Was going to return Macbook Air - but installed Window 7 and love it now!

Totality

Totality

Totality

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As per the title really. I have never owned a Mac and have tried to get on with OS X Lion but really couldn't grasp why people thought it was great. The web browsing experience is great with the scolling and gestures, but apart from that it felt like a stripped down OS which I suppose being a Techy I didnt really enjoy. I've been a Windows user since the start and also use Linux distros so have a fair bit of experience in a unix style system, but I couldn't get on with the following in Lion (maybe I'm missing something?):

  1. I use a lot of open programs at once so in Windows am I clicking between open programs using the taskbar quickly and effectively. In Lion I found it too annoying dealing with all the open windows and flicking between them all as the only way I could see to do it was to do a flick up with three fingers or alt-tab between them all
  2. Using Citrix from home to connect to work, the citrix windows open full screen behind the dock meaning you can use the bottom inch of the citrix app :(
  3. When I had multple desktops on the go, there was no way to re-arrange them from what I could see. If I wanted to move the contents of desktop 2 to desktop 4 for instance and move desktop 3 items to desktop 2, I would have though you could open the control centre thingy and just drag the desktops about. As it stands you have to manualy move the windows about to the new desktops
  4. I miss the window snap feature which snaps windows half open on the left and right when using two documents
  5. Safari doesnt have a nice adblock program or popup blocker like firefox does. Firefox doesnt work well with Lion at the moment and doesnt support full screen or gestures
  6. Font smoothing was over the top and I thought I had a faulty screen at first. I found out a way to hack font smoothing and my headaches stopped and the screen text was crisp again. My vision cant do font smoothing.
  7. The maximise buttons in apps do weird things! Some apps maximise the windows but some seem to to enlarge the window or in itunes case it minimises the window to a smaller quick button thing - huh?!
  8. Flash on a Mac is a nightmare. I'll leave it at that! Crashes and slowness galore
  9. No UP arrow when navigating folders in the OS? If you jump straight to a nested folder, I couldnt see a way to go up to the parent one?
  10. Clicking delete on a file or folder doesnt delete it

After spending so much on a laptop I felt dissapointed after trying to get to grips with it for a week. I decided on a whim to see how it handles Windows 7 before I went back to my old laptop and it works well with no problems! I didnt even know you could enable right-click usage whilst in the OS so thats a winner. Now I have a combination of an OS I love and hardware I love too. The air is a really nice bit of kit and the only competitor is the Samsung Series 9 in the PC world, but having looked at one it is plasticky and more expensive!

Maybe people can help me get used to being more productive with a mac. I found working with multple documents at once a nightmare without the taskbar to quickly go between open documents. That is the main thing I didnt like about it if I'm honest. The lack of snapping windows was also a pain but I believe you can buy an app to sort that out?

As it stands I'm really happy with the machine now and have Windows 7 set up, but I havent completely wiped the partition yet as I want to go back to give Lion a go when Firefox get off their arses and make it work natively with full screen support and gestures. Maybe I shouldnt have tried to adopt a new OS when it was first released, but I can always come back to try it again :) It's a very pretty OS, but I can't understand how people work on multiple things with it, especially because there is no easy way to re-arrange desktops once you have filled them up with open programs. I thought you could just drag them around in the control view, but you can't. Maybe a patch will introduce this to help?

How did others find the transition to OS X from Windows with the lack of a taskbar? How do you guys navigate between lots of open programs? Maybe someone could also advise on my points above to help me next time I give it a go :) The hardware really is fantastic and I love it, but you get better battery life under OS X I believe so would like to get back into it if possible.
 
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5. http://safariadblock.com/ ? Is Chrome Lion compatible, or just wait for FF to be?

7. Don't think of it as maximise like in Windows. It's zoom, and only makes the windows as big as they need to be e.g. on a webpage it will fill as much as to minimise whitespace, scrollbars. That's probably why you think it's doing random things.

Half the initial problems with using a Mac OS are expecting it to work like Windows.
 
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I'm struggling with similar issues to your point 3 Totality. Can't see how to drag and drop between screens. I wanted to attach some files to an email. The folder was open in Finder but on a different screen to Mail. I had to use the File->Attach Files menu in the end. Sort of defeats drag and drop.

I've been running many apps 'full screen' and used the 3 finger swipe to move between them. Ok for 3 or 4 apps but any more would be a mare I suspect. Not sure I like Window's 7 task bar for app switching much, to fussy with all the small windows. Not sure what solution is, try not to use too many apps ;)
 
picnic said:
I'm struggling with similar issues to your point 3 Totality. Can't see how to drag and drop between screens. I wanted to attach some files to an email. The folder was open in Finder but on a different screen to Mail. I had to use the File->Attach Files menu in the end. Sort of defeats drag and drop.

