I started using the Macintosh back before there were Macintoshes. Okay, not quite that far back, but you get the idea. I’ve been writing Mac software for going on fifteen years. I’ve worked at Apple. Several times. I’ve written tons of software for the Mac: from games, to Development tools (MacApp!), to mail applications. (Entourage)… I now work for Microsoft on the team that makes Microsoft Office for the Mac. I love the Mac. Seriously. But sometimes love just isn’t enough… (gack, did I say that outloud?)
I’m sorry to say this, but the Mac is just too much of a pain in the ass to use. I’ve been using more and more software on my PC (Windows XP). For example, I just bought the book collector software from the folks over at collectorz.com. It’s Windows software. It’s also very cool software that is improving my life. Do you think there is anything close to this on the Mac? I have two words for you. Fuck and No.
I can’t find any decent digital picture management software on the Mac. iView multimedia pro is a good application but I’m just not going to pay $170.00 for it. Just. Won’t. Do. It. Also, I hate, loath, and despise iPhoto. Did I mention my dislike for iPhoto? Whoever designed that program to copy all your images into a proprietary database should be shot out of a cannon. Into a brick wall. Twice. I’m using the Microsoft digital image suite instead. Yet another Windows app. This is a beautiful piece of software.
When surfing the net, I always us IE on Windows. This has been true since I started using OS X on the Mac. Safari and IE are just too slow. And incompatible. There’s nothing like tooling around amazon.com, adding a bunch of books to my shopping cart, and then after I enter all the shipping, credit card, and billing info, clicking the submit button causes my computer to burst into flames. Hot plastic melting flames. Singing my fingertips. My dog runs yelping into the other room. For fuck’s sake!? Did my order go through? No? Looks like I need to add everthing back into my shopping cart and try it again. Here’s to you Apple! I salute you!
Recently I tried to find some decent software on the Mac for posting to my blog. Haa ha haa haa haa. ROTFL. My solution? I wrote my own frickin’ cocoa app to do it. Then I gave up and starting using Windows IE because the control that’s available (only on Win IE) has spell check, font control, link generation, blah blah blah blah. (Insert very loud “D’OH!” here).
Digital music? WMA is clearly the superior format. The crap format that apple uses for it’s online music store (AAC?) sounds like my dog ate my boombox and I’m listening to it through, well, you get the idea. I just got a new iPod (a gift). Not sure I’ll ever use it. Why? No WMA support. I might use the windows version of iTunes and down convert my WMA music files to MP3. This makes me want to beat on someone. Come here yooz, I’ve got something to tell you…
Development tools? Codewarrior? X-Code? I’d laugh if I wasn’t already crying. Sobbing. Wailing. Beating. Head. Against. Wall.
The one application I’m sorry to lose is Entourage. I don’t think there is a better email program. Period. I’m biased because I helped make it so good, but even that’s just not enough. And now that I’ve found Mozilla Thunderbird, why bother? It’s nearly as good as Entourage. Makes life easier.
My life is too complicated as it is. I’m tired of my schizophrenic operating system lifestyle. Apple, I’m pulling for you. I really am, but I can’t wait any longer. If I had a lighter, I’d hold a lit flame for you. Maybe I’ll put my Mac SE on my hearth and surround it with flowers and candles. Maybe I’ll hold a vigil. In memory of you. Then again, that would be easier to do on Windows XP.
{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }
I’d like to join your support group. We could all meet each week at the house of some disillusioned Mac user and share coping tips and cool software. At the end of the meeting we could compare what we got in return for selling our souls (which, in most cases, will be a much better selection of software).
I nominate Omar as our high priest.
Mike, I couldn’t agree more. I’ll probably just use my iPod as a image storage device so I don’t have to bring my laptop to photo shoots. But then I need to buy a $100 belkin CF reader for the iPod. Oh boy what a bargain. MP3 sucks, I can’t believe music lovers don’t revolt!
Apple has a habit of doing really half asses products that get you trapped in thier solutions, addicted to a few good features and otherwise completely frustrated.
Using my PC is a relief. If ony I had a good mailer.
Let’s start secretly porting Entourage to Windows…
blah blah blah.. bitch bitch bitch… Someone call the whamublance… You guys will never be happy with your current hardware. Even if you are, six months later you won’t be.
My G4 laptop rocks! My G4 desktop, rocks! My G5 dual processor, has no equal!
Programming, video editing, photo editing, printing, archiving, music and games.. My Mac does is all and I don’t have a problem with it. So you pay a little more to use the best. All of you guys can relate to that.
