Mac@Work Series: Part 3 – Windows Co-workers Get Demo
“WOW, thats amazing!!! My next computer will definitely be a Mac.” That is the reaction I received after showing my coworkers what a Mac can do. As a converted windows guy I’m passionate about showing current windows users what they are missing. I cant help but to show my enthusiasm for the Mac. As with most Windows users they didn’t know the first thing about Macs and weren’t expecting much from the demo. It doesn’t take long to see an eyebrow start to raise, and within a couple minutes they quickly become fans. I’d like to share what I show people when demoing the Mac and OS X and along the way it will be clear the advantages OS X has over windows.
First I show off Finder. Finder is the file manager and equivalent to Explorer for windows. I use finder in columns view so that it is easy to drill down through folders and see the hierarchy in detail as I drill down to a file several folders deep. This alone is a huge improvement over explorer. Explorer can drill down by expanding folders in a vertical fashion, but it’s a bit difficult to navigate. Finder expands in columns from left to right and will continue to add columns as you continue to drill down. I drill down a bit and find a group of files that are mixed in file type such as movie, pictures, documents and Highlight them as a group. Moving into my next demo I hit spacebar to show them spotlight. Of course I pause before hitting the space bar to build suspense and tell them to “Watch this, BAM!”. For some reason I cant resist the color commentary when demoing. A split second later a preview pops to the center of the screen. Arrow right down through the list from .pdf to .jpg to .mov and each file show as fast as I can push the arrow. I explain to them that OS X doesn’t need to open a program to view the file. If I would have done this in Windows it would have had to open each program associated with the file, loaded the program, opened the file then I would have had to close them all when it was done. On a Mac just hit spacebar for a quicklook.
Next I show off Spotlight. ?-Space “Boom!” More colorful vernacular of course. I explain how that set of keystrokes gives you a search field full of power. I start out by typing in simple calculations which responds dynamically with answers. Then I pick a random item to search for such as “quote”. The search results adjust with each keystroke and categorize my search for me based on resulting file type. I take it a step further and show them how to search for specific items. I type “kind:folder” and only folders show up, then I type my search term to narrow to folders with that search term in the name. To be fully honest I use textexpander so I only type “,sf” which converts to “kind:folder”. Textexpander constantly watches my keystrokes and when I type a specific set of predetermined characters in order, it will be replace with anything I’ve setup saving me many keystrokes. Next search, ?-Space “Numbers” and the application is highlighted for me to press enter to launch the program and go onto my next demo. At this point I’ve definitely got their attention.
Numbers is one of my favorite things to demo. As a long time MS Excel power user I’m use to being restricted to working within the grid of cells. One has to leave blank rows between groups of data, lay pictures over the top of cells that will need to be left unused, etc. Numbers is setup as a blank canvas and tables, shapes, pictures and charts are considered independent of one another and can be dragged around on the canvas and put in position where you want them. To keep the demo moving I insert a table, choose a style, convert the column and row to headers, type some numbers and labels in. I highlight the numbers and show introduce them to the drag and drop friendliness of OS X by dragging the sum balloon onto the table, I go back and grab avg and drop it in as well. I open up a web page and search for an image. I click and drag the image from the web page and drop it on my numbers sheet. I drag the picture around to show them the assistance I get with alignment in the form of blue snap lines. I drag another table out to show how easy it is to arrange the components. Numbers is important enough that I’ll spend a whole post on it in the future.
Screen capture is something I use every day. In an effort to communicate with people through email I often will capture a piece of a web site, email, picture, drawing, etc.. With windows it is a difficult multistep process to put a screen shot into a .jpg format. I would usually paste it into Word then create a .pdf which took several steps and was not nearly as clean for the recipient to view. Or I would paste it into an email and crop the picture to eliminate unwanted components which took a bit of time. With OS X ?-Shift-4 and the mouse pointer turns to cross hairs. I pick something and drag a box around it “Poof!”, Yes more color commentary, and it drops a .jpg image on the desktop. I highlight the file and hit spacebar using quickview to show them the results. At this point they are usually engaged in the demo and asking questions.
Having touched on the drag and drop friendliness of OS X I explain my perception as to why the menu menu bar is stuck to the top of the screen, and the program windows dont fill the screen as they do on a PC. I believe it’s to allow multiple windows to easilly be visible at one time so the user can drag items from one program to another. Having said that I drag the image file from my screen capture and drop it on the Entourage icon in the dock. A new email message is created with the file as an attachment. I drag the image into the Numbers document I still have open. I drag it down and drop it on the iPhoto icon in the dock and iPhoto opens and imports the image. Finally I have a printer alias setup on my desktop so I drag it over and drop it on top of the printer icon and drop it. Nothing happens, and they ask “What did that do?” A second later we hear the bizhub fire up and start printing the picture. Although this is a little gimmicky I think it shows just how drag and drop friendly OS X is.
