Occaisionally I like to reflect on my
Adventures in Cross-Platform Living (AICPL) - my day-to-day experiences using Windows XP and MacOS X at home, side by side. I've been doing it for about a year, now, and I will likely continue. But after some flirtation with XP becoming my default platform for email, iTunes / iPod management, and daily tasks in general, I seem to be making the
switchback.
One thing in particular is behind this:
Spotlight, the Mac's ubiquitous search tool that kinda makes the directory structure disappear. Say I'm working in Adobe Illustrator and I need to open a file, and because I use a semi-standard nomenclature for .ai files, I can just hit cmd-O and in the resulting dialog box, type a piece of the file name in the Spotlight window. All the files that match will populate the Finder pane and there's my document. I can search just one folder, or te entire Home directory, or the whole danged HDD if I really have no idea where the file might be. But because Finder behaviors are consistent within apps, these sorts of mundane tasks take on a elegant fluidity.
I've tried using the Google Desktop in XP but the results are, to me, unsatisfactory. It's that XP clunk with an extra layer on top.
I've been doing more and more Web work on the Mac, something I did mostly in XP for the past year. But I've been doing more audio editing on the PC, thanks to Audacity and the LAME mp3 encoder. For quick and dirty editing and publishing of tracks to the Web, it's a great set of tools that I prefer using on the PC for app-specific reasons. To my ears, the LAME encoding sounds better than iTunes for mp3s (I still use iTunes for AAC encoding for the iPod). So the switchback isn't total. I still have two boxes under the desk.