I recently added a Windows computer to my household, and am having the exact opposite experience. I hate hate hate WMP and WMA. IT sounds like shit. I hate hate hate IE 6. No fucking tabs in 2004? What a piece of garbage. No pop up blocker in 2004? What a hunk of junk. And why the hell can’t I get it to go away?!?! I even set Windows to block access to that festering pile of rotting code, and it still comes back! GARHGHAH!
I can’t find a blogging tool as good as NetNewsWire, or an RSS feed reader as good as the same. I can’t believe I just had to spend money to protect my computer from viruses, what the fuck kind of shit is that?
Word 2003 lacks a live-updating word count. Outlook is a joke compared to Entourage.
Windows Explorer is very nice, but My Pictures is no substitute for iPhoto. And Windows Movie Maker is not as good, in my experience, as iMovie, and there’s nothing on my HP laptop to compare with iDVD.
iTunes is nice on Windows, and AAC sounds great (my opinion being, of course, 100% as valid as yours). Windows Update is slow to navigate and a pain compared to Apple’s Software Update.
It’s great that Windows comes with a USENET reader. It sucks that it’s not as good as the one in Entourage.
It sucks that Windows comes with no AOL-IM client — no one I know uses MSN.
I like the two button mouse and the scroll section on my laptop’s trackpad. I HATE THE LOOK OF OFFICE 2003, but like much of its improved functionality.
Whoever programmed Microsoft Publisher should die a million deaths.
See, anyone can rant. Nothing makes my rant more or less valid than yours.
Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. Everyone has their pet peeves. I use Macs. I use Windows Boxes. I use Linux. All have their pluses and minus. I prefer to spend my time on the Mac. I won’t convince you. You won’t convince me… but here my 2cents.
1. Book collection software. I use Readerware. It’s a windows port, but it does the job.
http://www.readerware.com/rwMac.html
2. I love iPhoto. It’s not a proprietary database by the way. It just organizes your photos by date. I don’t think it’s a good solution either (I’d prefer the iTunes way where you can file your own or let iTunes do the filing), but it’s not a big deal to get around. I didn’t like iPhoto much at first but after the current version was released I warmed up… handles my 20,000+ images without a hitch and darned fast on my G5.
3. IE on Windows. Ughh. Make me puke. How can you stand it? Safari (and even Omniweb are light years ahead HI-wise). We have dozens of machines here and I’ve never heard of anyone having problems with Amazon. Weird. Some banking sites yes but switching to Mozilla is no big whoop. I honestly don’t know how anyone could use IE on Windows on purpose. It smells like ass.
4. Blogging software. What are you doing on this blog that couldn’t be done with ecto? I don’t get it. http://www.kung-foo.tv/ecto/ Also don’t you get spell check for free on all cocoa apps that use the standard text editing tools?
5. WMA…HAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA I don’t buy DRMed music. I rip my own.
6. Entourage… love Entourage… then again I loved Claris Emailer from whence it’s programmer’s sprang. Speaking of Usenet. Unison is the shit.
And on and on… So go use Windows. Be happy. But please excuse yourself from the Mac Office team. I think Mac Office runs circles around the Windows version and we don’t need no haters…
Dude…take a huge deep breath and calm the fsck down. If I were you, I’d check my BP stat and make sure my brain is getting enough oxygen since your rants don’t really make much sense at all.
First of all, iPhoto’s "proprietary" database is an XML file. One that you can read, in Notepad or TextEdit. Or read with MSXML or Xerces or CFXML. And not only can you read it, you can use it in other applications. A Microsoft guy pulling out the proprietary card? Gasp! Not only is the XML non-proprietary, it’s just a collection of pointers with metadata to your picture files on disk. You’re free to open them in other apps, toy with them, add cute effects and save them back and iPhoto doesn’t care a bit. Boy, that sounds just terrible. I hate it when Apple uses an open standard. Grrr.
I’ve used Safari since the beta stage, and buy quite a bit of stuff from Amazon and have never, ever experienced a meltdown like you describe. Did you do some simple troubleshooting steps like clearing your cache? Again, you’re just presenting the problems, not the solution, which is a good sign of a weak argument.
You cannot argue that IE6 is an outdated browser. I have to go to friggin’ Google to get a popup blocker?! That is crap.
You’re right, uncompressed WMA does sound pretty darn good. Useless in every way, shape and form, but darn it sounds good! Just like AIFF or ALE. All useless in 2004.
