Back to Windows: first day experience

When you live abroad for a while you can come back and look at your own country with fresh eyes. You don't take everything for granted anymore. Going back to using Windows after using Mac almost exclusively for 3 years feels a bit the same. There are so many thing about Windows that one takes for granted after using it for a long time that you don't notice it anymore.

Of course I have used windows now and then during these 3 years but it has mainly been to surf the web and write some email. But now I am starting an internship where I will be developing on a windows box. So I had to go through the whole procedure of installing and configuring apps.

Installing apps
First experience was installing apps. What I noticed that annoyed me was that installing apps on Windows XP requires considerably more worthless clicking than on OS X. There is always this wizard like installer were first you chose installation type, then there is the question where you want the app, then if you want a link to be added to the desktop. When it finally installs there might be a question to view last notes. And at the very end there is a question whether you want to launch the app. Seriously, do we need that many f..cking questions?

I am comparing this to a typical Mac install: Just drag the application to were you want to it and it installs. Then you can forget about it and start with the next app. If you want last notes just open the last notes file in the mounted .dmg. If not it is not a question you have to make a choice about. You don't have to click next in the wizard past this option.

Running apps
When you first run an app you notice windows love for pop ups. Always you get todays tips that you got to click away. Of course every time I boot an XP install with some apps. There always seems to be all these annoying pops up down in the system tray, telling me all these things I don't give a shit about. They are just annoying and I need to click them away.

Then there are things like configuring the app or entering license key. Non standard. You never know quite were in the menu these options will be located. On OS X these options menu options are always in the app menu (before file menu).

Paths and Drive letters
Now, I never liked the deal with paths and drive letters in Windows so this is not exactly a new discovery. But this time a friend was helping me do a lot of the configuration, which is a Windows fan, and still even though we were both looking at it things got messed up.

I was supposed to set up a project from SVN with Visual Studio. The project needed to copy some files to another directory after each build (a .dll). Here was the first problem. For some reason my computer used H: as the drive letter for the main hardrive. C: was interpreted as removable media. But all the other guys used C:, so the copy statement put into Visual Studio didn't work, because it used C: and I had H: on my computer. But we couldn't change this because then it didn't work on the other computers.

The second problem we ran into was that we couldn't manage to get the SVN checkout to work. The problem? We specified paths like this: "directory\file", the normal windows way. However it turned out that it was supposed to be "directory/file". That is the problem you almost never know on windows. On OS X (Unix way) it is always "/" that is the path separator but on Windows it could be either "/" or "\". Use C/C++ or a web browser and you use the Unix way. Use cmd or file manager and it is the other way. For anything else you never quite now, and you don't get very informative error messages when it goes wrong.

Finding files and programs
When installing we had to determine what needed to be installed and if it wasn't installed we had to find the install package and install it. I cringed when I saw my window friend trying to figure out this. He first manually looked through the start menu to see if the program was there, then when he couldn't find it there he went into program files folder and started looking through that. Finally he decided it wasn't there and started looking through all these different file shares for the install files.

I was just thinking while he was mucking about this, "If only we had spotlight and I would have just typed in the dam app name, it if was there I would have found it if not, I would have found the install files right away".

Consistency and robustness
One of my first impression was that the look and feel of windows apps differ greatly. In any OS X app hit apple+w to close a tab or window. On windows this only worked in Firefox. Programs were very bad at updating the UI. If I checked in a file with tortoise, or changed some configuration in Visual Studio or my coding editor (don't remember name), the GUI would frequently not update. Instead you often had to close dialog boxes and reopen them or go out of a directory and back again (hitting the refresh button didn't work). I notice these kind of glitches because I am not used to them in OS X. Perhaps because the Cocoa model view controller paradigm is used extensively, so dependent part of the GUI gets updated when another GUI changes some data. When coding in Windows before there didn't seem to be as much tradition for this in the toolkits and frameworks. It was more up to each developer to take care of.

Reboots
When I first started using XP back in the day I remember thinking it was so great because you didn't need to do all those typical Windows reboots. Perhaps I didn't think it was so bad because it was a dramatic reduction in the amount of reboots you needed before. But when I used XP now I couldn't help getting annoyed at the seemingly endless amounts of reboots as I installed new software and made configuration changes.

Final thoughts
A couple of things are still nicer in Windows. I absolutely hate how Finder insists on sorting everything on name. Why can't we please get the directories first!! What benefit could having the directories mixed among files possibly have? Kudos to file manager for this.

Windows XP also has a lot more hooks in many places so they can do thing like having version control integrated with the file manager, that is nice. Visual Studio has a lot of nice features and much more robust implementation of code completion than xCode.

However I can't help feeling that I am using something quite old fashioned when using XP. It seems very long in the tooth compared to the current incarnation of OS X. It shows that there hasn't been a major OS update in a long time. Things I use extensively and all the time while working on a computer like spotlight and expose is missing.

Extensive use of search fields is also missing. It is painful to navigate all the compile options in Visual Studio compared to xCode for instance because the lack of a search field. Same goes for preference panel.

Vista will fix a lot of Windows problems and bring it more on pair with OS X interface wise (under the hood it will be far more advance in places). However I don't see Windows catching up to the clean OS X interface in a long time. There are a lot of Windows apps out there that are not going to switch to a new GUI style as soon as Vista is out. Meanwhile OS X has been out for quite some time and most apps have adapted a common OS X style interface. This means as a Mac use, most apps you use will look and feel very similar, and take advantage of recent trends in GUI design like e.g. extensive search capability.

I am a bit ambivalent about the improvement of Windows. Of course it should be better, because that increase competition and force Apple to improve, it is also better for me because it will be more of a pleasure for me to use Windows at work. I have no illusions about what platform I will using for work for all foreseeable future. At the same time it is a pity with Vista because MS regains a huge gain Apple has had over Windows. Today it is quite plain to see how much more modern and far ahead OS X is compared to XP. This should help Apple gain some market share. With Vista the reason to switch will be a lot less.

Unless Apple has something hidden in their sleeve I don't see Leopard as making and huge difference. Sure it has some nice features, but it won't make OS X look as far ahead of Windows as Tiger does now against XP.