1. Access to applications is haphazard.
The start menu is simple and sweet. OS X you have to open the hard drive,
go to your Application folder and scroll (often latent scroll reacting) until you've found the program you want to run.
Huh? You can have the window as big as you like, the icons as big or as small as you like, you can use icon view, list view, etc. Scrolling performance has never been an issue on my Powerbook.
Contrast with the Start menu - one big list which doesn't stay in order. Once it goes off the screen, you have to put the mouse pointer on the little arrow at the bottom and sit there tapping your fingers whilst it scrolls down and reaches the software you recently installed. How's that more friendly?
BTW if you want to mimic the start menu, drag the applications folder onto your dock next to the waste bin. Right-click it and ta-da, there's your start menu.
2. In OS X, windows open and close with a huge delay.
How huge? I'll grant that things are sometimes delayed for a few milliseconds due to genie effects and stuff, that's the old snappiness vs. looking pretty debate. A small tradeoff, but I must admit some UI elements of Aqua are slower than say Win2000 (or OS 9 maybe)
3. File menu access requires knowlege of shortcut keys. In Windows you simply access any application's menu bar by holding Alt and the letter of the menu's name.
OS X has no such direct access at all like this.
- There is no shortcut way to reach a menu.
Yes there is - turn on universal access and use CTRL-F2.
- Sub Menu items are all assigned to quick keys. With a Windows prog., A sipmle Alt + F gives you immediate and visual access to all file menu options.
CTRL-F2, move to the menu you want and there's your options. It can be a few more keypresses, I'll give you that.
It's true that the most efficent "Mac Way" is to try and remember your shortcuts - ultimately it's a personal preference. The good thing about Mac shortcuts is they're all the same - e.g. CMD-Q will always quit, it won't suddenly change to ALT-X or CTRL-F12 at the drop of a hat. Same for CMD-O always being open file etc etc. You generally don't need to look inside the menus - but if you do, CTRL-F2 is there.
5. Finder is slow compared to Search in windows... Bottom line.
Examples? Statistics? You can't just make blanket statements and opinions like this if you want to be taken seriously.
Here's my example... I wanted to find some pics from my holiday in France last year.
XP: Type france, click search, the doggy goes off and sniffs around the disk for a quarter of an hour and brings up every filename with France in it.
Tiger: Click on spotlight, type france, and less than 5 seconds later it has everything to do with France in the metadata, descriptions, email content etc - all neatly categorised.
How on earth is Windows search faster than that?
6. Menus are tricky in OS X. They appear and dissapear at the most precise point of your mouse.
In Windows you never have to think about loosing a menu. You just click it, it's there and it won't abandon your mouse.
A fair point - Windows wins on this one. On the other hand though, have you ever tried to navigate the Start menu while something's loading (especially if you've just rebooted and your system tray apps are still loading)? Don't you just love the way it keeps on closing?
7. The Dock in OS X is a dumb, uniformative unuseful way of getting applications organized.
.... In your opinion. In mine, the icons are well designed and I've never failed to instantly recognise what each running program is, even with 30 of them on the go. I tend to prefer that to a row of grey squares with "Int..." or just "..." written in them.
8. The genie and other minimize effect is sloppy and runs slowly.
Take your finger off the shift key
It runs smoothly on mine, and it looks pretty. But some people do prefer an instantaneous reaction without any pretty effects... that's a personal preference. I'm pretty sure there's a way to turn the genie effects off if you so desire.
In Windows you minimize and Bam. There it is on the bar for you. OS X requires a bizzare unintiutive "hiding" method of window management. You have to go to the dock, right click the item, open the trickily clicked menu (see 6) find the "Hide" option once you're there. After all that you have hidden a program. What a wash.
Eh?? You hit minimise (the yellow round button) and a small version of the window goes to the right-hand side of the dock, and you can even see a preview of the window. Click on it and it restores. That's difficult, how?
The hide function is a separate thing entirely, that's an extra feature *as well* as minimize.
Please at least learn the *basics* of how to use an interface before trying to criticize it.
9. In Windows, applications are easily maximized and you're not distracted by layers of multiple sized windows behind it.
I'll give you this one, I much prefer the Windows version of maximize.
10. Any given OS X application is going to take up about 15+ megs of ram easy. Text Edit, the OS X answer to Windows' Notepad takes up some 20 megs. For a text app?? I don't even think MS Word on the PC uses quite that? It was very extremely hard for me to use up 512 megs of ram on a PC. In OS X you'll be topping out that 512 after running a couple of extremely simple programs, and maybe Firefox (60 whopping megabytes) and Safari (more or less 60 megs).
Yep, OS X is RAM-hungry. I can't believe how much the widgets take up. On the flip side, the memory management is much nicer so you don't notice any paging etc.
11. Web browsing is tedious for OS X.
Scrolling through a web site you will immediately see there is some kind of bad rendering problem with most browsers (although IE for Mac doesn't have this problem oddly). A page in Windows flips up and down without a single breath.
That's due to badly designed sites that don't follow standards but rather are designed blindly around IE. That's not Apple's fault. You could also try Firefox.
12. I realize this has always been how a Macintosh handles it's application menu, but it's a royal pain in the rear to have to leave the actual application you're on, to the Menu bar at the top of the entire screen. Why would you do this? It just seems only normal to let the users get their menus ON THE PROGRAM ITSELF, not off on some remote detatched planet up there at the top.
The menu follows a basic part of HCI user interface design methodology - if you want something to be easily targettable by a mouse, make it a big target. Putting it on the edge of the screen makes it an inherently massive target and much easier to click on - because you just whizz the mouse up and you can't miss it by going past it etc.
14. OS X uses an overabundance of garish type looking eye candy in it's interface.
It's not at all functional. It's tricky.
More personal opinions. The eye candy looks very nice to me. I'm not sure how it's 'tricky'
It's a general lack of feedback on what you're doing.
Sigh... yet again, your examples are.............??
Here's mine:
I launched Firefox on a Windows box earlier and I didn't think I'd clicked on it properly because there was no hourglass or any form of feedback, so I clicked on it again. 10 seconds later I got 2 instances.
I did the same on my Powerbook, the Firefox icon bounced in the dock to let me know it was starting, and from experience I knew how many bounces it'd take. It didn't stop bouncing until the window was there on my screen.
File copying - fairly smooth. Did a similar file copying operation on Windows and it said 2 minutes, then 30 hours, then 9 days, then it went back to 1 minutes 30 seconds... yuck.
You have one or two good points such as the RAM usage and the maximize/zoom feature, which is understandable as there are pros and cons of both interfaces, but in other areas of your article you seem to be clutching at straws as if you have an axe to grind and are simply looking for excuses to put the Mac interface down. You need to concentrate more on facts and examples than just trying to find things to snipe at and saying they "just suck".