ZDoom

Apple never used any official or unofficial standards for their UI. Just look at their international keyboard layouts which ignore all national and international norms. Which makes working with Macs a chore for anyone used to a standard ISO layout. And good luck finding amcustom keyboard layout that just works. Apple is doing their best to make that as uncomfortable as they can.

It is part of the Apple arrogance. There's only one way to do things and everyone should adopt their solution. All their products reek of it, really.

It is the 90% of users that is wrong about using the PC keyboard layout, not the 10%. They would probably have done something about this particular one if it had not been an American company though. The US keyboard layout is identical for the two platforms as far as I know. That said, at least for the danish keyboard you can get used to using it - even if it is really really awful (alt+shift+7 to type "{" for example). The stuff Rachael mentioned with apps not quitting when windows are closed (*), the alt-tab not switching between windows, the detached menu bar (forcing a menu bar for applications that don't need one), home/end/page up/page down having defaults that are the opposite of what you want to do 99% of the time, the single button mouse, maximize with a weird definition of maximize that doesn't make sense for most apps. All that stuff is the classical Apple branding of not-invented-here. Those things were IMHO interesting ideas at the time, but clearly not ideal and therefore not adopted by any other platform.

*) except of course for those that do, like the settings app.

To make things worse, it is often indoctrinated within creative circles that Apple is somehow THE industry standard and you won't be taken seriously or be able to get jobs unless you use Apple stuff. Very rampant in fields like pro audio (recording/music production), but also in graphics design. Somehow there is a perception that Apple is superior and clients feel more confident when Apple gear is involved. As do these creative circles often talk down/dismiss non-Apple constantly.

Just an example of how bad it is: recently a fellow sound engineer had problems with his Mac, and was getting very worked up about getting a new Mac to replace his equipment, despite being suggested that they can get the same setup for a fraction of the cost on PC.

To these people, it's either Apple or nothing. It's crazy how much money Apple is gouging out of these customers.

I don't want this to be a "dog down on Apple" thread but that's my two cents. I actually own a lot of Apple gear - bought 3 generations of iPhones, have an iPad and iPad 2, and a Macbook 2008. All of these are now digital waste and just lying around in my house because they were forced to obsolescence via software updates. :S I can't even use them for their most basic functions (like the phones - imagine having 3 unusable phones!)

Nash wrote:To make things worse, it is often indoctrinated within creative circles that Apple is somehow THE industry standard and you won't be taken seriously or be able to get jobs unless you use Apple stuff. Very rampant in fields like pro audio (recording/music production), but also in graphics design. Somehow there is a perception that Apple is superior and clients feel more confident when Apple gear is involved. As do these creative circles often talk down/dismiss non-Apple constantly.

Yup, that's very much the case with the visual arts too. The assumption is that you will be working with a Mac - indeed, many just talk about "the Mac" or "your Mac" ("I'll just do it on the Mac, or you can do it on your Mac") and assume that everyone will be using one because... well, everyone uses one, right? why would you use anything else. I mean, PCs can't even do this stuff, right?

The superiority of Macs in these fields may have been more-or-less true 30-35+ ish years ago (when Macs had a GUI and PCs were still basically text based unless you forced them not to be, and didn't have sound by default), but those days are long gone and yet the myth persists. And it will continue to persist. In every school that I have worked in, the Macs that were in general use have long been replaced with Windows™ machines for everything - office computers, computers on teachers' desks, computers in computer suites for pupils, etc etc. No Macs to be seen. Unless, that is, you visit the music rooms or the art rooms. Why? "Because Macs are so much better at music/art." And so the next generation is also being trained in this myth.

Funny that in reality Mac audio is inferior to Windows which needs a state-of-the-art system for its games...


BTW, there's another field where Macs reign, and that is web development. Here it's thev POSIX compatibility which Windows does not have.