I agree what you said with the automator, its a great idea and fun to play with but its hard to think up useful situations where you would use it.

Yeah, this statement it coming home to roost today. I have a highly repetitive task to do (replaceing identifier numbers in XML files for use in test cases) and I’d LOVE for Automator to be able to do this job for me. It’s a relatively easy to explain problem but, I believe, too complex for Automator and even programmatically it is likely that the task will take much longer if I try to avoid this manual task. This said, I have seen some new Automator actions that will be incredibly useful when testing web applications (as long as they are based on HTML/JavaScript), so things are looking promising.

To be honest, when it comes to Dashboard, I liked it right from the start and things have only gotten better. As a British National living in Belgium and having very little in the way of foreign language skills, the real-time translator has come in incredibly useful, particularly since Dutch is a supported language.

I agree what you said with the automator, its a great idea and fun to play with but its hard to think up useful situations where you would use it.

Regarding the need for expensive hardware (vermouth 20 sept 7:06am and Hossbud 4:50pm), I’ll do hossbud one better. I have a 500 mhz G3 powerbook and I’m doing fine. I’m going to up my RAM from my rather measly 256 mb and would like a bigger HD, but the latter is purely due to my rather large music collection. And I earn my living on my computer, so it’s not just a e-mail and surf box.

Having said that, I do get a nostalgic tear in my eye thinking back to OS8/9 (which incidentally my SO run on our even older original iMac). I actually think OS9 was more elegant, in some sort of subdued way. OSX is a completely different beast. Taken as a whole maybe as nice to use, and better (not nicer, better) in many ways. But still, after one year on OSX I miss a few things from OS9. The trash can that Stephanie mentioned is one of these. Fortunately that particular gripe can be fixed. I now have a very aqua-esque trashcan in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, thanks to DragThing (which is a godsend in may other ways too).

No OS can be everything to everyone. It may seem an obvious statement. But I feel that it’s a point that’s often overlooked. I think that’s where most opinions of which OS is “best” derails. Best for whom? Really. Think about that one.

Otherwise, I have to agree with Jorge. OSX (like OS9 before it) gets out of my way and lets me do what I want. During my several years with windows as my workplace OS I never got it out of my way. The objective difference may or may not be huge, but Apples OS’s stays on the right side of the line for me, while windows doesn’t. I get bugged by windows. Usually with the little things, like the “cancel-ok-apply” thing. Why both “ok” and “apply”? It’s simply confusing me. Others may feel otherwise, and that’s cool. What’s definitely un-cool though, is people staying with an OS just because of inertia. But then, that’s life.

I’d give a lot to have a simple “Open new text document here” context menu option

Hmm, I never really did see a use for those commands in Windows but I’m glad that people were using them. However, one of the Finder options that I WISH Windows would give is either a keyboard shortcut to creating a new folder or adding the option to the first context menu that you open rather than hiding it under the “New…” option. That drove me nuts ever since Windows 3.1 where, if memory serves, this option was available.

Anyway, I do agree that if you have a Windows background, you knew what you were doing there and that you’ll miss some applications. I suspect the same is true if you go from Mac to Windows (I know I’d miss Omnigraffle) but I think it’ll be interesting to see if more applications cross-platform applications become available on OS X when the transition to x86 happens next year. That’ll be interesting to watch.

Best of luck with OS X. I studied it for an OS course at university last year so that was a great opportunity to “get to know my OS” and, if you are interested to know more about the likes of Carbon and Cocoa, I can recommend reading some of the introductory on Apple’s site as they, for me, were really quite excellent.

I have used RedHat and Suse extensively too. I guess I hoped the Mac would avoid all the hassle you get when you have to recompile the kernel or do something strange on Linux (I gave up trying to get the wireless card on my laptop working with Suse even with an NDIS wrapper). The Mac doesn’t have that hassle - oh, wait - as long as I want to do it Apple’s way.

A lot of time since I got the Mac has been spent on Google trying to find out how to do stuff that I guess most Mac users just take for granted. Lots of ‘good grief, I have to hold down WHICH keys?’ and ‘wow, that’s REALLY neat!’ More happy-happy than doom and gloom overall. The main thrust of my work is Adobe Photoshop and the Mac is just perfect for that. Fast, clean, and very few lockups or glitches.

That said, I have managed to crash Tiger a couple of times - now I understand the phrase “Spinning Wheel of Death - and I wish I could configure some of the things where Apple seem to think they know what I want to do better than I do. Fact is, I probably can configure them, but I expect to take a long time understanding the layers of BSD, Mach, OSX before I can do that. I haven’t quite figured out how an application can hide in a folder with a .app extension and why it crashes if you try to execute it from the terminal. List of arguments? And what on earth are Carbon, Cocoa, etc.? Right now even those Applescripts and Automation are almost incomprehensible to me. I’m really not stupid, it’s just a radical departure from the environment with which I am familiar. Give me time… But it’s very pretty and at least it works wonderfully well if all I want to do is use standard applications.

I won’t buy another Windows platform, but I won’t be throwing my XP away just yet either. I will stick with my not inconsiderable investment and no doubt I’ll get there eventually. The learning curve is not as smooth as I’d hoped.