Operating Systems

You may have guessed it, I am using Mac OS X, but life wasn’t always that good. Hard to believe that a little more than two years ago all I knew about Apples was that they only have a single button mouse (how awful) and that the menu bar of every program is always at the top of the screen (how awkward). I had a love-hate-relationship with Windows and I thought that that was about as good as it gets. After all, XP-Pro was very stable and what more can you ask for, right?

Now I wonder, why didn’t anybody tell me about ctrl-clicking, or that you can us any 2-button mouse of your liking, or that having the menu bar always at the top is actually a really nice thing. In particular, if you have ever tried to explain to someone not-so-computer-literate what menu bar you’re talking about. Top of the window is not nearly as straightforward as top of the screen.

So in January of 2004 I took the plunge out of sheer curiosity, trying to find out what this whole mac-cult was all about. It was the proverbial jump into the cold water, and boy, it was rather cold at first. I had a hard time with the so-called much more intuitive GUI. More intuitive it may be, but not if you have been breathing Windows OS for the last 1o years of your life.

Well, thanks to countless hours, and some reading in the Missing Manual for Panther, I fairly quickly became accustomed to the new OS. One year later, we bought another one, and the rest is history, so to speak.

At this point, my former love-hate-relation-ship with Windows has turned into a loathe-hate-relationship which is even tougher because corporate America unfortunately has not discovered Mac OS yet. Will it ever?