The old year has come and gone past, and this was a post I was supposed to do before it ended! But well, better late than never. Long post again, so in multiple parts. Starting with my toys!
Panasonic HDC-TM700 Camcorder (Win): I picked up the HDC-TM700 to replace the not very old SD20 HD video camcorders, and almost 8 months after the fact, Ling still marvels at how much clearer, smoother and sharper are the videos that the TM700 is capable of compared to our older HD camcorder. We’ve put it through pretty heavy use this year; one long trip to Boston, one trip to Japan, and literally hundreds of videos of Hannah. All tremendously precious memories that we’ve been able to keep. The only one downer is that this camcorder is now available for much cheaper today than what I paid for. Oh well.:(
Dell XPS Studio 16 (Win): A later in the year purchase. I like the MacBook Pro in terms of its build quality, but a fear I had upon its purchase turned prophetic: I never liked the Mac OS before, and after using it on the MacBook Pro, dislike it even more now. It’s limiting and its UI condescending. Granted it works great for some, but it just didn’t for me. People still find it strange that I always dual-boot the MBP into Windows and hardly touch the Mac OS at all. Incidentally, a colleague at work – who has years of development experience under his belt – just acquired the same MBP and said exactly the same thing so it’s not just me.
It doesn’t help as well that the fruit company today while commercially successful is fast becoming an increasingly disliked technology enterprise through its high-handed business actions. So, while the Dell XPS Studio is a less aesthetically pleasing machine, its Windows 7 operating system does a more than adequate job of providing an attractive UI that doesn’t make me feel like an idiot. I’ve used it more now in the last 2 months as a work replacement machine than I ever did with the Macbook Pro over a year.
Samsung Galaxy S (Mixed): I adjusted to the iPhone OS relatively better than the Mac OS, but the hardware started degrading (battery life became awful), and all the good applications I wanted required jailbreaking, which in turn posed problems towards stability (kept crashing) and incurred performance hits. So, it was an Android phone and towards a competing iPhone model that has become a runaway success for Samsung. Why is it a ‘Mixed’ verdict for me though? Well, I discovered, to my horror, that my Gmail account that I use with the Galaxy S has serious issues with Google Market’s download services. So, while the phone is fully functional, great battery life, far more reliable than a jailbroken iPhone, I can’t update applications short of a OS refresh each time. Gaaaah!!!
The funny thing though is that it’s not a fault of the phone but of my Gmail account; two colleagues with the phone have none of the issues I have. Sigh.:(
Olympus E-PL1 (Win, for the most part): I picked up the E-PL1 for a very specific reason – I needed a smaller compact digital camera that would produce images with quality nearing that of a DSLR, and that it wouldn’t at the same time weigh as much. The E-PL1 has been a great tool, especially because I can carry it everywhere – it’s a frequent inclusion with me everyday when I go to work – and human subjects tend to be far less self-aware when it’s this camera pointing towards them compared to a massive D300 with an almost as large f2.8 portrait lens. On the down side, focusing tends to still be real iffy when I’m trying to catch Hannah at her usual moments, and Ling for some reason still prefers to use that cheapo Panasonic LZ8 compact I got her more than 2 years ago. Maybe I’ll secretly hide the LZ8 and force her to use the E-PL1 hahahaha.:)
More in the next post!
I find it interesting to read that you find Mac OS UI to be condescending. Why so?
OS X for me abstracts too much detail that it no longer provides a learning experience for me on working the nuances of a computer. I like understanding my computers and knowing what my OSes are doing, something that I’ve been able to do with Windows through its iterations, but not with the Apple OSes. OS X simplifies so much for me that it makes me feel like an idiot, that when something does go wrong or when it doesn’t work the way I like it to, I don’t know what to do.
This isn’t getting into the reality that aside from the UI differences (absent keys, quirks copying/pasting files in Finder), at a functional level for me, there’s just too much that I can’t do using OS X as compared to e.g. Win 7 – e.g. Enterprise level applications that I use, or that at the IHLs are on the MSDN Academic Alliance and all the full license Microsoft software suites freely available for us there are Windows only.
YMMV, and clearly OS X works for some people who don’t need/wish to think about what’s under the hood. But not for me. I spent about a year trying to get used to the Mac OS and reach the same level of effectiveness I could on Windows, but in the end gave up. It’s likely that I’ve been so used to Windows since 3.0 that I can work it at a optimal level. I still use my MBP as a backup notebook, but hardly ever boot it into Leopard anymore.