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PIMs, Writing Software, and Windows XP, Vista, and OS X
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Posted by Chris Thompson
Dec 4, 2007 at 06:07 AM
I think your Windows criticisms tend to boil down to not feeling in control. David Dunham already answered your registry question, but in general one of the nice things about the Mac is that it puts you back in control. Your application preferences (as well as system preferences) are stored as individual text files (as XML, but it doesn’t really matter) in ~/Library/Preferences. You can pick and choose which preferences you want to move to another computer. You can open the files and tweak values directly. If you want to start from scratch with a program, just blow away its preferences file. For applications that maintain other data, it’s all in ~/Library/Application Support. Want to move all your passwords (Internet passwords, network shares, etc.) to a new computer? Just copy the file in ~/Library/Keychains to a new computer. When something goes wrong, you have a much better chance of fixing it because it’s clear what’s going on. The monolithic registry is such a disaster because it’s impossible to figure out. You end up reinstalling Windows to fix things. Huge waste of time.
—Chris
Cassius wrote:
>I purchased a fairly powerful, Widows laptop a year ago, but after seeing how irksome
>Vista is and other irksome Windows “features” I think my next machine will be a Mac.
>Perhaps some of you have some knowledge of how the OSs compare? For instance:
>
>1.
>Windows registry is an arcane abomination. Among other problems is that of
>reinstalling a program. Many programs save in the registry (rather than in an ini
>file) any special settings one has made. So one has to manually reenter these settings
>when one reinstalls a program.
>
>2. Windows has an unbelievably heavy background
>overhead. It is constantly opening strange files and then saving them, even if they
>are unchanged. That is, it creates massive disk activity, often for no discernible
>reason. [If you have ever used GoBack, you know what I mean.]
>
>3. MS is sloppy with its
>Windows updates. Often they “break” a previously running program. (A Toshiba
>manager suggested that I NOT run Windows updates.)
>
>4. MS sometimes stealth updates
>one’s Windows OS, even if one has purposely set Windows NOT to update. What’s worse,
>some of these updates break parts of Windows! This stealth activity also suggests
>that MS has put a “backdoor” in Windows and that it may be secretly collecting info from
>one’s computer.
>
>-c
>
Posted by Randall Shinn
Dec 4, 2007 at 02:06 PM
Chris,
Thank you for your description of the Mac OS X system of storing application and system preferences and data. You hit the nail on the head about not feeling in control with Windows registry, and the Mac system you describe sounds much easier to easy to understand. And moving applications to a new or different computer sounds far easier with Mac OS X than with Windows. Your explanation was the tipping point for me. I’m switching over to Mac in the next few months.
Randall
Chris Thompson wrote:
>I think your Windows criticisms tend to boil down to not feeling in control. David
>Dunham already answered your registry question, but in general one of the nice things
>about the Mac is that it puts you back in control. Your application preferences (as
>well as system preferences) are stored as individual text files (as XML, but it
>doesn’t really matter) in ~/Library/Preferences. You can pick and choose which
>preferences you want to move to another computer. You can open the files and tweak
>values directly. If you want to start from scratch with a program, just blow away its
>preferences file. For applications that maintain other data, it’s all in
>~/Library/Application Support. Want to move all your passwords (Internet
>passwords, network shares, etc.) to a new computer? Just copy the file in
>~/Library/Keychains to a new computer. When something goes wrong, you have a much
>better chance of fixing it because it’s clear what’s going on. The monolithic
>registry is such a disaster because it’s impossible to figure out. You end up
>reinstalling Windows to fix things. Huge waste of time.