5 Things I Miss About XP

OK, right off the bat, I do love my new Mac and I like Mac OS X. And don’t let Bill Gates hear me saying anything good about Microsoft. However, after having used it for over a month now, there are a few things that I miss from my days in Windows XP. Granted, some of it’s just because I’m not yet used to how OS X does things, but still…

1. Keyboard shortcuts – At first I just didn’t know whether OS X had many of the shortcuts that I was used to in XP. Eventually, I learned that they’re all there and then some, but I just haven’t been able to learn them yet. I found a very helpful page online (part of a site comparing Mac OS X to Windows XP on a number of criteria: http://www.xvsxp.com) which contained a table listing all the OS X keyboard shortcuts against the XP ones. In particular, I find myself missing F2 (when I want to rename a file) and it’s hard to use Return (which I have always associated with executing a file) instead. The command (apple) key vs. the control key in XP is giving me huge headaches (well, not huge, but) annoying me at work (where I still use XP) when I find myself hitting Alt instead because that’s where the command key would be on my Mac. I also miss Control+Enter for sending emails, and Alt-Tab for switching programs (which, I know, is just Command-Tab, but it’s not the same).

2. Windows Explorer – I really miss Windows Explorer. I like the tree structure and the left-pane/right-pane layout. The Finder window with the Column view is just not the same. The columns are too narrow most of the time. I know I can also expand folders in the regular Finder window but it’s just not the same. I like to keep things organized and I move files around a lot. It might not be as big a deal since OS X knows where everything is even after it’s been moved, and Spotlight is an awesome search tool (much better than anything in XP), but I just need to easily put things in their proper folders.

3. Delete to the Trash – I miss being able to hit the Delete key and send something to the Recycle Bin. I don’t like dragging stuff, especially not when I want to get rid of it. I don’t like having to right-click and choose Move to Trash. I want to press Delete, and say good-bye.

4. True Maximize – I’m used to the window control buttons being on the left hand corner now, but I’m not used to the green Maximize button not really making the window fill the entire screen. I don’t like the arbitrary nature of this button. Sometimes it makes the window bigger. Sometimes I have to stretch the window to work with it, and hitting the green button actually makes it smaller. How is that Maximized?

5. Quitting programs for real – I am a memory miser. I hate wasting precious RAM by leaving programs running in the background unused. It’s like having five books open at a time, or opening two or three tubs of ice cream when the first one isn’t finished. I just don’t do it. So I am still not used to the fact that when I click on the little red button to close a window, I’m not actually quitting the program. It’s stupid. Most programs cannot do anything without a window open anyway. I guess it helps to open a file quickly if the program that runs it is already open in the background, but come on. I miss that windows had an X button in the corner of the window to quit the application. I am getting tired of Command-Q for quit. I’m especially tired of that little black triangle below the Dock icon taunting me that the program that opened itself just so I could view a file days ago is still running even though that file has long been closed. Aargh!

Anyway, there are plenty of good things that I could say about Mac OS X, plenty of things I’d miss if I went back to Windows. (I definitely don’t miss the trepidation and fear that I felt from the possibility of malware and viruses at every turn). Nevertheless, Apple, if you’re reading this (ha ha!) those are a few things you might want to look into.

iTunes 7: All the small things

 

Because I got the software upgrade along with my new computer (with bonus new iPod), I can’t tell whether all the changes that I’ve noticed are iTunes 7 related or not. Nevertheless, I’m really loving the new version of iTunes for all kinds of big and small reasons.

Cover Flow

This feature creates a virtual collection of album art for all your music (which doesn’t have to be purchased via iTunes music store) that you scroll through like flipping through vinyl LPs in the record store. Nostalgia aside, it’s incredibly sleek (though its practical value is questionable). Even though I think it’s much easier to find songs using the normal text-based listing, ever since I got iTunes 7, I’ve been hard at work getting all the album art for every single song I have (which numbers close to 4,000). The feature is great, but not flawless. If the name of the album or artist don’t match up with the online database, you can’t pick up the album art automatically (I found that out the hard way when I asked iTunes to grab all my art automatically but it got stalled at some problematic tracks and wouldn’t go on). Now I do it all one album at a time. I even have a dashboard widget that queries Amazon to pull up album art for ones that iTunes cannot get. My latest time-waster is that I’m trying to match all the individual tracks from my compilation CDs to their original art. Obsession, thy name is “Cover Flow”!