I've been running many apps 'full screen' and used the 3 finger swipe to move between them. Ok for 3 or 4 apps but any more would be a mare I suspect. Not sure I like Window's 7 task bar for app switching much, to fussy with all the small windows. Not sure what solution is, try not to use too many apps ;)
Click to expand...


Drag the item to the dock icon :)

Totality said:
As per the title really. I have never owned a Mac and have tried to get on with OS X Lion but really couldn't grasp why people thought it was great. The web browsing experience is great with the scolling and gestures, but apart from that it felt like a stripped down OS which I suppose being a Techy I didnt really enjoy. I've been a Windows user since the start and also use Linux distros so have a fair bit of experience in a unix style system, but I couldn't get on with the following in Lion (maybe I'm missing something?):

  1. I use a lot of open programs at once so in Windows am I clicking between open programs using the taskbar quickly and effectively. In Lion I found it too annoying dealing with all the open windows and flicking between them all as the only way I could see to do it was to do a flick up with three fingers or alt-tab between them all
  2. Using Citrix from home to connect to work, the citrix windows open full screen behind the dock meaning you can use the bottom inch of the citrix app :(
  3. When I had multple desktops on the go, there was no way to re-arrange them from what I could see. If I wanted to move the contents of desktop 2 to desktop 4 for instance and move desktop 3 items to desktop 2, I would have though you could open the control centre thingy and just drag the desktops about. As it stands you have to manualy move the windows about to the new desktops
  4. I miss the window snap feature which snaps windows half open on the left and right when using two documents
  5. Safari doesnt have a nice adblock program or popup blocker like firefox does. Firefox doesnt work well with Lion at the moment and doesnt support full screen or gestures
  6. Font smoothing was over the top and I thought I had a faulty screen at first. I found out a way to hack font smoothing and my headaches stopped and the screen text was crisp again. My vision cant do font smoothing.
  7. The maximise buttons in apps do weird things! Some apps maximise the windows but some seem to to enlarge the window or in itunes case it minimises the window to a smaller quick button thing - huh?!
  8. Flash on a Mac is a nightmare. I'll leave it at that! Crashes and slowness galore
  9. No UP arrow when navigating folders in the OS? If you jump straight to a nested folder, I couldnt see a way to go up to the parent one?
  10. Clicking delete on a file or folder doesnt delete it

After spending so much on a laptop I felt dissapointed after trying to get to grips with it for a week. I decided on a whim to see how it handles Windows 7 before I went back to my old laptop and it works well with no problems! I didnt even know you could enable right-click usage whilst in the OS so thats a winner. Now I have a combination of an OS I love and hardware I love too. The air is a really nice bit of kit and the only competitor is the Samsung Series 9 in the PC world, but having looked at one it is plasticky and more expensive!

Maybe people can help me get used to being more productive with a mac. I found working with multple documents at once a nightmare without the taskbar to quickly go between open documents. That is the main thing I didnt like about it if I'm honest. The lack of snapping windows was also a pain but I believe you can buy an app to sort that out?

As it stands I'm really happy with the machine now and have Windows 7 set up, but I havent completely wiped the partition yet as I want to go back to give Lion a go when Firefox get off their arses and make it work natively with full screen support and gestures. Maybe I shouldnt have tried to adopt a new OS when it was first released, but I can always come back to try it again :) It's a very pretty OS, but I can't understand how people work on multiple things with it, especially because there is no easy way to re-arrange desktops once you have filled them up with open programs. I thought you could just drag them around in the control view, but you can't. Maybe a patch will introduce this to help?

How did others find the transition to OS X from Windows with the lack of a taskbar? How do you guys navigate between lots of open programs? Maybe someone could also advise on my points above to help me next time I give it a go :) The hardware really is fantastic and I love it, but you get better battery life under OS X I believe so would like to get back into it if possible.
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1. Try hyperdock in the app store. It makes this easier.
2. You could have the dock auto hide. Sounds like a citrix bug maybe they will fix it.
3. Not sure sorry
4. Hyperdock does this
5 There is an adblock extension on the first page of safari extensions
6. PC/Mac font methods are very different, it takes a wee while to get used to but I find it much better now that on pcs. You can turn it down/off too I think?
7. Annoys the heck out of me too! However I have 27in screen so I never maximise things now :D
8. Thank Adobe for that. Install click2flash on safari. Makes the problem go away.
9. Where the buttons are in finder, right click > Customise toolbar Drag the path button to where you want it. That shows the path to the folder and will allow you to do what you want.
10. This is done deliberatly, kind of the like the are you sure you want to delete this file in windows. use cmd + backspace. Or what I do is added the trash button in finder as with 9.

