In my house today, all of the computers are Macs. This is a long way away from three and a half year ago, when I said that Jaguar could not replace my PC. We're chugging along happily running Tiger, just as productive as before, and enjoying every bit of eye candy. But OS X isn't always cherry pie, it's got its own set of faults, and some can be downright annoying. UPDATED
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Member since:2005-07-06
Do you actually know how virtual memory in Windows works? When you minimize an application, a lot of its memory will be flushed to virtual memory to free up physical memory. So only those apps you have active and are working with are fully using their memory.
As far as the systray.. I never have a problem with it being overloaded. The max number of icons I'll ever have in the systray is ~8. Some are rarely used, but I like having them there when I do need them (network icon, volume, ultramon, etc).
It really is just a matter of preference for the close thing, but I prefer for a program to close when I close the last window. And again, the ones I don't almost always come with an option to minimize to the systray when I click close. Such as MSN (meh), uTorrent.
Member since:2006-01-12
Do you actually know how virtual memory in Windows works? When you minimize an application, a lot of its memory will be flushed to virtual memory to free up physical memory. So only those apps you have active and are working with are fully using their memory.
I didn't mean to suggest that Windows doesn't free up memory from minimized applications.
However, if the application was paged, it tends to take ages to bring it up.
Member since:
2006-01-12
Actually, the apps that DO stay open let you know, or at least ASK you first. So it's not inconsistent really.
Actually, this is really a windowsism. It stems from the fact that Windows is still incapable of managing virtual memory effectively, which means the user will constantly need to shut down applications in order to keep the OS in a responsive state. This is why windows applications will always have the systray option.
OS X can effectively manage virtual memory, which means the user no longer need to constantly worry about idle applications. If the application is not being used, the resource is automatically freed up. It also means the application can be called up quickly by the user instead of having to wait for a fresh application launch.
An OS X user only cares about which documents/objects are opened. The system takes care of the rest.
At least in windows when an application does this, it puts itself in the "systray" instead of being hidden completely until you open a menu.
The systray in Windows is often very crowded, since every application wants to avoid the taskbar entry clutter. This, along with the tiny area and the tiny systray icons, make the systray just as unusable as the taskbar.
Like I said before, an OS X user doesn't care about which applications are launched: They just call it up and the system will do the right thing (launch if the application hasn't been opened yet and open a new window if the application has no opened windows etc.) If you insist on knowing which applications are launched, you can use the dock, which indicates launched applications with a black triangle beside their icons.
Of course, many people new to OS X will find this behaviour to be unintuitive after years of using Windows. The key here is to try to work with the system instead of working against it.