Your whole rant is weakly formed and has no statements to back up your supposed angst. You bitch about the dev tools but don’t give any evidence as to what the problem is. You’re just bitching to bitch which just decreases the signal to noise ratio and makes you look childish and unprofessional. I’m just about to get Office 2004 and now that I know that you worked on Entourage, I’m scared to use it. If this is how you rationalize your technology, I’m scared to death of how you code.
iView Media Pro is $135 from amazon.com, and $160 directly from the developer. Perhaps you should get your facts right.
I’m not a big fan of iPhoto, either, but there isn’t anything proprietary about its database, and the idea is to leave the file management up to the app so that you’re free to organize your photos as you wish.
Hey, ranting is fun! Let me try!
Hmm, can you say Sasser, MSBlaster, SoBig.F? Spyware, want to download a free World Clock???
All dialogs: Yes, No, Cancel. Anyone ever heard of VERBS?
Try typing resumé, Voilá, über cool. Oh yes, just switch keyboard implementations or just use Office, there’s a real solution!
As for Ass Sucking, ever tried automating your workflows using VB??? Getting apps to talk to each other? Getting apps *on different computers* to talk to each other??? And I mean, without a frickin C# degree. If I want my computer to say something, I just type [say "PCs can't do this so easy" using Victoria] in AppleScript. Hmm, lets see how many lines of VB can you do that in?
I love chunky, pixelly icons, don’t you? And I love requiring third-party software to rip my MP3s or play DVDs. Ever try auto-DVD-bookmarks? How about making PDFs directly in any app *without* buying 3rd party software??? Aw, a browser with no tabbed browsing or popup blocking, how cute. Come on MS, get with the millenium!
Ranting is FUN! But not terribly useful. Anyone can string together a bunch of complaints about an OS. Try a real comparison: xvsxp.com
My Mac turned me into a newt!
Hey I started using windows and turned into an asshole!
Well put Jim. Your unparalleled proficiency in rational debate is beyond compare.
Check-it, you got mad dis skilz, G!
I suppose it’s moot now as you are abandoning the platform, but I rather enjoy bookpedia for book cataloging. It’s simple and it works!
http://www.bruji.com/products.html
Is there like a Mac version of Slashdot that scours the net for people leaving the Mac platform so that all the zealots can bombard their comments pages?
One of the best points that I’m very glad you made is about AAC. When iTunes for Windows came out, I decided to give it a shot. I was, however, quickly reminded of why I hate using Apple products.
Problem 1) My friend (a big Mac fan but has a PC because he plays games) called me because iTunes completely hosed his 35GB music collection which he’d painstakingly organized exactly how he wanted it…
Problem 2) I couldn’t find any music from the first 3 bands I searched for. Finally I decided to buy a Guster track and a Ben Folds track. Upon loading up the Guster track, I had one thought: "Ugh, who was messing with my soundcard settings."
I quickly realized, though, that the answer was "no one." I then brought my friend from Problem 1 over to tell me if I was crazy… or if this recording sounded like total shit.
He agreed.
So now the real test… We got a track from one of Guster’s other CDs of which I owned a copy. Playing the AAC file of "Fa" after listening to the CD track was truly painful. It really sounded nothing like the CD. So for comparison, we ripped the track from the CD to a WMA v9 file using the 80~125k VBR setting (what I usually rip CDs at). The WMA track was indistinguishable from the CD. On some tracks at that VBR setting I can sometimes hear a very subtle difference from the CD… Example, my "Best of the Canadian Brass" disc. But I have an extremely high quality sound system… an Audigy 2 ZS and Klipsch’s ProMedia Ultra 5.1s… They make picking out differences in encoding methods a good deal easier.
My point, though, is that the quality of the AAC tracks we downloaded from iTMS was ABYSSMAL. I would have much, much rather paid $1 for 128kbps MP3 files. And even that is the absolute bare minimum I consider to be tolerable.
Problem 3) Oh yes, there was another. At the time I had an iPod. A 5GB first-gen iPod. However, we could not test how good the AAC files would sound on a portalbe player with headphones BECAUSE APPLE DID NOT UPDATE THEIR OWN PLAYER TO SUPPORT THE MUSIC THEY WERE SELLING. Did they really think this was the way to encourage me to buy a newer unit?
Hah… I bought an iRiver 20GB player instead. It kicks the shit out of the iPod in every way imagineable – and is only slightly thicker than the new-gen iPods.
We later did another experiment upon the release of Napster 2.0.
We found the system to be adequate and the sound quality to be quite good.
