What I miss about Mac OSX

By PNWDweller
in Microsoft (Windows)

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Grand Master

PNWDweller

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So, it has been about 3 weeks since I moved away from MAC OSX and back into the Windows world. I have adjusted pretty well for my personal use (I use it at work full time in IT so know it well there :) ) But, what I use here at home and work are two different things.

On the Mac, I fell in love with the 'Quicklook' feature which allowed you to anywhere, such as desktop or finder window (Explorer), just press the spacebar and you have a quick preview of the file's contents, play the song you just highlighted, read an entire PDF without opening it, and more. The first thing I found to help with this is a nice little program called QTTabBar which puts tabs in the explorer window, but also lets you 'quick look' the files that you are interested in viewing. It is rougher around the edges than Mac's quick look, but a suitable replacement. :)

Mac's Calendar program, I asked about that earlier here, but just settled on using Fluid from Mozilla to create a program file to load the Google Calendar (which ties to my Android). Load the program, and I am in. Very rudimentary, but so far pretty good.

Quicksilver - i have yet to find a suitable replacement. This program IMHO was killer! You set the hot key combo (I had CMD-Space for mine), and it would open up a window to let you start typing in the program name and it would let you launch it form there. YES - I know I can search in the Start Menu but, not really the same to me.

iPhoto - the best yet, hardly used (Maybe once) replacement I have found for that is Picasa. Not really a big fan of the program, but works for me for now.

It Just works! - That mentality that you come to rely on full time when you hook a printer, camera, thumb drive, or other hardware, you don't have to download the driver and install it. That probably has been the worst for me to adjust to, but really is no big deal. ;)

Anyone else switch from MacOSX in the past back to Windows and run into a similar issue?

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Grand Master

HawkMan

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What about the calendar in live mail

As for launching apps. I don't see ow hitting the single windows key start typing app name and hitting enter when it's at the top of the list isn't a better alternative than a key combo and then doing the same thing.

Personally, I'll take live photo gallery, or windows photo gallery now, over Picasa any day. Faster, handles big collections faster, better correction tools and more compatible with more upload services.

As for it just works... So does windows. The difference here is that, for most hardware the driver is either nstalling right away, like on the Mac, or it has to be downloaded, unlike the Mac alternative where it's installed right say, if its Mac compatible, or it doesn't work at all. You might have had a point on this in xp and earlier, but in 7 and 8, not so much. Most hardware is installed right away from built in or windows update.

Grand Master

Mr. Gibs

Posted
Posted
On the Mac, I fell in love with the 'Quicklook' feature which allowed you to anywhere, such as desktop or finder window (Explorer), just press the spacebar and you have a quick preview of the file's contents, play the song you just highlighted, read an entire PDF without opening it, and more.

Enable the preview pane in explorer and you'll get the exact same thing without needing an app.

It Just works! - That mentality that you come to rely on full time when you hook a printer, camera, thumb drive, or other hardware, you don't have to download the driver and install it. That probably has been the worst for me to adjust to, but really is no big deal.

What version of Windows are you running exactly? Ever since Vista the driver database has increased massively, and ever since XP it auto searches for drivers online, downloads and installs them.

The thing about Quicksilver already exists in Windows, it just looks different. And the others well I guess that comes down to personal preference really.

Grand Master

PNWDweller

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Yeah Spotlight does the same thing as quicksilver, but Quicksilver does a lot more than that as well. Hard to explain because I never used it to it's full potential, but do know you could use Quicksilver to compose email on the fly, w/o having to launch your email program and more.

I am running Win 7 so I guess the tag didn't stick here.

For those that are saying the drivers install right away. Yes in fact that do, but...I'll use my new system as an example - it is a Gateway so that of course means store bought. With that comes the plethura of drivers that need to be installed right after you install the OS. Last week, I took a spare hard drive and installed Win 7 on there as a clean install to be a bit more free with the system in terms of not having to worry about bloatware which I already removed with PC-DeCrapifier and manually removed if I were to reinstall due to HDD upgrade later on. (Also gain the extra space they reserve for the system image).

