4 Months Using Apple: Working with IT
Well I’m officially 4 months into using Apple on daily basis now. There’s quite a funny thing here, I am using a MacBook from Apple but I often boot to Windows XP to get the job done. At first I didn’t notice this trend until a friend of mine show me that on average I spend more time on Windows XP rather than on a MacOS X. Not that the OS isn’t good for what I do, it’s just not right. So I decided to use one day exclusively with MacOS X and not booting to XP via Bootcamp.
For a background, what I do with the laptop is an everyday job activity. I write stuffs using the word processors, sometimes I create presentation, most of the time I’m keeping my trading journal on a spreadsheet and last but not the least, I swing trade stock markets and options (and of course also browsing the net — duh what else?). So here’s my one-day-exclusive-mac-os-x-only experience after the jump.
First of all, like what I’ve done every morning, I check my email on Gmail account (and Gmail hosted services). Try to use Safari but the WYSIWYG editor on Gmail isn’t detected (and I think this plagues all browser that uses Applekit) so I switched to Firefox. So far so good and doesn’t deviate much from my usual habbit pre-Apple day. But since there’s like 6 Gmail account that I have to check, it’s quite troublesome to login and then log out after finishing all the mails on one account. So I decided a second browser like Camino might do the job (this is a plus on MacOS, there’s so many browser to choose from!). Everything so far so good.
On the note, I despise Apple Mail. I think in terms of usefulness Thunderbird pwn MailApp big time. I hope Apple can do better on the usability department and not just focusing on cool UI. On another note, I’m also waiting for MailPlaneApp to be released into public.
After finishing my morning tea and replying email, it’s time for data gathering via internet and paste the results on any word processor. My choice goes to everyone’s favorite, Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. The experience is painful. It loads alot longer than if I compare it to Office 2007, heck even Office 2003 on a much lower computer spec. I believe it’s because it’s not a universal app yet that makes all the slowness but this is just unbearable. It took quite sometime to display a picture, and sometimes when you scroll a very large document it gets a little bit choppy.
You might say that it’s still not a universal app and a universal release will solve that problem, infact there’s other alternatives like OpenOffice.org and Apple Pages to begin with that is already a universal app. It is indeed very fast to run those two application but by far it’s not as powerful as Microsoft Office suite, hell there’s no office suite program that is powerful enough to challenge MS Office (OpenOffice is heading there but they still lack 1-2 years behind I think). So using a MacOS X to do your everyday documents and spreadsheet works? A big no no.
But there’s something positive for you who make presentation, the Keynote program bundled (trial) in every new MacOS X installation runs very well in both the usability and the speed (of course, it’s a universal app). In my term, the power of Keynote exceeds those of Powerpoint.
However, the easiness to work with at least in my line of work stops there. There’s no charting software in MacOS that can rival Amibroker or Metastock. Sure there are some decent charting software like ProTA but it just doesn’t cut it. There options for scanning is very limited (if there’s any) and the library of available indicator is very small compared to those in Amibroker or Metastock. To add to that, one of my broker’s trading platform doesn’t support Mac and they do not intend to provide any Mac equivalent in the near future (of course this is not Apple’s fault — just an ignorance by the broker). Even the widely used TWS platform is not yet a Universal app.
All and all MacOS is a very decent operating system which is safe to say, virus free. However, for some line of work (such as mine, trading) doesn’t fit in very well with the platform because there’s no substitution software. Other line of work such as science, anything that needs a chaotic creative environment might benefit alot with the processing power a Macbook (or other kinds of Mac) have but in the mean time, this is just not for me. So off we go to that boot camp Windows installation…
Just for the record: I only use Windows to do two things currently, trading and playing games. For the rest of it like browsing and ecommerce transaction, I use MacOS X.
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I love Macs, though got to use PCs/Windows for work. Owned a new 512K Mac when it first came-out. Now we have a G3 and MacBook (old). My friend from Intel has just moved to a MacBookPro (17in) running Parallels, which allows him to switch between WinXP and OSX. I’m really jealous:) It would be great if Apple (or someone) would sell an Enterprise-grade office software, so that I can convince my boss. [TH]