7th February 2006, 3:25 PM
Quote:First of all, the current incarnation of Mac OS does have built in support for multibutton mice. The third mouse button doesn't do much, but it doesn't do much of anything in Windows either (unless you assign a function to it yourself).
How useful button three is depends on the program (and it seems like that mac mouse is 2 button + a 4-way scroll function, as opposed to 3-button plus a 2-way scroll function like scrollwheel pc mice), but some use the third button... it's definitely very, very useful for keyboard/mouse games. Actually, gaming-focused mice often have at least 5 buttons (with several on the side)... because your fingers are there, they just need buttons for them. In Windows though yeah most programs just use two buttons, but some use three (like how many MS programs use the third one for 4-directional pagescroll). So yeah, the third button is the least useful, but it has its uses too...
Quote:Further, as to the hard to use thing, I myself am not very familiar with it. However, I will say right now that that is mainly due to just not using it.
Familiarity is certainly part of it, but it is true that Macs have no equivilant of the Start menu. The Apple menu is all you get, and that's cluttered even worse than the Start menu is with all kinds of stuff (I know, you can configure it to make it better, maybe you could fix the Apple menu, but Windows comes with one that works right out...)...
I just don't like Apple's interface design. The way all non-fullscreen programs share the same top menu bar, instead of each application window having its own, takes some getting used to and seems to be the worse choice (makes it a little slower to use them if things are windowed...). Having all programs share the same bar as the apple button and the clock and all that stuff just seems inelegant... and it leaves no room for running-tasks buttons, you've got to go to the Finder menu to find what's running. ... oh, and you can make it autohide, right? Never tried, but I know that I hate having the taskbar always showing on my pc.
Oh yeah, and the public imacs here at school are slow and none of the applications run as well as they do in PC. :) There are almost always some free, so once in a while I use one, but I quickly regret it... between the nonfunctioning rightclick menus that have almost no features to how the version of Word they have is evidently incompatible with Word 2000 documents (it could not properly display the formatted file) to everything else... yeah, I don't like macs. :)
But anyway... I can understand how people could say MacOS is easier to use than DOS, but Windows XP? I don't see that at all...