We try to avoid taking positions on provocative subjects here at digitalmissive – health care town hall meetings, South African track star gender issues – things like that. But I’ve recently found myself sitting in front of a completely Microsoft-free workstation at my current client site – no Windows, no Word, no (gasp) Excel, no nuthin’. So at the risk of upsetting a few of the religious faithful on either side of the great Cupertino-Redmond divide, I now find myself with a few (somewhat unexpected) observations to share.

I’ve been a Windows user for some time now. The bloat, the ambivalence (at best) towards open standards, the security concerns – all this can get annoying at times. By and large, though, I’ve been one pretty happy XP camper for a while now (like many, I sat out Vista). Lately, though, like many of us John Hodgman types, I’ve secretly wondered if I too could one day be as cool as Drew-Barrymore-boyfriend guy….

And so now here I am, living the dream… surprisingly, though,, after two weeks on my Apple, I find I kind of miss my Windows desktop. I miss Excel. I even miss Word. And I’m in the process of accumulating a list of general workflow complaints:

Applications and simplicity – too much of a good thing?
Word has always struck me as a prime example of too many developers thinking up too many new features (maybe each looking to make a mark in advance of their reviews). Whatever the cause, it’s felt as if there have simply been too many cooks in the kitchen, resulting in cases of both ‘solutions-looking-for-problems’ and ‘application-knows-best’ syndrome (I’m looking at you, little paper-clip guy…). But as my current project is somewhat technical and doesn’t require a lot of business document creation, I have only Apple’s TextEdit installed on my workstation. Verdict? While Word’s feature-bloat (and resulting plethora of menus and toolbars) can be disconcerting at times, it can be easily ignored the other 90% of the time. TextEdit, on the other hand, is a prime example of how it’s also possible to keep things too simple.

Take lists, for example. I like bullet lists. TextEdit implements nested lists via the Tab key, but I have yet to find a way to ‘back out’ a nested list up to it’s parent level (and let alone renumber it). It almost seems as if the Apple TextEdit developers lost interest in list implementation and wandered off down the hallway halfway through to see what was up with the cooler kids on the iPhone team.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s unfair to compare the two, TextEdit is bundled free with the OS wile Word is a (not inexpensive) standalone application, TextEdit is only using RTF formatting, etc. But while I recognize that TextEdit was never meant for enterprise-level document creation – but if you do choose to implement something (and RTF does support lists), then do it thoroughly – follow through the use cases (btw? similar issues with Mac Mail).

On the other hand, to show some of the Apple bundled apps some love, I have to say Preview is great – it’s so nice and light, it’s a pleasure to be able to view PDF docs without waiting for the (unnecessarily heavy, I think) Acrobat Reader to launch.

Operating systems and workflow…
Two weeks in with the Mac, and I have to say I still prefer the Windows desktop. I’m sure some of my issues might simply be due to unfamiliarity with the Mac alternatives, but still…

• Clearing off my desktop… I don’t know about you, but after an hour or two, I’ve accumulated a lot of open apps and windows. That’s when I used to rely on “Minimize All” (Windows-M) – but there appears to be no Mac equivalent. Sure, you can hide all windows of non-foreground apps, but to get all the way to the desktop, all I’ve found is Exposé (overkill) or setting up a corner of the screen to drag to. That latter feature is actually pretty slick, but the problem then is you can’t bring just one individual app back into focus at a time – it’s all or nothing – either you have the same mess of multiple open application windows or a completely bare desktop (which kind of defeats the whole purpose of getting to the desktop in the first place). The only way I’ve found to bring back on a per-document or per-app basis is to put them all individually on the dock, which isn’t really a workable solution.

• How I find the Finder...     In Windows, I’m used to creating a new folder within an existing folder by simply selecting the existing folder. Strangely, it appears to be impossible on a Mac – if you select a folder, there’s no ‘New Folder’ command available from the contextual menu – and if you try the main menu command with a folder selected, the OSX creates a folder on the same level (OK, sso it’s only one additional click to first open the parent folder – but the needlessness of having to do that still bothers me a bit).

• Why can’t you open multiple instances of the Finder from the dock? Since you can do precisely this from clicking on any desktop disk icon, why not from the Finder dock icon as well? A mystery.

• In the horizontal pane view (which is otherwise pretty nice), there’s no “Sort by Date Modified” option, it’s just by file name. While the pane view is nice, as with TextEdit and Mac Mail, the lack of some fairly obvious functionality make the app feel somewhat half-implemented to me.

• And one last thing on sorting, while I’m at it – I really miss the “View by Date Deleted” option in the trash window…

It’s very likely that I’ll not only find workarounds to these small workflow issues, but will also find some things I like better about the Mac – tricks I hadn’t even thought of (perhaps with the help of my digitalmissive cohort Andreas, an avowed Mac home user).  Already, I can say that there’s a refreshingly clean and transparent feeling to the OS that I really appreciate.  For example, I still can’t get over how easy it is to install apps – drag a folder?  (what? no badly-written installer apps messing around with a byzantine and scary registry?).

But in terms of workflow and productivity, I find (somewhat unexpectedly) that I really do miss my XP desktop and my Office apps.