I think that may solve most of your issues. Switching from years on a pc will not happen over night, but the above should ease your transition :)
 
SIAT said:
Drag the item to the dock icon :)
Click to expand...

Just tried that but it creates a new message, does not attach to the open one. You can also achieve the same thing by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate menu item. Neither method is that helpful when replying to a message.
 
Totality said:
  1. I use a lot of open programs at once so in Windows am I clicking between open programs using the taskbar quickly and effectively. In Lion I found it too annoying dealing with all the open windows and flicking between them all as the only way I could see to do it was to do a flick up with three fingers or alt-tab between them all. Any open apps are displayed in the Dock with a blue dot shown below its icon. Any without a blue dot are apps not currently running, but are 'pinned' to the Dock just like you can 'pin' icons on Windows 7's taskbar.

  2. Using Citrix from home to connect to work, the citrix windows open full screen behind the dock meaning you can use the bottom inch of the citrix app :( You can either auto-hide the Dock, or try using Maximizer (link is below) for a possible workaround.

  3. When I had multple desktops on the go, there was no way to re-arrange them from what I could see. If I wanted to move the contents of desktop 2 to desktop 4 for instance and move desktop 3 items to desktop 2, I would have though you could open the control centre thingy and just drag the desktops about. As it stands you have to manualy move the windows about to the new desktops You can turn off the automatically arranging by most recent use in Misson Control's preferences, but at the moment you can't reorder the spaces by just dragging-and-dropping. You are not the only one upset with this change, a lot of people still preferred how Spaces worked in Snow Leopard.

  4. I miss the window snap feature which snaps windows half open on the left and right when using two documents I know there is an app that does this but since I don't use it hopefully someone else that does can find the link for it.

  5. Safari doesnt have a nice adblock program or popup blocker like firefox does. Yes it does, see the replies above.

  6. Font smoothing was over the top and I thought I had a faulty screen at first. I found out a way to hack font smoothing and my headaches stopped and the screen text was crisp again. My vision cant do font smoothing. I think I've always preferred Apple's font smoothing, but since I have only been using OS X about 18 months and was a full-on Windows user before that and used to the way ClearType displays text, my eyes have definitely adapted. It just takes time.

  7. The maximise buttons in apps do weird things! Some apps maximise the windows but some seem to to enlarge the window or in itunes case it minimises the window to a smaller quick button thing - huh?! The green plus (+) button always enlarges the window to as big as it needs to so the content can be displayed properly. Sometimes this is the entire screen, sometimes it's just enough to remove the vertical and horizontal scrollbars (such as in Finder). Lion now supports fullscreen apps natively, for those that don't I have found a great add-on that enables it here: http://chpwn.com/apps/maximizer.html

  8. Flash on a Mac is a nightmare. I'll leave it at that! Crashes and slowness galore Flash is terrible, with the advent of HTML5 it's long being phased out and Apple have never been supportive of it.

  9. No UP arrow when navigating folders in the OS? If you jump straight to a nested folder, I couldnt see a way to go up to the parent one? There are three ways to do this, either the Back (previous folder) button, the Path button (drag and drop from Customize Toolbar window), or Cmd+Up.

  10. Clicking delete on a file or folder doesnt delete it If you mean with the keyboard then to delete a file it's Cmd+Delete. Delete is essentially backspace in the Apple world.
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Just keep at it. OS X has a very steep learning curve IMO and a lot more keyboard shortcuts to increase productivity than Windows that may not seem obvious at first. I am still finding new/hidden features all the time :)
 
Cheers all I'll give it another bash tomorrow as it's coming upto midnight now!

The missus turned the bedroom light off to try and stop me playing with the laptop but oooh I got to test out the backlit keyboard so her plan failed! It's pretty!!

With regards to the safari extensions page, I never knew there was one. Is that something within safari or web links like with firefox? If it's a web link could someone provide a link?

Hyperdock and being able to add buttons for navigating folders are top of my list to try next!
 
There are loads of windows snap to edge apps. I own a few such as Divvy and Cinch but prefer the simplicity of the free 'better touch tool'.

Also take a look at Hyperdock and Moom by Many tricks.
 
