Last year I was doing some painting with a paint roller. The arm of the roller broke and we were stuck with a half-painted wall on a Sunday afternoon (all the hardware stores were closed).

It occurred to me to see if the broom handle, which screws into the broom head, would also fit into the paint roller.

Perfect fit. I don’t know if this is an actually official standard of some kind, or it if was just done to save manufacturing costs for Handle Co. Either way, it saved the day.

There is a lesson here.

A few updates on my Mac experience since I posted the original review:

• A two-button mouse makes a huge difference. OS X has fantastic support for the right-button. To say that Mac is based on a one-button mouse is no longer true. They just still sell a mouse with one button.
• When browsing network drives on machines with a file system other than Apple’s HFS, OS X leaves hidden files all over the place (apparently to save folder-specific Finder settings). This is a deal-breaker. Any way to disable it?
• My criticism of the tactile transparency of the Internet Explorer icon (you can’t click on holes in the e) is apparently limited to that one icon and doesn’t apply to the rest of the OS. Good. Update to my update: while no other icons (that I know of) are as bad as the IE icon (with a hole in the middle), most icons do have none-clickable areas in the box, but around the shape (around the edges of a folder, for example).

The scale of the reaction has been surprising. It has mostly been quite positive (thanks for all of the wonderful compliments).

A lot of people brought up the fact that I didn’t have the most recent hardware. I don’t want to debate the details, but I don’t think the hardware hindered my experience on the OS significantly. I’ve worked on a wide range of systems and have a good feel for when more horsepower would solve a problem. That said, the overall experience would no-doubt have been more pleasant with better hardware.

I’m not a journalist with a hardware budget and Apple doesn’t send me free hardware to review. I’m just a schmo who happened to have an old iMac sitting around.

A lot of people said a lot of kind and interesting things. A lot of people said the same thing over and over (which is somewhat understandable – I don’t expect people to read though over 100 replies). A few people said nasty things, but my new Mac posse stepped in to defend me.

Also, the article may be getting translated into Chinese for a web-magazine in Taiwan. Cool.

I’ve been conducting a user interface experiment with myself as the subject. A long-time Windows user and armchair graphical user interface critic, I have spent a week working in Mac OS X. What follows is my review of the experience.

The Scene

My primary computer is an IBM ThinkPad T30 laptop running Windows XP. Most of my time at the computer is spent using a web browser (Phoenix/Firebird and Internet Explorer 6), reader/writing email Outlook 2002, and doing web development work (PHP/XHTML/CSS via HomeSite and graphics via Photoshop/Illustrator).

The mac I’ve been using is old graphite iMac we have at work for testing web applications. It has a 15″ CRT, a 400MHz G3 processor, 192 MB of RAM, and is running OS X 10.2.5. Not the latest and greatest hardware – and it showed – but it was sufficient for most work.

I’ve always been familiar with macs, but I’ve never spent enough time with one to actually make a fair judgment on their quality and usability. Using a mac always felt to me like trying to use a computer with boxing gloves on (much respect to Strong Bad). I’ve often wondered if it was simply due to my familiarity with Windows conventions rather than any difference is quality of design This is my third full-workday on the iMac and my experience has been interesting. Here are my observations.

The Boxing-Glove Effect

First, it look me a full day to get beyond the simple differences between Windows and OS such as basic key combinations, window/application switching, and the location of the special keys (Control, Alt, and the whatever-the-hell-you-call-that-thing mac key). For the most part, these differences are innocuous – neither better nor worse on one platform or the other – but a serious hurdle in switching between the two. It doesn’t help that my ThinkPad has an annoyingly non-standard location for the Ctrl key. My hand muscles are more confused than they were during puberty, but as I did then, I’m mastering them.

The hardware is an odd combination of great and crap. The CRT is a great quality, though 15″ & 1024×768 is way too small for me. I tried not to judge too much based on the screen-size, as larger screens are obviously available. An LCD would be nice too – also available (read my initial reaction to the release of the flat-panel iMac).

