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I tend to be different compared to a lot of people I know in many ways. Right now, I’ll be discussing a way I tend to be different that affects almost everyone on a daily basis: computer interfaces. I feel that a computer should interact with me in a manner of my choosing, not the other way around. Systems that I cannot adjust to my liking enough, or have fundamental flaws that I cannot get around make me feel confined, not unlike the feeling of needing to do grocery shopping via mass transit instead of one’s own car.

What tends to irk me about Windows users is that it’s not that Windows has its own sets of confinements (which drive me insane), but most of the users don’t even realize what’s out there. If you like the Windows Way, that’s great, and I’m happy it works for you. Many people just don’t know that they have so many more options.

That’s what drove me to Linux in the first place. Here, at long last, was a system I could make work for me, and not force me to work for it for day to day tasks. It was a trade for me from Windows. It allowed me the flexibility to do what I wanted, but you pay for it in set-up time. I was drawn and constantly teetering between the KDE suite, and the ION window manager for my graphical interfaces; both are powerful and tweakable ad nauseum (especially ION and its extensive use of the lua scripting language). For most of my usage, it was great.

And then I won my MacBook.

Enter MacOS. Its graphical interface is as relatively locked-down as that on Windows. However, the system is much better thought out. While it still follows the WIMP system of interaction, features like Expose offer a lot of draw that ION offered me in Linux; namely that I can everything that’s open all at once, without overlap, and use keyboard navigation to select what I want to select. The OS is very usable from the command line, a feature sorely lacking from Windows. I can make my mousing just as convenient as I could in KDE, if not more so. Lastly, for the most part, hotkeys are standardized across applications.

The most important feature, however? Open data sharing.

My mail app, IM app, address book, calendar, program launcher, and freaking cell phone all operate out off a common data set. Adium (my instant messenger) respects my screen names that I list in the address book, and I can open up the address book entry for named contacts in my buddy list, from where I can send emails, direct my cell phone to dial, or any number of other things. It’s like my personal data is one database, and most of my programs are just clients who access and manipulate the database.

This system, however, has plenty of flaws of its own. While I may sound like a fanboy here, it’s simply because MacOS X is the most capable to twist into something that acts how I like it to act. I have three case studies in how things fail it, that I’ll talk about in the next system interface post.