Windows XP since I’ve had a small succession of similar machines over the last ten years, but I find the improvements in MacOS X to be so compelling than I’m considering moving to a completely new architecture. In a sound-bite those reasons are power and user-friendly in one.

MacOS X is based on a BSD Unix kernel (called Darwin and available under an Open Source licence) and has an enhanced Macintosh user interface grafted on top. This is truly the key. You have the complex internals available from a command-line when you need it and a state of the art GUI when you just need a word processor.

In conclusion

There is only one other operating system that supports such a neat combination of Unix and User Friendliness (the BeOS) and that has many problems: I have tried it on three machines and all have had some device that is unsupported, so this can hardly be a unique scenario; and the software support is worse. I may prefer not to use Microsoft Office, but I need to be able to exchange files with people that do.

No other operating system will have quite that level of flexibility. Microsoft won’t be adding more Unix like functionality to Windows and the open source community just can’t compete with the many years of experience that Apple have designing computers for people who don’t write code.