The slot loading CD drive is a nice touch. Perhaps there are engineering reasons why more manufacturers don’t do this – but it is great in practice. The little speakers are all right for general use, but you won’t want to throw a party with them (I tried, but only one person showed up).

The keyboard and mouse are crap. I know Apple has since replaced the puck-mouse, and bashing it is passé, but holy crap is it bad. The mouse is perfectly round, making it difficult to feel which is the front and back – important piece of special knowledge when using a mouse (as it determines the direction of the cursor). The keyboard has tiny arrow keys and tiny home/pg-up/pg-dn keys. Luckily you can easily replace a keyboard and mouse. Otherwise these unfortunate components would be a deal-breaker.

One major problem with the iMac: it made me look like a dork. Those who know me understand that I am one who can rely solely on my physical appearance to get through life. Having a cute-looking gum-drop computer on my desk caused my co-workers to laugh every time they enter my office/cubby-hole. Don’t underestimate this – the dork appearance factor is probably killing sales of the Segway. Granted, I would look like a total bad-ass with a 17″ titanium Powerbook or a new 17″ flat-panel iMac.

The Software

The software proved more interesting (and is more up-to-date) than the hardware, I’ve criticized OS X for being over-designed. I stand by that criticism, but it was not an impediment to using the computer. In fact, I found that the GUI had a more solid overall feel than Windows XP (which is quite rough around the edges). Everything is smoothly anti-aliased the visual elements (windows, widgets, menus, etc.) gave an impression of depth and integrity.

I came across a few particularly nice touches in OS X. When working on a document that has been changed since last saved, the window-close control (the little red orb), has a dot in the center. This indicates that if you click the close button, you will be prompted to save or discard your changes. This is a smart and unobtrusive feature that proved very useful (I happened to be working with a lot of HTML files this week).

Closing an unsaved document brings up another nice feature; Rather than the floating dialog boxes of Windows and previous versions of MacOS, dialog windows (a.k.a. “sheets” in applespeak) are attached to the title bar of their parent window. The subtle animation of the sheet sliding in from the title bar of the parent window helps reinforce the association between the dialog and the window. Nice simple improvement.

A simple unsaved document warning dialog also highlights something MacOS has always done better than windows: wording of dialogs and controls. Take these two examples of a save-warning in Notepad on Windows XP and TextEdit on OS X. Windows asks me “Do you want to save the changes?” and presents three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, and “Cancel”. OS X asks a similar question “Do you want to save changes to this document before closing?”, but the three buttons presented has a powerful differences: “Don’t Save”, “Cancel”, and “Save”. See screenshots of the OS X and Windows XP save dialogs.

While some dialogs were well worded, I did find inconsitencies. For example, the Empty Trash confirmation dialog has “Yes” and “No” options rather than the better alternative of “Cancel” and “Empty trash”

The OS X scheme forces me to click on the action I want to perform. If I want to save, I click “Save”. If I don’t want to save, I click “Don’t Save”. On Windows XP, I have to figure out (as simple as it seems), what “Yes” and “No” mean. This forces the user to understand the question before clicking (if it said “Discard changes”, then clicking “Yes” would delete your work). Also, the “Don’t Save” button, the most dangerous option, is located farthest away from the “Save” button to reduce the possibility of accidentally clicking on it.

The Dock

The infamous OS X dock confused me for quite a while until I understood that it can contain three distinct types of objects: Shortcuts to applications that are not currently running, icons of all applications currently running, and icons for any minimized windows (oh, and a trash can). See a diagram of the three dock-item types. At first, the inclusion of both application shortcuts and applications that are currently running in the dock seems like an odd design choice. However, I grew to appreciate the diminished distinction between applications that are actively running and those that are not running (the only visual difference between the two is a small black arrow with the icon – see the screenshot to the right). However, I did find this made it easy to unintentionally leave a trail of opened applications with no documents open after a while.

