Mr. Scott, You know the drill

I've got about 50 minutes left in my download of the Unreal Tournament 2004 Demo for OS X but I don't think I'll stay up to try it out tonight, I got an early start this morning so I'm going to cut this post (and my awake time) short tonight (sorry guys, I promise more later).

What originaly convinced me that it would be possible for me to use a Mac was the fact that virtually every application (read: not games) I needed to use was available on the Mac. There was actually one point a long time ago where absolutely everything I was running on my PC was available for the Mac (I was only playing Warcraft 3 at the time), I almost did the switch-experiment then but I wasn't feeling adventurous enough. Other than the normal apps that everyone uses (FTP, IM, email, etc...) I have a couple of requirements: Photoshop, MS Office and Dreamweaver. I've grown accustomed to using those three applications in publishing articles for AT and luckily they were all available for OS X.

The first thing that's important to note is how simple the application install process is under OS X. In most cases there's no need to run the Windows equivalent of a setup file, instead you just drag the program onto your hard drive and it's installed. Some programs do have an installer, in which case the process is identical to it would be under Windows. Removing programs works in the exact opposite way; drag the app into the trash and it's gone. The one benefit here is that applications seem to properly remove themselves after this is done with, although I haven't tried removing Office just yet :) (under Windows you pretty much need a surgical procedure to truly remove Office from your system)

Photoshop and Dreamweaver are identical to their Windows versions, although Word is a bit more uncomfortable for me. I'm not sure if it is just the floating toolbar that puts me off but Word definitely feels much more foreign than I would expect my wordprocessor of choice for the past decade to feel, even if it is under OS X. I'm curious as to what Office 2004 for OS X will be like, because v.X definitely doesn't "feel" like its XP counterpart. From a functionality standpoint, everything is the same - except I haven't been successful in locating a wordperfect conversion filter in v.X. The rest of the Office suite seems pretty normal, although I haven't used Entourage (Outlook for OS X) as I'm currently quite happy with Apple's Mail.

One complaint about some apps that are on both OS X and Windows is that they often feature Windows shortcuts. For example, in Word v.X the home and end keys will take you to the beginning and end of a sentence just like in Windows, but there is no other OS X app that will do that. Instead, you have to use control + left/right to go to the start/end of a sentence. Neither option is "better" it's simply a matter of which one you are used to, but being in an OS where everything uses one method and having a single application stubbornly stick to another method frankly doesn't make sense. I guess that's a Microsoft gripe but I'm not so certain how responsive they will be to feature-requests from Mac users; then again, I'm probably jumping to conclusions, the Mac Office team is actually probably committed to their users.

I have yet to use any of the content creation applications such as GarageBand or FinalCut so I can't comment on those now, but I do have some words about Apple's Calendar and Mail clients. Calendar is a great application, it's very simple, the interface is great and the application itself is decently powerful. The UI is impressive but my biggest complaint about the app is more of a complaint with the platform - no blackberry support. I am a blackberry addict, I need it to get through my day and the fact that I've been unable to sync it with my G5 has been a huge issue. (the fact that I gave up blackberry sync functionality should say a lot about my interest in this experiment). The lack of blackberry support is more a fault of RIM as they don't see the demand in this market, but the fact of the matter is that you won't see sales until there is support out there. There's Palm support for OS X, there needs to be blackberry support. The blackberry sync application is a relatively simple app to begin with; porting it to OS X should not be a mammoth task by any means. If anything, the limited hardware/software configurations should make support a much simpler issue than on the PC if a client were developed. If I end up liking OS X enough I may have to ditch the blackberry for a Treo 600.

Apple's Mail client is also quite impressive; it's extremely easy to use but also extremely powerful, especially if you're willing to put in the time to learn how to script it. Without any modifications I had Mail doing everything Outlook 2004 was doing for me, including filtering spam. Just like Outlook, Mail's spam filter isn't 100% and it lets a decent amount of stuff through - but luckily we've got a filter on AT's mail server that picks up the rest. I'm hoping that Apple will continue to update the Junk Mail filtering engine on Mail as time goes on like Microsoft has, but only time will tell. I haven't accumulated enough email to judge performance between Mail and Outlook, but for someone who receives ~100 important emails and thousands of others to filter through on a daily basis I can say at this point I prefer Apple's Mail. We'll see if things change once I accumulate more messages but right now I'm liking Mail. My only complaint about Mail? There's no way to directly import Outlook .pst files; you have to export your .pst to a different format and then import them into Mail. So I left all my old email on my PC...every single message I've received since sometime in 1998, all organized into a nice hierarchy of dates corresponding to individual .pst files. Ah well :)