Skip when shuffling

One of the things I used to hate was the Shuffle Songs feature, because it always seemed super-lame to go from a song to the next track (which might be an audiobook chapter, or a podcast). Now there’s a track option that allows you to check off Skip when shuffling. So now that I’ve checked off all my audiobook chapters (and I think this might be checked off by default for podcasts), they never show up when I shuffle songs—it’s pure grooves all the way.

Remember playback position

Another track option that’s cool is that you can tell iTunes/your iPod that it needs to save the position you last listened up to on a track. This is especially useful for long audio files like podcasts. Too often I used to want to switch to a song or something at some point in a podcast, or maybe I’d arrived at work and need to turn my iPod off. Now when I go back to that podcast track, I don’t have to listen from the beginning and scan through to the part where I stopped listening. My iPod knows exactly where that spot is and starts from there—sweet.

Gapless playback

This one’s not as important to me. There was a lot of mention of this in all the hype surrounding the release of iTunes 7, but I just don’t have that many albums of continuous, gapless music. Nevertheless, when I set that option on the tracks from Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, it was cool not to have that split second gap as one song flowed into the next.

More than just for their practical value, these changes help me keep the faith that Apple’s the kind of company that really tries to understand how its customers are using their stuff and wants us to have a good experience.

Migrating E-Mail: Getting from There to Here

I knew it had to be done, so I was going to be careful about how I migrated my email. I had read in the Missing Manual that there were options with varying degrees of headache and (in one case) cost. David Pogue recommended a consumer application called Outlook2Mac (now called O2M at www.littlemachines.com). It was a simple wizard solution that would do all the heavy lifting and you say which folders to move from Outlook to the Mac. Sounds easy, but it had a price tag of $10 (small price to pay, I know). There were a few simple home-baked solutions recommended as well, including a complicated one using Netscape.

I opted not to go the route of the complicated solutions, but kept my eyes open for a free way as I set up my folders for O2M. I didn’t want to just import all my folders. I wanted to select out the ones that were from friends, and other important emails such as password confirmations, etc. This (including procrastination) took a long time. I had to go through years of old emails and select out the good ones. I also thought I could install Thunderbird on Windows and somehow transfer my mail there and it would be simple to copy that to my Thuderbird in OS X. I quickly gave that up, though, when it didn’t seem workable.

Finally, I was ready to get O2M and get going. The Windows program basically takes all your Outlook content and packages it up for the road. You copy the files over to your Mac and import them into your mail application. The program promises not only to import emails with all their formatting, but also includes attachments, contacts, and calendar. At first I downloaded the trial version (the difference between trial and full versions being a mere unlock code) but after successfully importing a small folder into Apple’s Mail.app, I figured I was ready for the real thing.

Still being a bit gutless, I began by importing Contacts into the Address Book (I’d already done a bit by exporting my Contacts in csv format, so I was actually only updating my Address Book with O2M’s improvements with the same data) and some updates were made (addresses and numbers had been imported as “work” numbers and O2M made them into “home” ones).

Next safe step was iCal (the calendar program in Mac OS X) and I played it even safer by creating a new calendar, separate from my main calendar, in which to import the new events—so I could still delete everything cleanly if it got messed up. It worked flawlessly.

Then, after the program spent some time chugging away at packaging up my emails, I was ready to import them on my Mac. I couldn’t figure how to get any of it into Thunderbird, so I figure as long as I can get it into Mail.app, I’d still be OK. When I got the mail over, I found that I had far fewer emails than I had expected. After I confirmed in Outlook, I realize that O2M was aborting the archiving without telling me. The log acknowledged that there were over 1000 emails in a certain folder, but stopped copying after around 12. What gives? I went to the web site, which was useless. Finally I tried a few experiments and found that it was because of the attachments (including inline graphics that are actually part of the email). After I set it to skip all attachments, I was able to package up all the emails, but I wasn’t happy.

I was able to successfully import all the stripped emails into Mail.app, but I was disappointed at having paid hard-earned money for a program that didn’t work as promised. In the end I guess it’s not a big deal. Emails are just emails. They don’t change the world. But maybe I’ll send the O2M folks a little email of my own and see if that can change something. What do you think?