My 5th MacBook Report - It's the GUI... Stupid

One of the things I am noticing about my new MacBook is that almost all of my difficulties with figuring out how to do something are because of my Windows bias. That is to say, that I am so used to the convoluted way some things are done in Windows, that I have come to expect tasks to be unintuitive. Which of course, on the Mac, they are not.

Case in point: I wondered how to get program icons onto the dock (and stay there). I figured out that when you open a program after finding it in the applications folder and double-clicking it, it appears on the dock while the program is running. But I expected the task of making the program stay on the dock to be convoluted and therefore went looking for the convoluted method. I did find one, but as it turns out, there's actually a rather simple way. You just drag the icon onto the dock with the program closed. That's it. Do you want to rearrange the order of the icons on your dock? Just drag them into your preferred order. One thing I like about the dock is that they managed to (from a Windows perspective) roll the task bar and quick launch bar into one seamless entity. How do you tell which programs are open? Easy - they have little triangles next to them. I know it can be argued that Windows isn't exactly 'hard', it's just different. This may be true, but I seem to be noticing that on a Mac, there always seem to be fewer steps needed to get a particular task done.

Another feature I thought was cool (especially for users new to Mac) - if you have no idea where a system setting you need is located within the system preferences window, you can just type a key word in the window's search field and as you get more specific (or choose an offered choice from a list), the system preferences option you need becomes highlighted (see image). Very smart.

Spotlight is Mac's search feature to find stuff on the whole system. Typing something in Spot light will search (on the fly) all your folders, files, applications, utilities, inside documents, email, it's like having Google Desktop.... but without Google Desktop.

Exposé is yet another feature of great design. Although you can tab through open applications and select the one you want, sometimes you want to see all of your open programs at the same time. In Windows, this would be time consuming to manually resize all the existing windows. But in Mac, Exposé makes it as simple as pressing the F9 key. It automatically (temporarily) resizes the program windows so they all fit with no overlap. When you click on a program window in this mode, it comes to the forefront and all windows go back to their original size.