Ditch and switch
- Article 42 of 53
- iCreate, September 2005
With the success of the iPod and low-cost Macs such as the Mac mini, there's never been a better time to ditch that old PC and switch to the Mac
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Everything in OS X is pretty consistent across programs, thanks to Apple’s rules for developers, so you don’t spend ages looking for the same options in different programs. Everything is easy.
Ease of use isn’t the only place where OS X beats Windows hands down. The latest version, OS X 10.4 aka Tiger, has a range of high-end features that Windows won’t even think about having until next year with “Windows Vista” – assuming, of course, that Microsoft doesn’t remove the three or four new features it still has left from its original plans for Vista. Spotlight lets you find any file or text within a file within seconds, wherever it is on your computer, while you’re still typing. That’s a feature Microsoft has been working on for over a decade and they’re still not going to be able to get it to work in time for Vista.
Core Image, Core Video and Core Sound make DirectX and other Windows multimedia facilities look like a kindergarten’s potato prints. Any Mac developer can include breathtaking ripple effects, picture transparencies and anything else from this massive toolbox of Hollywood special effects with little effort; Tiger, in fact, is littered with them.
Then there are things like Dashboard that not only look great but make your life so much easier. Press a single button and a host of gadgets known as widgets will leap onto your desktop. These will give you your contacts, the weather, flight times and a horde of other things. You can download and install your own widgets, too. There are over 1,000 widgets that can give you TV listings, train times, a live stream over the Internet of Radio 4: you name it, someone’s probably created a widget for it. There’s just nothing like that in Windows.
The iCal calendar software that comes with every Mac lets you plan your days, publish your diary online for others to see and to subscribe to other people’s calendars. There are now thousands of calendars for sporting events, movie releases and other areas of interest that you can subscribe to with iCal. Yet another OS X program, iSync, lets you synchronise your iCal calendars – and your contacts - with mobile phones, PDAs, iPods and other devices. Do you see how much useful stuff you get with a Mac?
Now, what do you use your computer for? Maybe work. Maybe games. Ultimately though, it’s the big three most people use home computers for: email, web surfing, and entertainment. Let’s look at those one at a time.
OS X’s built-in Mail program is immune to all those Windows email viruses that keep disrupting our lives. It has a junk mail filter that learns as time goes on what’s junk and what’s not. Pretty soon, you’ll be able to set it to just delete anything that looks like spam mail, it’s so good.
Surfing the web, you’ll be safer with a Mac than with Windows. Even Internet Explorer on a Mac is safer than Internet Explorer on a PC. Safari, the built-in web browser of OS X, is faster and more compatible than Internet Explorer and makes the web look one hell of a lot more attractive than IE does, thanks to OS X’s built-in text and graphics functions.
It’s with entertainment that OS X really excels. As you’d expect, there’s a built-in DVD player. There’s also iTunes, the best music player and organiser for any platform, installed without a single download.
But the biggest Mac advantage is iLife, a collection of iTunes and four other Apple applications: iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, and Garageband. iPhoto is the number one program for organising your photo collection. It downloads pictures directly from the vast majority of digital cameras without any extra software, lets you organise them, add comments, enhance them and remove blemishes. Best of all, you can order prints directly from within iPhoto, either loose or in specially made linen books.
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