Got A MacBook/Windows vs Mac OS X Rant
I broke down and bought a MacBook on friday. The first thing I did? Installed Vista on it. I primarily did this so that I could use it for Heroforge, Spellforge, and Monsterforge for my DND games. Also, so I can blog using Live Writer. Vista is running nice on my 2GB MacBook with Aero Glass so I’m very satisfied with it. I’m trying to use OS X more and actually work at becoming a switcher. The only problem is that I miss the Start Menu. Why can’t the Apple Menu work more like the Start Menu? The Apple Menu should be a Start Menu for the OS X. The dock is not a launcher, it’s the equivalent of the Quick Launch menu. I find that the Start Menu is much easier to use to launch a program than going into the applications folder in the Finder. Someone will just say to me “use Spotlight” or “use Quicksilver”. Spotlight has to be opened with a click or Command-Space. Start Menu, Click or Windows Key. Both you can start typing and it will search for what you’re looking for. Spotlight uses a key combo while Start is one key. Both are great but I think that the start menu is just easier to use. Well, honestly, XP, which does not have the search feature, does have a better menu system than the Vista start menu. But the search of the Vista start menu is really slick. I really think that a combination of the XP and Vista Start Menus would be a great improvement. Now the Apple Menu needs to be set to do the same thing. It would improve the launching of programs in OS X a lot. I do have to say that I really like the OS X dock. It’s a nice combination of task bar and quick launch, but I like the animations and just looks nicer, I don’t know if I’ll every get completely away from Windows. If you take a look at Yahoo! Messenger for Vista and Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, the Vista version is much nicer. Is Mac loosing the status of the good looking OS? Or am I just a sucker for shiny things. Leopard has made everything look nice and simple but not necessarily pretty. It’s definitely not ugly (like the old Win95 and pre OS X looks). It just looks nice. I might post more later about this later. Not sure.
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How to make a start menu similar to windows on OS X. The first thing you need to do is download the latest OSX update, 10.5.2. Once done, you can drop your Macintosh HD folder into the Stacks section of the dock. Right click on it and change the settings to “Display” as a folder and “View content” as a list. This should now work in a similar method to a windows start menu, except on the opposite side of the screen.
Hope this helps.
Cheers
Mike.
I just downloaded this last night. I’m liking the list for the stacks for my applications folder. Now I have a relative start menu.
I did it a little differently. I don’t use every app every day, so I created aliases for all the apps I use often enough to have in a start menu, but not often enough to have in the dock. I created these aliases in a folder called apps, and then dragged that to the dock. I chose grid rather than list, and have myself a nice little graphical start menu.