I’m a proud Mac fanboy.  When it works, it works well.  Things have a very high value of JustWork, and more or less I’ve been very pleased with it.

My problem comes into being with trying to interact a lot with more of the outside world.  Office 2008 for the Mac manages to snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory.  It’s slow and buggy.  The PDFs that Apple products create (such as from Pages) tend to be incorrect when viewed from Adobe products.  For better or worse, ESRI’s ArcGIS consumes enough resources that it cannot be run in a virtual machine on my mac.

All of these issues were still “put-up-able” enough while the choice was XP or Vista versus MacOS.  I like how Apple has set up the user interface.  That plus a couple of free programs (like Blacktree’s excellent Quicksilver launcher application) mean that I can really focus on doing things without having to think about how I’m doing it.

Now it seems that Microsoft has managed to figure out most of what’s wrong with using Windows with Windows 7.  The interface for most everything I’m using is regular and normal. Its search functionality is as good as Apple’s Spotlight (which admittedly was a Vista feature), and all in all it has a very high value of JustWork.  It moves the major annoyances of computer use from the OS (to which MacOS was the cure), to the applications I’m using.

I’m using Windows 7 right now.  And I like it.

This is my story.

As I’ve already discussed previously, iTunes has a certain amount of suck involved.

So, I’ve discovered Play, which sucks less in some ways, and sucks more in others. As so far, the more suckage hasn’t been so much of a concern for me yet, and after checking out the source code, it don’t look too hard to create some patches against. One of my “post-graduation to-dos”.

My CD collection sits as FLACs on my server drive, and Play handles it quite nicely, updating its sqlite database of music every time it starts up. To rip, I use sbooth.org’s Max, which includes the very excellent cdparanoia ripper and pretty good support for tagging, album art, and all the formats I’ve grown to love, such as FLAC.

Currently, there are a couple of weak links. Play doesn’t export playlists to plain text files (otherwise known as .m3u), and the built-in “Convert with Max” option only lets you select 10 tracks at a time. How am I supposed to convert 200-250 FLAC files into Ogg or MP3 to put on a portable player to bring around? Solution: the music library database is simply a sqlite database, which means I can hook up a Perl script to it and extract playlists like that, and run it through conv. For use with my iPod, I can simply make a small library in iTunes, and simply import into iTunes to copy to the little machine. No biggie. If I felt like it, I could most likely write an AppleScript to automate it for me.

CD burning? Same as with the iPod; just use iTunes to make it easy.

So far, I really haven’t missed it. Huzzah!