valmont's Journal: A Few Reasons Why OS X Rocks

Note: i posted the ramblings below to apple's os x feedback form. grab a pillow.

--------

I just wanted to drop a note to send you guys my most sincere congratulations.

I believe OS X is the best thing that's ever happened to computing.

It has litteraly increased my work productivity by orders of magnitude. Powerful, reliable, customizable, flexible, secure. BBEdit, NetBeans (!), iTunes, JabberFox, and IE5.1 are some of my most-commonly used applications. I just *love* crashing out of IE5.1 while loading some obnoxiously huge web page and force-quitting either thru cmd-opt-esc, or ctrl-opt-dock-click-app-icon, or terminal/ps -x kill -9, and see the rest of my system run as if nothing happened.

I constantly work with at the very least 5 terminal windows opened, more like 8-10 on average, with ssh connections to various hosts within our corporate network, my satexas.com shell account. I constantly use the shell to weave in and out of file structures, automate tasks, find file patterns, use emacs to quickly edit a file without having to fire-up the BBEdit window, copy batches of files to my tomcat build directory to test spot changes to some web application i'm working on.

Favorites. I love those. I love browsing directories within any application's "open" dialog, and be able to "add" any directory to my favorites so i can get back to it afterwards.

Multitasking. Interface. Beautiful. I can fire-up a massive regexp pattern search in BBEdit thru a deeply nested directory structure while sticking BBEdit in the background (watching its oh-so-sexy progress bar in the dock icon) while working in other applications. Ctrl-clicking an application's icon in the dock lets me bring a *specific* window for that application to the foreground. Telling iTunes to go to the next song without bringing it to the foreground. beautiful. It's all there, it's powerful, it's out of my way. I love it.

Unix. Yum. All my favorite unix tools are there (i've got the dev tools). cvs, emacs, whois, find, xargs, grep, sed, awk ... *all there*. I enabled my /etc/hosts file with lookupd. Surfing the web spam-free (without using omniweb which is pretty cool but i still find IE5.1 sexier). I downloaded, installed and configured smbd. So windoz weinies can access my public share. This essentially mean that once i got done configuring networking and smbd, my public share could be mounted by:
unix nfs client users
appletalk client users
windows smb client users
Plus OS X already comes with built-in clients for all those protocols.
More unix yuminess? fink.sourceforge.net. Gotta love those guys. All popular open-source apps are becoming available to OS X.

The Home Directory. beautiful. Every application I run saves all its user-defined preferences in the home directory, in well-defined locations like ~/Library. To futher confirm this, I removed administrator privileges from the default user I use every day, so the only place I can write to on my filesystem is my home directory. I switch user when I need to installl applications. The ramifications of such a set-up could be absolutely great. Imagine a collaborative work environment with a bunch of those nifty iMacs which mount user directories over the network. Anyone could walk over to any Mac, log-in as themselves over the network, and have *their ENTIRE work environment* all set-up and ready to go, with the same desktop they're used to see, all their browser cookies. All their files. Everything. System administrators could very easily restrict a user's access to their hard drive so they don't install unwanted applications, confining them to their home directory. Those concepts were established a long time ago by unix environments. But Unix alone was never practical as a desktop platform. Useful. But not practical. Windows tried to mimmic such behaviour on the surface but was never secure, nor reliable, always filled with blatant loopholes while allowing any user to write to most sensitive parts of the operating system even with restrictions. OS X fixes all that. I'm also toying around with the idea of sticking a copy of my powerbook's home directory onto my iPod. So I can carry my environment with me.

Aside from work, this little ti-book of mine is, as Steve Jobs envisions it, at the center of my digital world. Because of OS X's built-in support for all major digital cameras out there, i actually bought a Sony DSC-P50 camera. iPhoto was a home-run. I also have an iPod. I plug things and they just work. It's beautiful.

Because of this laptop i also bought a few must-have DVDs. I don't even own a dvd player. You had to see the priceless expression on the face of the guy sitting next to me in my los angeles to paris flight as i'm watching Shrek, while his little Kid is crawling all over him. "Is that one of the new Apple powerbooks?", "Well, it's an early model, you can get a more powerful one for about the same price I bought it for, but I have yet to find something I can't do on this puppy.Believe me, i'm a geek (swithching DVD Player to the background to reveal my NetBeans Java IDE with some code i was working/procrastinating on), and i like to push it. I just can't crash it. Everything just works. Work. or Fun. it just works. beautifuly."

Networking in OS X is simply sexy. I leverage various network locations to manage multiple connectivity options while at work or at home. Or roaming to friends' houses. Wireless 802.11b networks, opened or secure/encrypted, dhcp or static, ethernet LAN, modem dial-up, i have all those ports and protocols configured in many nifty ways. OS X organizes network ports and corresponding protocols so nicely, it is a breeze to understand and set-up. A Geek's dream.

I could go on and on about how sexy this operating system is. And i've used Mac OS since "System 6", right after "multifinder" was introduced. MacOS 7.6 was very nice, very stable, quite light. Open Transport was a major improvement to networking. 8.5 introduced some nice features, but bloat too. OS 9 added more bloat and unstability. I switched to windows2000 some- ime between 8.5 and os 9, tho it wasn't by choice, I didn't miss macos too much, there was no compelling business or productivity reason in my field of work to justify my getting a then-more-expensive mac laptop over cheaper Dell running win2k which was known to be rock-solid stable. That is ... unntil win2k started corrupting sectors of my hard drive, adding to a pile of nightmares already introduced by poor dell hardware, at which point my boss took pitty right when OS 10.1 came out and got me this laptop. The rest is history. Here I am today, back to being a hardcore apple evangelist.

With OS X, Apple products now just work together, nicely, with eachother *and* 3rd-party components, one magical symphony within the nirvana of computing. No compromises, no headaches, no hassles, just pure, reliable, secure, unrestricted fun opening doors to boundless creativity and productivity.

I just love what you guys are doing, and for what it's worth, i wanted you to know it. Many fellow-geeks have switched to OS X from windows and unix. I'm working on my mom and dad.
I've convinced a few people to buy a new mac *because* of OS X. iPhoto. iTunes. iPod.

Keep up the good work. :)

-C.H.