However, I do not use the service at this time for the following reasons:
1) DRM – the files I purchased at that time can no longer be played, because I used all 3 of my PC uses on the same computer (after upgrades/reformats/OS changes).
2) Price – $1 a track is too much for music that is of lower quality than that of a CD and has a virtually free distribution channel.
Apple most certainly DID update the original iPod to play iTunes Music Store songs. When the store came out last Spring, prior to the release of the Gen 3 iPods, I used my original iPod to play the songs.
Which I think sound fine. Really no different than the songs I’ve downloaded off of Napster 2.
Novell is planning a MacOS X version of Mono.
http://www.go-mono.com/road-to-1.0.html
Does it means that .net apps will run on Macs ? Lets wait and try when it’s out…
Probably hundreds (or thousands) new apps for mac
Rolando
Novell is planning a MacOS X version of Mono.
http://www.go-mono.com/road-to-1.0.html
Does it means that .net apps will run on Macs ? Lets wait and try when it’s out…
Probably hundreds (or thousands) new apps for mac
Rolando
Hey guys, thanks for reading my blog. I’m shocked (some) people got so bent out of shape. Whatever. They probably still live in their Mom’s garage. I don’t need to justify anything I’ve written here. I’ve been using and developing on both platforms since they thought it would be a good idea to smear their Gerbers all over their faces and stick their fingers in electrical sockets… Hee hee, Just kidding.
For the record, I’m not abandoning the Mac. I was just ranting. I still think Mac’s are cool. I love the whole look and feel. I love working on Entourage (the best email application in the world). The bottom line is that it’s not really a technology platform. It’s a consumer platform. If I only ran iTunes, Entourage, Word, Safari, and iPhoto (yikes!), I’d be perfectly happy. But no, I need to compile c#. Try that with xCode.
Another Mac book software package for you to try out (Booxter):
http://www.deepprose.com/
—
Fro c# have you tried Rotor on OS X?
For all the time you’ve spent in the Mac world, one would think that you would’ve stumbled upon Delicious Library at some point in your search for cataloging software.
http://www.delicious-monster.com/
Also, I hate how Entourage is crippled on the Mac. Hopefully, as a developer of Entourage, you can answer this question: why can’t I access email accounts that are owned by an AD group with Entourage? We’ve held off upgrading our Help Desk’s Mac to 10.3 so that we can keep running Outlook 2000 under Classic because of this. Also, why do I have to configure LDAP on Entourage, when Outlook handles LDAP without needing any special ‘cn=Users,blahblahblah’?
Hey Cripple,
I use a Mac and PC too. The Mac’s better. That’s why I try to copy features from it all the time. And I can’t even stop my employees from using the iPod – much to my embarrassment.
Well,
Whoever stores my amails into a proprietary database should be shot out of a cannon !
I losts 3 times my mails thanks to entourage due to corrupted databbase.
I still use it beacuse I think it’s the best mail software out there, but I’m paranoid.
By the way, what do you need to compile C# is you’re in the mac team ?
Could you ask the guys from the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac OS X why it’s slower than the original one using Virtual PC ?
– The bottom line is that it’s not really a technology platform. It’s a consumer platform. If I only ran iTunes, Entourage, Word, Safari, and iPhoto (yikes!), I’d be perfectly happy. But no, I need to compile c#. Try that with xCode. –
Well, try compiling Objective-C in Visual Studio. Who the hell cares!? Develop for the platform in the environment that is best for that platform. Cocoa/Obj-C/C++ is the best on the Mac and .Net/C# may be the best for Windows.
I don’t give a rats ass that I can’t easily compile Objective-C in Visual Studio and no one should give a rats ass that they can’t easily compile C# in Xcode (though from what I’ve read it’s easier to get a C#/Mono runtime up on Mac OS X than it is to get an Objective-C runtime up on Windows.)
Oh and as far as a technology platform goes, nothing beats the Unix guts of Mac OS X. Need to modify the Kernel in some way to fit your needs, well you got complete access to the source – try that on Windows. And try getting the thousands of Open Source/Unix/Linux based programs to compile and run on Windows.
read your blog and saw that you have been working a lot on programming for Mac.I am doing a research on Mac OS x and trying to figure out how the developer community finds the new OS. I am also trying to figure out how the transition to X86 will be taken by the developer community. Does the transition to X 86 matter to the developer community or not. Is it possible for you to give me some insights.
If you feel convenient we can also have a con call on this.
Looking forward to your kind response.