The thumbnails of minimized windows in the dock proved surprisingly useful if kept sufficiently large (though I’m not sure they are worth the screen real estate and I expect most power-users have their dock set to be quite small). However, the general window management proved awkward and frustrating for an experienced Windows user. Windows provides a tile in the task-bar for all open windows. OS X only shows minimized windows on the dock. This led me to the following frustrating scenario several times: I have several windows from several applications open. I open a new window that is larger than all the other windows, completely hiding all other windows. I have now have no way to get to the other applications without first moving or minimizing my current window. Pain in the ass. I can imagine this being a significant long term annoyance with OS X. Update: Several readers have pointed out that you can Command+click (or right click, or click and hold) on an active application icon to get a menu of the current windows. So noted.

The Finder

View Full-Size Screenshot of OS X Finder’s Column view

The Finder was another area of the Mac that seemed to be polarized – some great things and some real crap. Plenty of smarter people than myself have written about the OS X Finder. The three-pane view, a relic from the NextStep OS, is fantastic. Part of the work I’ve done on the mac this week involved editing a large number of HTML files buried in a deep hierarchy of folders (on a Windows NT 4.0 machine, no less). The three-pane column view was much better than the Windows explorer-tree (which is quite good).

The icon view in the finder also had a nice feature that Windows could learn from. The icon view shows additional information about objects when there is room (eg. image dimensions, or the number of items in a folder). Nice, but I’d like to see it taken further: add a “zoom” control to the finder icon view, the closer you zoom in, the more detail you can display about objects (see Eazel’s Nautilis).

Working with both Linux and Windows (98, 2000, NT, and XP) machines on the network proved surprisingly smooth and seamless – this is a massive improvement from my experience with previous versions of MacOS.

The “spring-loaded folders” feature is something I will miss in Windows. Pickup an icon and drag it over a folder, if you keep holding down the mouse button, the folder will open, you can then hover over child folder, which will open. You can repeat this process indefinitely, making it easy to navigate deep into a folder hierarchy. Then, when you finally drop the icon, it is deposited in its final location and all the windows you opened close. It works well.

Elsewhere in the System

The System Preferences was generally well organized, though I was completely confounded by the bar along the top of the System Preferences window. It contains duplicates of icons in the System preferences window. It is customizable, and I suppose it is intended as a place to put frequently-used items. Duplicating icons in this already crowded window seems to be an odd choice. This is particularly puzzling since other applications use a similar-looking icon row at the top of a preference window in the same way tabs are traditionally used. I welcome any insight into this design decision.

View Full-Size Screenshot of the OS X System Preferences window

The Safari browser (I was running Beta 2) is shaping up nicely. I’m not sure about actual rendering speed, but it felt faster than IE5.5 or Camino (which is also a very nice application). I even got used to the brush-metal appearance of the Safari window (something I started off hating). I did find that there was insufficient feedback when a link was clicked. If a server took a few seconds to respond, the only indication that a link had been clicked is the blue bar in the location box (and it remains motionless while waiting for the server to reply). As a result, I found myself clicking links repeatedly before realizing that they were already loading from the first click.

View Full-Size Screenshot of an OS X text input form

Another feature I’ll miss in Windows is the highlighting of active form fields. The active form field is highlighted with an unobtrusive but strong blue halo. I was mystified that using the Tab key (or Shift+Tab) to move through form elements only selected text input boxes, skipping radio buttons, pull-down menus, and check-boxes. Can anyone offer an explanation for this? You also can’t tab through buttons in a dialog box (“Save”, “Don’t Save”, and “Cancel” for example), meaning mouse is required for something that can be easily (and quickly) done with the keyboard in other windowing systems. Is it possible to operate a mac without a mouse?

Another annoyance: while icons have nice visual transparency, they also have tactile transparency. This basically means that if an icon has a hole in it, and you click in the hole, you haven’t clicked on the icon. What!? The Internet Explorer icon is a good example: the gaps in the “e” (not to mention all the white-space around in icon) are mouse-click dead zones (the orange-pattern highlighted area in the image to the right is not-clickable). The dock gets around this by making the entire icon area clickable – the finder should do the same.

