Jeremy’s Little Corner Of The Web…

Jeremy Zawodny has given up using his PowerBook at Yahoo!, instead using a Compaq nc6000 (he did say, however, that it will remain in use as his "media" computer).

While it's only one person, it's a bit disheartening to see this.

Jeremy provides a couple of points for "switching over". One of these is usability problems:

stop fighting the Mac's usability problems (the tab key being useless in most dialogs, the lack of hotkeys in most apps, the X11 requirement for some apps)

I use the tab key all the time in dialogs, as well as the left and right arrows and space bar. You can enable this by opening up the System Preferences, then going to Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Then click the checkbox adjacent to "Turn on full keyboard access". This should really be enabled by default.

I don't really agree with the lack of hotkeys. Most of the apps I use (Mail, NewsFire, OmniWeb, Adium, OmniOutliner) could be done exclusively with the keyboard. For NewsFire, it's actually quicker to do so! Looking on MacUpdate, there are a lot of applications that also offer hotkey "automation".

If you're interested in what key combinations are available for each app, try KeyCue. I had this installed for a while.

With regards to the "X11 requirement", I don't see how that would be different on Windows. Unless there's a Windows port of the apps you want to use, you're going to have to download binaries or compile them (with Cygwin?), which will require a Windows X server.

Additionally, you make mention of OSS being "second class citizens":

More importantly, the open source software I want to use (vim, emacs, firefox, thunderbird, gaim, the gimp, etc) are all first class citizens on Linux. On the Mac I always feel like they don't quite belong - they are second class citizens. It's very difficult for me to articulate why this is or exactly why I feel this way. I'm hoping someone else who's had this experience can do a better job than I can.

With vim and emacs being CLI applications, I don't see how they can be second-class citizens. They compile fine on MacOS X, and you can even get Fink to install them for you and handle dependencies. With a system like that, how can Windows beat the experience with OSS?

However, I do know what you mean with Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim and the Gimp being not so great on the Mac (as opposed to Linux). Kevin Gerich is working on making Firefox and Thunderbird a lot more Mac-like. If you want a multi-protocol IM client, try Adium (it also uses libgaim). Again (Firefox and Thunderbird aside), how are these apps any better on Windows? They won't behave or feel like Windows apps (is there a specific behaviour or feel for a Windows app?).

However, you do make a couple of points that would probably "make or break" the use of your PowerBook at work:

get full IT "support" at work (meaning that I get on the "real" network and don't need to do all that tunneling crap)

I have no idea how the Yahoo! network is setup, but surely there's an easier way to use it than through SSH tunneling… How do the Windows machines connect? I can understand it being very annoying, though.

feel like I'm getting more out of the hardware

I can see what you mean here. I have a two-year old 12″ PowerBook and routinely have about 10-15 apps open at any one time. As a result, it crawls. I have 640MB of RAM, as well. As soon as the PowerBook G5s come out, I'm grabbing one. With a two-year old computer though, it should probably run a bit better.

Oh well.