Expose is another benefit that I share. I have my expose setup using hot corners. Each of the four corners of the screen can be setup so when the mouse is pushed to the extreme corner it activates a function. I have the bottom left corner setup with expose, and the bottom right corner setup for screen saver with password protection. So I whip the mouse down the bottom left corner and all the open windows spread and show themselves in full view. Move the cursor over the one I want and click to activate and bring to full size. Now I start getting questions such as “How much does a Mac cost?” and “Why aren’t Macs more popular since they are so cool?”
If I have my laptop with me at work I’ll pull it out and set it on the desk. The beauty alone is breath taking. When possible I’ll stack it on top of their Dell computers to show the contrast in beauty. The Dell is plastic, bulky, and cheap looking compared to the MacBook Pro. I always leave my laptop in sleep mode so I’ll ask them how long it takes their Dell’s to wake up when they open it. The usual answer is several minutes and from my experience thats an accurate answer. I open up the lid and start counting. By the time I get to 4 the computer is ready to use and by the time I count to 8 it has connected to the network and is ready to surf the web. That is the last demo that needs to be done to a business laptop user. One coworker sarcastically said “So I wont have to turn it on when I wake up in the morning so it will be ready by the time I’m done with my shower and breakfast? It takes 15 minutes to boot from the off position and 5-10 minutes to wake up from sleep.” At this point my face muscles don’t have the strength to hold back my huge smirk. They almost seem to get upset that Windows is so far behind and that OS X isn’t more mainstream. A few rants about viruses, virus scans, bloatware, frozen programs, reboots and they wrap it up with “My next computer is a Mac.”
I’m not even done showing them all the cool things about OS X so I share a few other tidbits of information that I find fascinating. I leave the laptop open and open up iPhoto to show how the trackpad and multi touch works. In the interest of brevity the touch pad will do different things with different strokes and gestures depending on the number of fingers on the pad at one time. One example would be rotating a picture in iPhoto by using two fingers and spinning in a circular motion. Another is two fingers pushed up and down to scroll and so on.
I get copied on all the quotes from our company. I have a rule setup in Entourage that identifies the email as a quote, moves it to a quote folder in Entourage and saves the attachment to a folder on the hard drive. With the speed of spotlight when a customer calls and gives me the quote number I can have it up and in front of me in 5 seconds. I’ll demonstrate the speed at which I can arrive at the quote. They are amazed and without question new Mac fans. If the company will let them get Macs as well, they will be sure to do so for their next computer. I move the mouse courser to the bottom right corner to activate the screen saver, demo over.
I realize that this post is a bit longer than I had hoped but it’s hard to not include some of the special functions of OS X that a windows coworker doesn’t know about. I have a passion for OS X and Macs and when I get going it’s hard to stop.
Although I love OS X it does have it’s flaws. Next post I’ll share some of the difficulties and incompatibilities I’ve ran into at work.
Oh man, for a minute I thought there was going to be some content in there. Then I realized you were just being that guy that shouts “iM A MAC” in people’s faces.
Oh Dear, what a silly post! MacApper is better than this I hope.
IDIOT!
Folks,
This is an opinion piece, if you don’t like it, don’t read it. It’s perfectly valid to explain how you demo the Macintosh, and your workflow.
While this was a little wordy, he explained quite well how his macintosh aides in his workflow, and is more efficient than the typical dell that the company is using.
If you don’t like switchers, then don’t read articles from switchers…
Nice post, man, I liked it… Actually I hoped it would have been longer
I’m a person that tries to convince windows users to switch to Mac, too, and when I can’t, they switch to Ubuntu 
So good work, waiting for the next…
P.s. do you know a freeware that does the same as TextExpander ? Thanks…
We switched to Mac in late 2007 and never looked back. We still have a late 2003 Windows XP laptop that we use every day while the other one is lucky enough to use the 24-inch iMac. (In fact, it’s my wife who uses the laptop – she likes laptops even more than she loves OS X, if such a comparison could make sense – you get the idea.)
I’ve always been wondering why Mac people keep saying Macs wake up from sleep faster than Windows PCs. Even my old Windows laptop wakes up in three seconds. That’s just two seconds slower than my iMac! Now, were I to have a recent Windows PC whose hardware is on par with my iMac’s, I believe it makes sense it would wake up almost 100% as fast as my iMac, wouldn’t it?
