As I sit on my mom’s new sectional and look around her house, I start to wonder how I’m going to get home since I forgot my wallet…

Windows Vista is coming soon and with it a reevaluation of my choice to switch to the Mac. I very much doubt I’d choose to switch back, given the phenomenal power and beauty of OS X. Yet here are the things that, nearly three years later, still irk me:

WMV

Roughly 15% of the video content on the web that I encounter is in WMV format, usually v9 or greater. This presents a challenge that I haven’t quite conquered. Had the percentage been closer to 50%, I’d probably have figured out a way to play these files. Which I actually just did - Flip4Mac plays at least one file that I tried to play before. Problem solved.

Internet Explorer

This isn’t a Mac problem per se, but the effect is the same. Many website operators still think that they can just ignore that part of the population that doesn’t have IE5.5+. They can choose to do so, and I can choose not to use their website even when I have access to IE.

I mainly experience this problem through others, like my mom. She works for Kaiser, and Kaiser’s intranet assumes you are using IE for certain things like accessing Lotus Notes. Creating (or supporting) a monoculture like IE on Wintel is just begging for difficult and expensive IT maintenance.

Perhaps they’ve run the numbers and determined that they’d have greater support costs trying to support other browsers (i.e. Firefox) than a reduction of the usual IE/Windows problems would cover. If that’s the case, so be it. That’s just not a company that I’d want to work at.

Incidentally, my company, j2 Global, does a good job of allowing a heterogeneous set of browsers and OSes to be used in-house. Kudos.

Games

I don’t frequently play games, and the ones I did before (Diablo II, StarCraft) actually do run on a Mac. My current game is Counter-Strike, which I’ve picked up again after a long break. I’ll probably stop playing it once I get a social life, but until then it’s fun sometimes. It only runs on Windows, so I have to devote part of my PC to Windows.

Attitude

Why the choice of OS should be such a hot-button issue I don’t know. You are not your OS, and an attack on it is not an attack on you. I have to remind myself of this sometimes whenever someone starts saying bad things about Macs. Usually the speaker is part of the anti-Mac bandwagon whose ideas are not based on fact but on hearsay, but not always - its the latter type that I try to listen to and respond in kind. With the former sometimes they are unwilling to listen to reason and prefer their version of reality where Macs suck just because, but many aren’t so far gone and will listen when I put the facts to them in a non-threatening way.

Needless to say, this position of having to justify my decision over and over gets tiresome. The desire to take the blue pill and go back to sleep sometimes floats by my peripheral vision, but it’s easy enough to avoid.

Windows

Turning my attention to Windows now, I think it’d be interesting to take note of the things Microsoft would have to include (or exclude) in Vista to make me switch back, or at least to actually want to use Windows for anything other than gaming.

A decent shell

CMD just doesn’t cut it. It’s not so much the shell itself as the lack of utilities for it to make it a useful place to do something. Where are grep, sed, awk, less, ssh, gcc, wc, etc? I could use cygwin, but that would only have some pull if the other issues I have with Windows were fixed. In this respect, MSH looks somewhat interesting.

A better file system

NTFS is fine, a big improvement on FAT and FAT32. However I want the UNIXy goodness of symbolic links, arbitrary mount points, or good substitutes for these. Screw Windows’ drive letter convention! I’m pleased that Vista will at least be minimizing the focus on drive letters.

A better alt+tab

Command+tab in OS X allows me to use the arrow keys and the mouse once it’s up. Windows could take a cue from this. Exposé is another feature that Windows could use to manage its many windows.

A better task bar

Mac OS X has the dock which, while being basically a launcher, also shows me which programs are running, lets me open a file with a specific app, and more. That said, I don’t really use the dock. I use QuickSilver, and there is no good substitute on Windows (AppRocket doesn’t cut it).

Better integration of common services

Mac OS X has global spell-checking and an easily accessible Address Book API. These two are worth quite a lot to me. Mail, Adium, and many other apps use the Address Book to find contacts. The experience is just nicer.

Bundles

Mac OS X has a concept of bundles, or packages. It basically is stopping to ask the question of why file name extensions should only apply to files and not folders. This allows awesome things like single-file application installs and the ability to just try out an app without copying it to /Applications.

Windows has either installers or zip packages that need to be copied somewhere (e.g. Program Files, a kind of absurd name). Installers usually just get in the way, and don’t actually let you configure anything for most smaller apps.

Having this ability in Windows would be really cool.

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