brendn asked: You said "mac loses major points in previews for not letting you arrow through a folder correctly". In what context? Preview.app lets you do it just fine. If you mean QuickLook, try using the tab key instead. (For some reason tab/shift-tab have been the standard forward/back in lexicographical ordering, while arrows are standard for spatial navigation.
ah, you’re right. i did mean quicklook. jeeze, i don’t think i’ve ever called it that once.
i would have never thought to use the tab key, though. (and probably will never get used to it) so good to know! but i still think the windows preview handles the arrow keys better than quicklook.
lauraj asked: i'm fascinated by the fact that you are both a mac & pc person. do you prefer one over the other to do certain tasks or what?
yes absolutely! i think i could write a book about what i like differently about each operating system, but here are a bunch of things:
mac os x:
- expose and spaces and my sick mouse setup with both are amazing, and there is no PC equivalent that i know of. but! to counter, the window’s taskbar is cool too because it’s always visible, doesn’t change arrangement every time you access it (expose) and is very customizable. (i like a flat white)
- it is way easier to change the icons of things on a mac (without special software) and mac’s version beats the heck out of the windows version.
- mac has some cooler options as far as text/document capture goes, but windows caught up and evernote kind of destroyed the whole issue entirely. i’m mostly referring to voodoopad, which was one of the most intuitive ways to organize your stuff ever. (wiki-like, with the ability to drop in images)
- preview for PDFs, word docs, text files and video is pretty amazing. but mac loses major points in this for not letting you arrow through a folder correctly. repeatedly hitting the right arrow key should go through each file, in each row, from left to right. on mac os it stops at the end of the row, and you have to then move down and left. this wasn’t an issue really before preview, and it’s a really tiny detail, but i encounter it constantly when working with folders of images.
windows xp:
- windows will always be my favorite way to file manage. mac’s preview feature is cool, but still not enough to make me feel differently about this. even if i use the mac most of the time, i still view my pc as the mothership and it holds all the really important stuff.
- i did use foobar for a while on pc and had a LOT of fun tricking it out. it’s like the anti-itunes.
- windows has SAI which is hands down the best drawing tool ever, for me. painter and adobe don’t have SHIT on this program. [english language files for sai]
- this will probably make some people cringe, but i like the fact that windows apps differ so much visually. when everything is the same shade of gray (mac) it takes extra processing time (for me) to find what i’m looking for.
- as the ancient argument goes, windows makes it easier to get under the hood. also to recover something when an application crashes, if you’re clever about it. mac just closes shop and says “sorry! try again?”.
neutral/equal:
- for mac’s super-customizable adium, there is miranda and trillian on windows. adium is a bit easier to use for advanced tweaking, but so is trillian. miranda is for the most determined warriors.
- i can enjoy myself equally on both. i can be productive on both. these are the most important things.
thanks lauraj for the question, that was really fun to answer :)
i’ve been reading (slowly) through cybertext: perspectives on ergodic literature by espen j. aarseth. not the lightest reading, but highly interesting if you have an obsession for both computers and words.
this was a particularly interesting bit:
“Instead of defining text as a chain of signifiers, as linguists and semioticians do, I use the word for a whole range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and databases. As the cyber prefix indicates, the text is seen as a machine— not metaphorically but as a mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs. Just as a film is useless without a projector and a screen, so a text must consist of a material medium as well as a collection of words. The machine, of course, is not complete without a third party, the (human) operator, and it is within this triad that the text takes place. (See fig. 1.1) The boundaries between these three elements are not clear but fluid and transgressive, and each part can be defined only in terms of the other two. Furthermore, the functional possibilities of each element combine with those of the two others to produce a large number of actual text types.” — espen j. aarseth