On the even more nerdly front

I’m not an expert in Unix or Linux, but a friend who is tells me that the integration of the GUI with the command-line-type functionality (super-user permissions in GUI dialogs, etc.) is better than RedHat or anyone else has been able to do. For more on the Unix aspect of OS X, see this 1-hour presentation by Apple’s VP of Software Technology and alumni of the friend-linux-GUI Eazel project, Bud Tribble. The presentation is an interesting look beyond the marketing gloss at Apple. Tribble seems as wary of hard-core mac fandom as I am. He also talks about how Apple listens to its customers, and then often chooses to say no to feature requests – a smart move, if done properly (this topic is discussed at CEOBlues.com).

So what does all of this mean?

I’m not going to run out and buy a mac tomorrow (sorry Dave). However, I am more impressed with the operating system and interface than I expected to be. Previous experiences with the mac never lasted long enough to get past the simple brain-cruft of familiarity with Windows. I’ve caught a glimpse of what it is that seems to make mac fans just that, “fans”.

By the way, here are a few corny posts titles I rejected for this post:

• The OS X-Files
• An outsiders’ tales from the Apple orchard
• A Taste of the Forbidden Fruit

I’m sure that most of those of you that will care will already have noticed this, but for the few, like me, who hadn’t: the FedEx logo contains an arrow in the negative space created by the E and the x. Beautiful.

I guess that’s why I’ve always thought that FedEx was a progressive and forward-thinking company and didn’t know why.

From Edward Tufte’s Graphic of the Day, the brilliant Princeton University Acceptance Letter.

Does anyone know how to pronounce Tufte’s last name? I’ve been calling him “tuft”, but I’ve recentely been told that it’s actualy “tuftee” (with the emphasis the second sylable pronounced as a long ‘e’). If so, I’ll add this to the long list of names I’ve long been mispronouncing (appologies to Derek Powazek, Dave Winer, Jason Kottke, and Matt Haughey). Such is the danger of a text-based medium.

There have been endorsements for a spam filter called SpamAssassin all over the web in the past few weeks (see Salon article). As the amount of spam I’ve been receiving has been increasing lately, I tried it out myself.

As I understand it, SpamAssasin in an open source Unix based spam filter (check out that title graphic!). However, an oddly-named company called Deersoft has released a commercial version for Windows/Outlook – that’s me.

I used the program for the free two-week trial, during which it mislabelled one email as spam, and caught at least 90% of real spam. The program also allows you to “Allow” or “Block” any given sender. I was annoyed that you could only allow/block one email at a time. I wanted to be able to go to a folder in Outlook and “allow” all senders (clients, for example).

I emailed Deersoft and requested the feature. I got a quick response acknowledging that this is an important missing feature. A few days later, I got another email letting me know that if I download the update (updates now download automatically), I can now allow/block multiple emails simultaneously. They actually said “ask and ye shall recieve”. Nice.

I’m sure they didn’t implement the feature solely because of my email – it was obviously needed – but I was impressed that they kept my email on file and bothered to let me know of the update. This was enough to make me feel they had earned the $29.95US registration fee – but what really got me to register was the fact that the software works.

While this is a good short-term solution, there are obvious problems with relying on filters for spam. First, the spammers will get smarter, and get good at beating the filters. For example, I got an email last week with the subject line that had something do to with electricians. When I looked at the message, they were not electricians at all, and they were doing nasty things to each other. Also, spam filters make my life easier, but they don’t make life any easier for those that maintain my email server – spam still eats up valuable bandwith and storage space.

I don’t know what to do about spam, but it is certainly pushing me towards other modes of communication. Particularly towards closed, permission based, medium like intranets and instant messaging (between these two medium, I have dramatically reduced by reliance on email).

Perhaps the swelling of spam will encourage the development of more powerful communication protocols. Jakob Nielsen used to talk about giving people, or companies, limited-use tokens to contact you. For example, if you buy a product from Automaton-Waterfowl.com, you give them an electronic token that will allow them to contact you three times (one for a receipt of your order, and two more in case of a problem). This is a good idea.

If anything, you have to give credit to the spammers for their occasional amusing subject lines – and I’m gonna miss getting mail like this.