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I need to know your secret then.

About three years ago, I purchased my first Mac. It was an early 2009 iMac. Before then, I had only owned a Windows machine, and like you, I was also incredibly invested in Windows.

But when I got my Mac, I just found doing simple things a challenge, and the various interfaces not powerful enough. To this day, I still struggle using Finder, mostly because there's no (native) way of browsing folders and files separately like in Windows.

But that's just one example, and I really don't have time to list the many other ways I found the switch difficult.

So again, I'm curious to know your secret. I don't know, maybe I was even more invested in Windows than yourself.

2 comments

Like I said, I haven't done as much work yet (I bought the Air right before a vacation, so most of my use has been casual). Still, I've got one thing going for me: I'm very quick at picking up new keyboard shortcuts and habits. I'm a vim user, and every few weeks I switch around some shortcut to make things easier for myself - and it usually only takes a day to adjust. I don't know if this is abnormal or not, but a lot of people really complain very loudly every time shortcuts are changed on them, so maybe I'm the odd one out here.

Also, I work hard at fixing big incoviences. For example, I can't stand the way maximize works on the Mac... but it doesn't matter, since I have a program that makes it work like in Windows. The trick is to give the new behaviour a fair shot before "fixing" it, since sometimes the new behaviour is better - for example, using command+tab (alt-tab in windows) only work between different applications, and having a separate shortcut for switching Windows in the same application - that's much better than in Windows, but at first I really hated it.

My biggest gripe with OSX right now, by the way, is the Finder. On Windows I used Total Commander, which is very easily one of the top ten colossal wins for me on Windows. on OSX, I don't have anything comparable, which is a big problem. But I'm working on that one too :)

Here is my bag of tricks that I apply to OSX/Finder to make it a more usable UI (and by usable, I mean more like ion/ratpoison/etc.)

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/making-the-mac-...

... although who knows how well any of this works on Lion, etc. - I am a "once snow leopard is EOL, I leave OSX" kind of user...

Shift+click the "plus" button and it'll maximize. I've been using BetterTouchTool's window movement abilities to set hotkeys to maximize and halve windows. It'll also do an aero-snap-esque thingy. Pretty useful

Cmd+tab is pretty nice, keep in mind you can use Cmd+` to switch between windows of the current application. It's a bit different than the way Windows does it, but once you use it for a little bit you get used to it and Windows feels a bit awkward ;)

If you're looking for better maximize/window management, check out the open source app ShiftIt. Works sort of like aero snap in windows 7, with a quick keystroke to fully maximize a window. I use it all the time.

I refreshed it for 10.7+/retina and compiled a build - check it out here: http://trisweb.github.com/ShiftIt/

100% agree about giving the default Mac configuration a chance. Often it's better thought out (or actually thought-out at all) and will work better if you learn the "mac way" to do things. Except the window maximizing—that's really an inexcusable shortcoming of the OS IMHO.

There are plenty of Finder enhancements and replacements. This is one of the more popular: http://cocoatech.com/pathfinder/

It's Unix—use the command line too.

(Shhh, don't tell anyone else the secret)