brainscat.com

Scoble said Russel’s thinking of switching back. I just finished switching last night.

You see, I love OS X, and I think it’s a better operating system than Windows XP. It has a better permissions model, way cleaner UI (mostly), better looks, and better UNIX interop. But… I switched away from Apple, back to Windows. Why? The short answer is I outgrew how Apple allowed me to use their product.

The Long Answer (and contributing minor reasons in no particular order)

1. I need ink. I can’t take the kinds of notes I do from my scanned textbooks and classes without my tablet. I’m not going to carry two laptops, a bunch of books, or notebooks. My faster and prettier Powerbook can’t compete with this kind of functionality.
2. Picasa, video games, poker software, ad infinitum runs on Windows. OS X is too narrow of a platform for developers to try and target, and consequently too frustratingly small of a sandbox to work in. It’s a sad but true reality.
3. My personal backup setup is on a Windows machine. Why? It’s easy as hell to setup, and I have no idea how to automate backup easily on OS X.
4. I want to own my media again. Xbox 360 integration, Yahoo Music Unlimited!, Windows Media Connect, Orb, my Windows Mobile phone all give me way more options to listen to my music away from home. What do I have from Apple? My iPod and the draconian iTunes. I can use that on Windows if I really want it.
5. It’s cheaper to run Windows. Yahoo Music Unlimited! kills iTunes Music Store in the value department. Also, the sum cost of OS X releases is waaaay more than the comparitive Windows costs. I’ll pay few hundred bucks and be just fine for five years, thank you.

Your mileage may vary, but for this here guy, it’s no contest.

Update: Magnus Nystedt and a commentor made some good observations on my previous post. First off, these are my opinions, I guess I didn’t state that clearly. Anyone looking for a “superior” platform will find themselves frustrated as these platforms are simply tools. Other OS’s are great at respective things, but they aren’t things I value and that’s why I switched. Use the right tool for you.

Magnus didn’t really like that I thought OS X is too narrow a platform. What I meant to say is… OS X is too narrow of a platform for a majority of developers to target. In many cases, the cost of development or cost of porting for OS X isn’t worth it because of the relatively small userbase when compared to Windows. That is a sad reality. I was in no way saying that OS X has an inferior platform for devs, just that the possible rewards for much software is less in the Apple world.

Lastly, yes, with Yahoo Music Unlimited! I only rent the music for a while, and don’t “own” it. It’s the first service to actually deliver as the “celestial jukebox”. I have more options than I do with the iTunes Music Store music, and that’s well worth the montly fee. The end result is that I consume a metric crapload of more music per month per dollar from Yahoo than I ever did from iTunes.

I’ve had my Tablet PC for about three days now, and have been using it heavily to get a good handle on it and I thought it would be a good idea to pass along my impressions. Later in the week, I’ll write about specific software packages.

On Form Factor

First off, I’m happy to report that the form factor for taking notes is just as inobtrusive as I hoped it would be. In the past few days, I’ve taken notes in classes and jotted thoughts, and each time the tablet has felt plenty comfortable.

I can’t say the same though, for extended periods of reading. The tablet is inferior to most books, because it’s heavier. It also loses out to reading off a laptop because you can always rest the laptop on your legs and adjust the angle of your screen accordingly. With the tablet, you have to hold it with your hands and it gets heavy, or tilt your neck down, which leads to cramping.

Web Browsing

The tablet feels most natural in portrait mode, but I’m finding that a lot of websites don’t like the fact my browser width is less than 800 pixels wide. The inaccessibility of some sites, combined with the fact that writing recognition doesn’t handle urls well can make browsing take longer than normal. Let’s just say, “bookmarks are your friend.”

Handwriting Recognition

It’s great when writing English words, otherwise, it sucks and you have to use the character by character handwriting editor. Like urls, shorthand for note-taking is quickly mangled if you try to convert it to text. I suspect this is because writing recognition works much in the same way that predictive text for phones does, selecting known words from a dictionary based upon the combination of “probable” letters. Notes are best left in ink, in my opinion. It’s better to have partially working send over ink you can read than to have converted text that makes no sense at all.

Scoble, you won, and don’t worry the Tablet PC’s not invisible, at least not to me. You see, I’m the new proud owner of my first TabletPC. Well, my employer owns it… but close enough. This whole post, actually, was written by hand and then converted to text in Firefox. Neat stuff, neat stuff… Stay tuned for more of my first impressions working with a tablet.