With the productive apps talked about, there's the next point that inevitable had to be made: gaming. Being a hardcore gamer on the Mac (by PC definitions) is basically impossible, unless you only play a game that is available on the Mac. The gaming scene has improved tremendously since I last remembered it, surprisingly enough Halo is even available for OS X. There are a few gems, such as the UT2004 Demo being released for OS X alongside WinXP, but the Mac is not a gaming platform. Luckily I've got multiple PCs in the house for just that purpose as I like keeping games off of my "work" computer(s). Gaming is something that will prevent the cold-turkey switch to a Mac for a lot of users, myself included. There's no getting around that, regardless of how nice the OS is.

My final comments on software on the Mac is about IM clients: OS X needs a port of Trillian. There are a number of clients with potential being developed for OS X; I first started using Fire because that's what everyone told me to use and its functionality was there, but the interface was horrid. Right now I'm using Adium which has a significantly improved interface, but lacks key features (can't check away messages, no file transfer, etc...). The Trillian developers mentioned the port to Objective-C as an issue for bringing Trillian to OS X, but it is desperately needed - unless Adium can get out of alpha quicker. The benefit of open source clients like Adium (other than the free aspect) is that they are constantly being updated, even in their alpha states (the v2 alpha has received an update a day for the past 6 days). If there is to be a Trillian port to OS X it needs to be done before clients like Adium are given a chance to mature, otherwise there will be very little demand for it. I wouldn't hold my breath though, it doesn't seem like OS X is a top priority for Trillian at this point - the hope lies in the open source community.

With all of these applications installed I've managed to bog OS X down to where I expected it to be; I've got a total of 15 apps running (including Finder) with 20 windows open and I'm beginning to see points where the system isn't as responsive as I would like. If I had to compare it to the previous PC I was using (Athlon 64 3400+) I would say that the system isn't actually any slower, but granted I'm running on a dual processor G5 setup vs. a single Athlon 64. I'd say any "seat of the pants" performance difference there is between the G5 and an Athlon 64 system is largely due to the OS. The aggressive caching OS X does seems to prevent disk swapping a lot, which does make the system feel faster overall than my PC when heavily multitasking. I have a feeling that with a little more memory (system and video) this thing would be running even smoother. Actually, that's a good word - smooth is the best way to quantify how the system seems to react when you're heavily multitasking.

The smooth comment being made, the G5 could use some faster CPUs. I've heard all the rumors about 2.5 - 2.6GHz 90nm G5s due out soon with 3GHz available by the end of the summer; if they are true, then that's exactly what this system needs. A nice 25 - 50% increase in clock speed (assuming no architectural changes) should improve overall system performance significantly; I think the G5 would be perfectly setup (given current software requirements) with a pair of 2.5GHz CPUs, at 3GHz we'd be talking butter. I don't know if I could deal with anything slower than the 2.0s I have right now, but the plus side of higher clocked CPUs being released is that the 2.0s will drop in price.

We always need more power, regardless of which side of the fence we're on :)

Thanks to the helpful comments from a number of you I did some looking into Exposé's performance as a function of video memory size. It does seem like 64MB isn't enough video memory to keep Exposé running smoothly with two high resolution diplays and a number of windows open. I've requested all of ATI's 9800 Mac products so I'll hopefully be able to do a 64MB 9600 vs. 128MB 9800 vs. 256MB 9800 comparison here with respect to high-res Exposé performance. I'm beginning to think there may be a need for a Mac section on AT; hardware is hardware after all :)

I know I said I'd keep this one short, but when I get to writing I can't really stop (I know, I talk too much). Keep the comments coming and I'll keep the blogs coming. Quick question for the keyboard junkies out there: is there a Safari equivalent to CTRL+Enter for completing a URL? I'm looking to be able to type 'anandtech' then hit a keystroke combination to add the www. and the .com. I swear I haven't been able to figure it out on my own if it does exist, it's probably the simplest thing in the world and I'm just missing it :) I'd appreciate any and all help as usual.

Take care all.