No wonder I keep wondering about this…! Even Apple recognizes their OS could wake up from sleep faster. After all, they tout Snow Leopard does it up to twice faster. (I know this isn’t a really good argument.)
That said, I must confess a few irregularities. To keep our old laptop from being too slow, we don’t use any typical Windows security software. No anti-virus and the like. (In fact, I’ve been doing this for 15 years without problems! Looks like we’re very good Internet citizens.) And I don’t allow almost any kind of software to be always running, always present in the notification area unless it’s really always needed. So these two factors might account for Windows’ purportedly slowness at waking up from sleep.
What’s your take on this?
While I concur on the “fan-boy-like” appearance of this post, I must confess that these are essentially my feelings when it comes to Macs vs. Windows PCs. I do not believe Macs are the silver bullet of the computing environment, but getting pissed of at my Mac seems a lot less severe than getting pissed off at my old Windows machines of the past. When I need an answer to a question, I can usually find it quickly online in the Apple support forums.
Macs are not perfect. He says it at the end of the article. However, I must agree that the ease-of-use of Macs is so calming that I dread going to work. Turning off background apps and anti-virus is not an option with my company, so booting from startup and booting from sleep do take several minutes vs. my Mac that takes only about 10-15 seconds to get logged back in after sleep and about a minute to boot from the OFF position.
I don’t like Numbers. Why? you ask. Excel destroys Numbers when it comes to speed. I routinely deal with large spreadsheets approx. 100,000 rows. Numbers takes 10x longer to deal with spreadsheets of that size than Excel. If apple can fix that issue, I might actually switch to Numbers. On that note, Pages is pretty cool and Keynote is rockin’!
When I get out of law school, I will be converting my dad’s practice to Macs. My dad already loves Macs. He steals my mom’s Macbook and takes it to court. It bothers her somewhat, as you might imagine. When his 5 year old laptop dies he’ll probably get a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro 13″. He is by no means a power user, so lots of CPU is not what he needs, but the 15″ might be better since he’s already moved into the reading glasses group.
Sorry for the wall of text, but I get excited about Macs since I’m a fairly recent convert myself. I’m typing this on my 5 year old powerbook g4 12″ that’s still running very well. I like this article, and you showed off the OS adequately. I would only mention somewhere in the middle that OSX and Macs are better than Windows, but they’re not perfect. Recovering from a problem in OSX is much less stressful than recovering from Windows problems.
Thanks for the feedback and comments to all. This definitely was an opinion piece and this series is my experience with Mac@Work. It may not be the same for everyone, however I haven’t heard too many people have a different experience than me. I experienced people that were not exposed to Macs get very excited at seeing what they can do, and I hope that came out in the article. If you’re not a switcher then you cant understand the joy in the process. Its a bit hard to not be excited about sharing it with the people still on Windows because I feel you are missing out. As far as content, this post has plenty of content however it is told in a story of showing a windows user how things work on a Mac. I find it more interesting than “just the facts”.
Keep the comments coming.
Thanks a lot for your posts. I’ll point them out to my collegues that are becoming switchers.
@vik89 There is RapidoWrite, you can find it here:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Word-Processing/RapidoWrite.shtml
@Gand
Thanks, man! I’ll give it a shot!!
This piece was a great read. I learned a couple things, and even where you described things I already know it was enjoyable to imagine introducing Macs into my network. I’m the Systems Manager at my company and we only have two Macs in one office (one of which is my own laptop), but I’m about to migrate two of my graphics arts users in another office to iMacs. I’m expecting the Mac envy to start growing over in that office pretty quickly.
I’d love for you to feature MORE of these little tidbits, one by one, with a more complete explanation. I’ve had my Mac for a year, am okay with it but not in love, for sure. I couldn’t get your screen capture instructions to work, nor the right arrow to skip through file types in spotlight. Simple math in Spotlight is great, so is the kind:image kind:doc etc in the Finder Search.
@ Alanna Quick links about OS X screenshot I’ve found with google:
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2084/os_x_screenshot_shortcuts/
and with 10.5 http://tinyurl.com/mqt97d
or a little video here:
http://tinyurl.com/mgy78k
And when they asked about how much they cost, how did you answer that? These features are cool, but not necessary and not worth paying 2x as much money for. You sound exactly like the type of person who just gathers people round to show them how cool his gadget is and how much better than theirs it is, because thats exactly what you did.
For some context, i have a macbook pro which i use all the time, i just choose not to try and convert people as i see no reason why i should, thats Apple’s job.
Loved this piece!
It’s easy to get excited about Macs, and I share the author’s enthusiasm, as do many others.