Please don't take this the wrong way, I mean no offense, but I'd like to address this:

but apart from that it felt like a stripped down OS which I suppose being a Techy I didnt really enjoy.
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I don't think you've looked far enough in to the OS. Apple's design is to try and hide the technical stuff from the average user, they don't need to see it because OS X should work without tinkering, if it works as Apple hopes - the regular user shouldn't need to delve into all the system configuration files and be flicking variables on and off for the thousands of little features and characteristics of OS X.

But, remember, you can do it. You can be just as much of a techy on Mac OS X as you can be on Windows 7, it is all there for you to tinker with. Apple take some fundamental design choices that are different to Windows, and if you do remember just because it takes a different approach to somethings, it doesn't mean it is wrong.

Use this forum to ask questions about why things are acting in certain ways or how you should best utilise these certain things and you should get some great answers.

Switching between documents

Go to: System Preferences -> Trackpad -> More Gestures and enable App Expose, then just do the Gesture it asks (Three fingers down in my case) and it'll display all your open documents (or the different windows for that individual app) nice and easily. I personally find that more friendly than the way you describe you work on Windows, but, you may disagree.

But give it a try ;)
 
picnic said:
Just tried that but it creates a new message, does not attach to the open one. You can also achieve the same thing by right-clicking and selecting the appropriate menu item. Neither method is that helpful when replying to a message.
Click to expand...

Ah I don't use multiple screens so I'm not sure what it would do. Generally that's how you can drag between apps like that. I think mission control is a bit early and buggy from what I hear.
 
OP: stick with it and don't give up....

I've been a massive PC user (with associated upgradeitis) and a high level network engineer for years. Decided the other week that I fancied an iPad.... after using the iPad for a week, I decided on Friday that I wanted a Mac!

Did it mainly because I was utterly sick of hacking around with my PC, and that all the stuff I do at work (Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, VMWare) I can do at work, or with my work laptop. Everything else, well, that's what the Mac's for now.

Bought myself a 4gb Mini with the Radeon card, figuring I'll do a little gaming, but mainly because it's tiny and I can re-use my PC monitor. The PC has now been flattened, a vanilla OS installed and is ready for sale.... the SSD I'm going to drop into the Mini.

I can't even pretend to have anywhere near some of the knowledge of the Macheads on here or in other places, but you know what? I've had more fun and enjoyment from "computing" since I got this thing on Friday than I've had for years with Windows.... it's revived my interest in tech, and that can only be a good thing.

The biggest problem I've had over the last few days has been simple:
1 - creation of .ds_store on USB sticks REALLY upsets the DVD I've got in the bedroom for watching encoded vids. A little bit of hunting and I've now got a link on the dock for Hidden Cleaner that I simply drop a mounted USB stick on, which cleans the hidden files and dismounts the drive.

I'm learning like you are, and I'm enjoying it. Go on, try it, you might find you like it eventually (and I hope you do).
 
Going to try these suggestions tonight and feed back how I get on.

One other thing I couldn't figure out was native NTFS support when plugging in a USB hard drive. Is this easy to implement to save reformatting all my hard drives/USB sticks which isn't an option as I use them for work and they have lots of ISOs over 4th so can't use FAT.
 
Totality said:
One other thing I couldn't figure out was native NTFS support when plugging in a USB hard drive. Is this easy to implement to save reformatting all my hard drives/USB sticks which isn't an option as I use them for work and they have lots of ISOs over 4th so can't use FAT.
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NTFS-3G
 
I use Citrix to connect back to my desktop at work loads. I don't have my dock set to hide or anything. It full screens fine and the dock doesn't get in the way. Do you have the latest version of the client installed?

Give it time... I switched about 5 years ago and found it a little frustrating for the first month or two, but would't change back now.
 
Seems like another case of not liking change and learning the OS to be honest.

but apart from that it felt like a stripped down OS which I suppose being a Techy I didnt really enjoy
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Really don't understand that comment. OS X just works, what more do you want? It's made this way so you can get on with your work without having to worry about anything. It's a tool. Not a toy.

Do you like spending ages messing about with virus programs, spyware, adware, malware, stupididontcareware?
 
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I don't get that comment either. If anything, it's very much like Linux 'under the hood' as per se. The Terminal app is an absolute godsend, and you can get as dirty as you like with the command line. Open source code, too, takes very little effort to compile and run just as well as any other Unix environment.

A fundamental difference I find is that Windows is more GUI-centric and OS X is more shortcut-centric, particularly when it comes down to the nitty gritty configurations you find in Windows and Windows Server administering.
 
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