I’ll explain (I think I’d better ).

Mac OS is pretty complete out of the box. If you’d like to burn an ISO image onto CD, or browse that ISO image, or ssh to another host, or use VNC, or… then it’s all already there, well integrated and working from the start.

Windows isn’t like that — the basic OS lacks a lot of functionality. If you’re going to burn an ISO, or browse one then you’ll need something like Nero. If you’d like to ssh to another machine then you download putty, if you’re going to connect to another machine using VNC then you’ll need that, and so on.

What you end up with is a whole host of extra software, all pretty much working, but all pulling in slightly different directions and all clearly written by different companies with different ideas about the user interface, and differing levels of integration with the whole.

Firefox and friends are also a little like that. The basic functionality is in the application, but all the extra frills are plugins, written by many different people. Many of the plugins are a little quirky, and they all tend to pull in slightly different directions — sometimes interacting badly with each other. It works, but it’s not elegant.

Microsoft and the Open Source Community do this for very different reasons. Microsoft does it to spread their programming effort as thinly as possible (I guess they’d say as efficiently as possible), always concentrating on ‘value’, and never on quality. The Open Source Community do it out of necessity: not everyone can be hacking the central code all the time, it’s just not practical, and the plugin approach enables a huge number of people to work on additional functionality whilst keeping the project manageable.

The world would be a much poorer place without open source software, but there is a price to pay. The plugin approach that open source development engenders leads to some great software (I wouldn’t give up my Squeezeboxes for the world for example, and my squeezeserver is bristling with plugins), but those systems do sometimes feel like they’re all elbows and knees — rather awkward, and somewhat less than elegant.

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A source of frustration

Not dangerous, but irritating until you figure it out: when an application is not the foreground app (i.e. mouse and keyboard input isn’t going there at the moment and the application’s menu bar is not at the top of the screen), then clicking on the application’s window will make it the foreground app, but the mouse click is not forwarded to the application.

So for example: with Windows, clicking on a link in web browser will follow that link, regardless of whether the application is the foreground app. With Mac OS X, if some other application is currently the foreground app then your first click will just select the web browser as the new foreground app — it will take a further mouse click to actually follow the link. So with Mac OS X you often have to click twice.

More dangerous

Dragging a folder to somewhere that already contains a folder of the same name results in very different behaviour. If you’re used to Windows then you may lose data.

Say I have a new Franz Ferdinand CD ripped and ready for my music collection. The music is in a folder named after the album, which is itself in a folder named after the artist.

With Windows, I can drag the new ‘Franz Ferdinand” folder from my ripping area to my music area and it will say

I say yes and it’s job done. The new Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents will be merged with the existing Franz Ferdinand folder’s contents in my music collection.

With Mac OS X, the OS says

Note the difference: ”Franz Ferdinand” is being replaced. So if I click on replace then all my previous albums by that artist are gone — not at all what I intended!

Another subtlety

There are others, I’m sure, but another dangerous difference in file manipulation when you’re used to the way Windows does it is this:

Drag a folder from one file-store window to another and then change your mind and hit delete (cmd+backspace in Mac OS X).

Under Windows, the destination window is now in the foreground, so you end up deleting the destination copy.

Under Mac OS X, the destination folder is highlighted (hint: it’s highlighted in grey not blue — that’s the subliminal cue), but it’s still the source finder window that’s the foreground app, so you end up deleting the source rather than the destination copy.

As with much of the Mac OS X vs Windows behaviour, the Mac OS way is usually better thought out, but that doesn’t stop it from being dangerously different if you’re used to the way Windows does things. Here’s hoping that this article will save some people some grief.

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