On September I did my switch to Mac OS X, since I bought a MacBook. When I finally put my hands on the system, I almost didn't think and accessed Mozilla to grab the latest version of Firefox, my browser of election on both Linux and Windows. I was too used to it, the browsing, the extensions... but was it really a good choice or just some unreflective act?
Actually, I didn't think about it, and kept using Firefox. No problems.
When I finally got Leopard and used Safari to open some pages while I didn't have Firefox installed I felt the integration on the system and the speed that only Safari could give, and I thought going back to Firefox would be a problem. And it was, since I installed it, tweaked it for looking like Safari and felt as like I was using some counterfeit piece of clothing when I had the original right next to me. But why then, would I love to use Safari but seem unable to?
NoScript Apple! NoScript! I just want Safari to have something as powerful as it! It's not really about security (although the more the better) , since I know that most of the adware around can't damage Mac OS X, it's just about surfing with the option of not seeing the awful adds that corrupt some pages being able to turn them off or on, seeing just what matters.
Do you want to see the difference? Here's an example:
With Firefox + NoScript:
With Safari:
With Firefox + NoScript:
With Safari:
Apple, please, create something like it, and you'll have an user!
For this Christmas I wasn't quite in that mood of furious greed wishing half of the world in a packed box, but since I was needing a mouse to speed up my work at the MacBook, I finally thought that the Apple's Mighty Mouse would be a good choice.
I read some reviews and noticed that this was one of that Apple products that is a bit overpriced when compared to other concurrent products, but hey! it was Apple's mouse, and from the Apple products it's difficult to resist.
So I bought a wireless Mighty Mouse, and here I am with it.
First I have to say that Apple knows how to innovate, although this mouse has no visible buttons it still works perfect, and detects right a right, middle and left click. When you click you feel the whole mouse going a bit down and then the click is detected.
Then, there is the scroll ball. It's fairly good in doing the usual scroll up and down but I must say I didn't quite manage to work properly with the left and right scroll, mainly because I usually don't work with the mouse on a totally vertical position, so when I try to scroll left or right i'm actually scrolling up or down. I have to get used to it, or simply forget that those scrolls exist, since I barely will use them.
The other two lateral buttons are a bit tricky to manage if you don't position your hand correctly on the mouse. If you incorrectly do so, it will be required a bit of force to activate the buttons, putting your other fingers in a strange position in a way to avoid unwanted clicks. But with a good positioned hand, the lateral left click is perfectly accessible. The right lateral is a bit useless for me since I simply can't work with it. It must be there for the left handed people since there is no way of assigning a task to one of the laterals and another to the other.
Overall, the mouse is fairly good, nice precision and, of course, full and smooth integration with Apple's Mac OS X.
In a nutshell, i think it was a good choice. You know how it is, an eye candy Apple product is always something that makes us proud.
I recently saw in a Portuguese blog dedicated to Apple (AppleTuga) that Al Gore and his foundation won the 2007 Nobel Piece Prize. Well, before I talk about the (not so) strange Apple reaction, I've a few things to say.
Besides the polemics over Al Gore's campaign, and money earned thanks to his movie An Inconvenient Truth, I've the opinion that if someone advises you to do something with good argues and if the action advised is truly the best thing for you to do (which may only be noticed after a while), you've only to thank. It's not necessary that the person who gives advises follows exactly what it promotes. So, even if Al Gore, with all his campaign, changed the mentality about the global warming crisis of just one person, it was worth it, no matter what. So, I think this Nobel was truly deserved and I expect IPCC to continue to help changing people's awareness.
Where does Apple get in the story? Well, it imeddiatelly changed its homepage to thank Al Gore. Err... why? What does Apple have to do with it? Well, perhaps Al Gore gave Apple some more credit of being a "green" company (that Apple was not, but tried to be, after some Greenpeace actions, if you remember) in his movie, where there are several images of himself working with his Apple products. Coincidence? I don't think so.
It's been a while since my last post. Unfortunately, college is beginning and I'm already noticing, even in the first weeks, that it will take me much time that I had before for personal hobbies and studies. But what I really want to talk about now is my little adventure of the last two weeks.
With my most-of-the-time-speding town moving to the capital Lisbon, living away from home to study without a computer would be impossible. I knew it would, so I bought a notebook and what's important to this post is that my choice fell in the MacBook.
The thing is, I had never, ever, used MacOS X. Was I crazy for choosing something in which I had zero previous experience? Well, I guess the answer depends of the kind of thing where I fell into, to be more precise, depends of the difficulties that the system will impose to me as user that follow my own logic to do tasks.
This is really the most important thing about usability: logic. Whether the system has logic, and whether system's logic equals our own logic - the user's logic. A true usable system is made always keeping in mind the logic that the user will use to reach the tasks he wants to perform.
An example not to follow that I want to give is in Microsoft's Windows. How much sense do you think it makes pressing a button named "Start" to accomplish a task named "Shut down" ? I think even the most Australopithecus logic wouldn't choose a button with the buzzword Start to accomplish something that will do exactly the opposite.
But let's get back to MacOS X. In these two weeks I had the opportunity to appreciate a system that really was made for intelligent people, because intelligent people follow logic to do things, and not a discovery based on a try and error cicle that can lead to unwanted results and bad methods of thinking and using computers. In a nutshell, MacOS X makes sense in the things and in the way they're done, although some require a little imagination that, in my opinion, the typical user wouldn't follow, like dragging an application to a folder named applicattions to install it. Hey, imagination?! Why did I say that? It makes sense after all. Well, this is another important aspect about the judgments made about operating systems or concurrent technologies, our mind has to be completely free of previous vices or bad ways of thinking when it comes to evaluate something new and different. A user wouldn't find such method of installing intuitive because is mind is probably already full of Potatoes' Logic (yes, as logic as potatoes) and bad methods of thinking of other (bad) technologies that blind him of seeing the logic underneath.
In a nutshell, I'm truly satisfied with the choice I made and if you've some Apple computer in consideration for a possible buy, but never used MacOS X, don't be afraid, it'll be a great experience. And remember, you've intelligence, follow it.
See'ya.
