Issue 1: Spotlight on Technology
By Dr. Roger Korby

To Switch or Not To Switch, Mac is the Question

I recently splurged and bought a Mac Mini. I had been thinking about “making the switch” for about a year and when an Apple store opened up here in town late last year I knew it was only a matter of time before I would give in.

The Mac Mini has a lot going for it:
-It’s tiny (about the size of 5 CD cases)
-It’s quiet (it does have a fan but most of the time you can’t even hear it)
-It comes with OS X (see more about this below)
-It looks cool

The real star of the show is the OS X operating system (pronounced “Oh Es Ten”). Here are a few things I love about it.

• Expose – It’s like the Alt-Tab windows switcher in Windows but a lot cooler. It shrinks all your open windows down to where they all fit on the screen at once. Then you just click on the window you want to bring focus to.
• Dock – a bar at the bottom of the screen that contains all your running applications and shortcuts to applications.
• Hot corners - You can program it to do things like show the desktop when you move your mouse over the corner of the screen
• Quicksilver – This is probably the slickest application I’ve ever used and it is only made for OS X. It is basically an application that makes launching other applications beautifully simple. You press Control-Spacebar and Quicksilver pops up, then you just start typing the name of the application, file, song or what ever you are looking for and it brings up the item so that you can open it.
• The operation system feels much more responsive than Windows XP, especially when you give it a lot of RAM. Applications do hang up occasionally on OS X, but when they do, you can kill them much more easily and quickly than you can in Windows XP.
• Installing applications is really simple. For the most part it consists of dragging an icon of the application you are installing into your application folder. To uninstall, you just drag the icon from the application folder into your trashcan.

Apples have changed a lot over the years and some of the reasons people have hesitated to switch really no longer apply. Here are some of the most common Mac Myths:

1) You can’t open Microsoft Office files.
Microsoft makes a version of Office for the Mac. Office 2004 for OS X is completely compatible with the Windows version of Office.
Another solution is Open Office (available for free at OpenOffice.org). Open Office occasionally has trouble opening complex Word files (they will open, but they may not look exactly right). If the Word documents you work with are primarily just text, Open Office should work just fine

2) You can only use one-button mice.
With OS X, Apple introduced support for two button mice. So far I haven’t had anything to complain about regarding mouse support in OS X.

3) Macs are expensive:
With the introduction of the Mac Mini last year, you can now get an Apple desktop for around $500-600. While you could get a relatively more powerful PC from someone like Dell for this amount, it would be running Windows XP and it would look and sound like a full-size desktop.

4) Macs don’t work with Windows computers.
In some ways it is easier to share files between an Apple and a Windows PC than it is to share files between two Windows PCs. OS X finds and can communicate with all the workgroups on a network, whereas in Windows you have to specify one and only one workgroup.

However, there have been a few things in OS X that I have not liked so much.

1) The Home and End buttons do not work the way they do in Windows.
Instead you press the Command key and Left or Right, which takes two hands. If you’re used to just hitting the Home key, this can be irritating.

2) OS X doesn’t handle menu shortcuts the same way Windows does. In XP most menu items have an underlined character that you can jump to by pressing Alt and then that key. This isn’t an option in OS X and I miss it.

3) OS X’s antialiasing (the way it smoothes out the edges of fonts) just flat out sucks. You’ll probably hear a different story from a long time Apple user, but if you are used to Windows XP’s antialiasing, you are going to be disappointed. I’m hoping Apple tweaks this in a later version of the operating system, because it is really bad.

Apart from these complaints, I have been really happy with OS X. If you have been reluctant to switch from Windows to Apple, I can say from experience, it is an easier transition than I expected it to be. As far as a recommendation, I am actually kind of torn. Apple offers a great operating system and some beautiful hardware to run it, but OS X is a different experience from Windows. Long time PC users may find themselves missing Windows. Of course, for these PC-using hesitators, fear not. Microsoft’s new version of Windows (called Vista) should come out this year and will have many of OS X’s best features.