I agree with your post. Many people automatically hate Macs because they are so popular. They’re popular for a reason! When I’m showing people my Mac, I show them iPhoto (face recognition)….gosh, I can’t think of anything right now because I’m not on my computer….
It’s so much easier to buy a Mac than a PC (there’s so many versions…) and you get great support
Well, while, I do agree the features on a Mac are really nice, especially since it was one of the first computers to have a built in webcam, PC is for heavy computer users. I don’t think that the potentiality of a PC can be brought out if you don’t understand or don’t want to understand the more advanced settings. I’m more of an intermediate user, I’ve actually tried to do more advanced things with my PC, but I don’t have that kind of attention span. It’s really complicated geeky stuff…. If you knew how to properly configure ports then you don’t have to worry about viruses and also watching what you download.
With that said, I bought my new macbook pro because 1) artist standard, works well with adobe software, etc. 2) I’m too lazy to go out and look for the perfect laptop because of time crunch 3) mac is expensive because apple has an active support team for its customers. I consider myself a hybrid user. I find cons and pros for both types and there are things that I love and miss in my old PC that is a little foreign here on a Mac. I do love how fast it loads up though — that was another reason. (and also because the new line of macbook pros had a price drop)
As a PC and Mac user myself, I enjoyed the article and agreed to many points. But, I have to question why Mac users keep saying Windows PC takes forever to wake up from sleep? In my experience with numerous laptops with XP, Vista, and Windows 7, as long as they are in sleep mode (compared to hibernation mode), they wake up within a few seconds. Waking up from the hibernation mode needs a little more time, but it’s in 1 to 2 minutes range rather than 10 to 15 even with 4GB RAM.
I suppose it all depends on perspective. One could argue that Macs are for those who want more advanced control of their computer – thanks to its Unix underpinnings. That said, I used to be able to do *everything* with my Windows computers. Not so much now – I’m out of the game and slowly forgetting the knowledge about it. So I’m using my Mac with this feeling of how wide, deep and unknown it is, while I used to think I knew most of what can be learned about Microsoft’s platform, or otherwise knew how to quickly know what I don’t.
Photoshop: in its last few versions, it’s quicker under 64-bit versions of Windows than under OS X. I don’t know if it means it’s really superior under OS X. It might still be better integrated with OS X than with Windows. I’m curious as to which platform nowadays is the best for photoshop.
Finally, I understand all of this mostly revolves about personal taste. And mine definitely grovels towards Apple. User friendliness, and lots of engine under the hood for people with more advanced needs.
ignar – I have a pretty new Dell decent specs (4gb) on my desk at work, this is the first Windows machine that goes to sleep and doesn’t crash or have issues up on waking up. However it does take almost 2 minutes to wake up and be fully functional from sleep, while my mac takes less then 30 seconds to be fully functional. I’m not complaining, but its a notifiable difference in time, but the pure fact that it doesn’t crash upon waking up is great. Still wish I could swing putting a mac on my desk at work, but that’s ways away still.
Korey – when is the fourth article coming?
Great insight everyone. Tannie, I was/am a windows power user so I do understand the customization capabilities of Windows. I agree with Daniel in that the Unix base of the Mac is extremely powerful and if I wish to get into the command line I’d be able to customize beyond what Windows is capable of. The beautiful thing is that I dont need to because everything I want is at my fingertips.
I’ve had 4-5 Dell laptops, and family have had sony and toshiba’s and not one of them woke up from sleep in less than a couple minutes. The 10-15 minute number is from a windows machine of a co worker that has been in use for several years and I’m sure it is suffering from “bit rot”. Windows machines tend to slow down over time from orphaned files and other reasons. I’ve only had my Mac for about a year so not an equal comparison but so far I have not had any slowdown. I’m told that Macs dont suffer “Bit rot” as much as PC’s. A reinstall of the OS on Windows every year is almost a must in my experience.
Next Article I hope will be before the end of the weekend. Life got pretty busy last week. i’ll see if I can get a couple done over the weekend.
Before I move completely to Macs ( I have no other computers in the house ) at home a coworker brought in his Mac mini to demo. I liked what I saw and he was generous enought to let me use it for a full day. That did it. A few weeks later I bought my own Mac mini. Now i have 4 Macs at home and have used my coworkers technique to convert three coworkers (including my Director), two family members and two close friends.
as usual also a great post … the one thing missing is the uploaded file of your demonstration
What is the current over/under on when Mac will release a first party piece of antivirus software? They can call it something like ‘Hunter,’ feature it in their Mac vs PC ads and have an automatic new bragging point. Sure, they would lose the old one that stated Macs were nearly invulnerable to attacks…but it is a fair trade in my view.