When I booted into the fresh install, no wireless drivers for my card, no nic drivers for my built in network, no sound drivers and no video drivers. This is where I am basing the "It Just works' mentality as well. Of course, we are talking about Windows having to support thousands of cards, configurations and more as a default so I don't blame them since in contrast Apple has a very small portion of pre-built devices to support so easier for them to 'default' the install and make things work out of the box. :) Again, not really a big thing for me. Just took a bit to get used to.

Preview pane in explorer is good, I give you that - but I did gain a tabbed interface which I rely on quite a bit while moving files. (Windows Snap is good too, but...since I have a 23" monitor - not really wanting to fill entire screen with two snapped explorer windows and not have other stuff running in back ground.)

Proficient

notchinese

Posted
Posted

It Just works! - That mentality that you come to rely on full time when you hook a printer, camera, thumb drive, or other hardware, you don't have to download the driver and install it. That probably has been the worst for me to adjust to, but really is no big deal. ;)

Very few things should require a download except old devices.

Enthusiast

pwgarner

Posted
Posted

Yeah Spotlight does the same thing as quicksilver, but Quicksilver does a lot more than that as well. Hard to explain because I never used it to it's full potential, but do know you could use Quicksilver to compose email on the fly, w/o having to launch your email program and more.

I am running Win 7 so I guess the tag didn't stick here.

For those that are saying the drivers install right away. Yes in fact that do, but...I'll use my new system as an example - it is a Gateway so that of course means store bought. With that comes the plethura of drivers that need to be installed right after you install the OS. Last week, I took a spare hard drive and installed Win 7 on there as a clean install to be a bit more free with the system in terms of not having to worry about bloatware which I already removed with PC-DeCrapifier and manually removed if I were to reinstall due to HDD upgrade later on. (Also gain the extra space they reserve for the system image).

When I booted into the fresh install, no wireless drivers for my card, no nic drivers for my built in network, no sound drivers and no video drivers. This is where I am basing the "It Just works' mentality as well. Of course, we are talking about Windows having to support thousands of cards, configurations and more as a default so I don't blame them since in contrast Apple has a very small portion of pre-built devices to support so easier for them to 'default' the install and make things work out of the box. :) Again, not really a big thing for me. Just took a bit to get used to.

Preview pane in explorer is good, I give you that - but I did gain a tabbed interface which I rely on quite a bit while moving files. (Windows Snap is good too, but...since I have a 23" monitor - not really wanting to fill entire screen with two snapped explorer windows and not have other stuff running in back ground.)

I guess the main thing about this entire experiment is that you could wipe everything and put it on your own hardware as opposed to taking whatever is already there. I am pretty sure if you wanted to install OSX on your new hard drive you would more than likely face bigger problems making things just work. You have to remember that out of the box most of the things you are talking about did just work and when you changed things you have to put things back right for them to work correctly.

Grand Master

Mr. Gibs

Posted
Posted
When I booted into the fresh install, no wireless drivers for my card, no nic drivers for my built in network, no sound drivers and no video drivers. This is where I am basing the "It Just works' mentality as well. Of course, we are talking about Windows having to support thousands of cards, configurations and more as a default so I don't blame them since in contrast Apple has a very small portion of pre-built devices to support so easier for them to 'default' the install and make things work out of the box. Again, not really a big thing for me. Just took a bit to get used to.

That's weird :/ The only driver I haven't had auto-install since Vista is my wireless card (Intel Wifi N 100), but 8 now supports that OOB. Not sure why the other drivers didn't auto-install though (apart from video drivers since MS only includes the basic ones).

Preview pane in explorer is good, I give you that - but I did gain a tabbed interface which I rely on quite a bit while moving files. (Windows Snap is good too, but...since I have a 23" monitor - not really wanting to fill entire screen with two snapped explorer windows and not have other stuff running in back ground.)

The tabbed interface would be quite a neat addition tbh.

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