Why Buy a Mac - Part III

OK, so we've looked at hardware and tech support as good reasons to buy a Mac. In this post I'll take a look at the Mac from an OS perspective.

As an IT guy, I live in the operating system (OS) of what ever computer I'm working on at a pretty significant level. So, while for the majority of you reading this the OS may just be the thing from which you run your apps, for me it's the thing that can make my life easier or harder...much harder.

When you think of Windows from an IT/OS perspective what things come to mind as the biggest pains in the...? For me it's the DLL's (DDL Hell), app sprawl, and uninstalling programs.

DLL files are files of information that program can use to run within Windows. The problem is shared DLL's. On the one had this is a good idea because if someone has already invented this great DLL, why reinvent it or why have a copy of it for every app that we have installed... saves on disk space. The problem is that shared DLL's can misbehave and can affect more than just one program. This also ties into my second most hated thing; app sprawl. In the old DOS days, each app lived completely in it's own set of directories. If you had two apps installed, app1 and app2, there was an app1 folder and an app2 folder and everything that the app needed to run and interact with DOS was in its folder. Except for where the app touched DOS, nothing was shared. Fast forward to Windows where so much of everything is shared code. If you needed to move an app from one computer to another,it was as simple as moving the folder. It you tried that under Windows, because of shared DLL's, app sprawl, and the registry; making such a move is impossible. And that ties in with uninstalling apps, Doing this through the Control Panel should be a simple thing and once you highlight your app and click on uninstall, you should have no worries. And for the most part that works, but when it doesn't, it usually messes up in a big way. One company's app that I used to use did the dumbest thing when you started to uninstall it. The first thing it would do would be to wipe out the uninstall info so that if the uninstall failed, and it did every so often, you have absolutely no way to go back and rerun that uninstall. The only recourse you had was to go to their web site and find the information about manually uninstalling the app and then spend anywhere from 30-60 minutes culling through the registry and multiple file folders deleting the things that the uninstaller should have deleted...what a mess.

So how does Apple do it? Well, first off there are no shared DLL's (or the Apple equivalent) no registry and no control panel uninstaller. When an app is installed, it typically creates a "folder" or a package in the Applications folder and just about everything that the app needs to run lives in that folder or package. Having said that, the app may create other files, such as a PLIST file which is equivalent to the INI file in the old DOS days. Typically installation is much easier and faster than with Windows. And when it comes time to uninstall...say it with me...delete the app's folder or package and it's gone. Boom, how simple is that. Now, to be honest the one thing that doesn't happen unless the app happens to have an uninstaller is that any extra files, like the PLIST file, will not get deleted; which I do find is a weak point. But there are apps you can buy that will gather up everything associated with an app and politely throw it all in the trash and the app is gone. To me this is such a better and more efficient way to do things. There is no wizard to run, no waiting for it to gather information - whatever that means, or examine disk space; the app just gets deleted.

And then there is the registry. Who thought that up? The registry is basically a massive file that contains just about all of the configuration settings for not only most applications that you install, but also Windows. In the Windows NT days, this was the most likely place to have a failure within the OS and recovering from that was almost impossible; can you say wipe and reload? The "fix" for many things in Windows and various applications are modifications to the registry. And every instruction to modify the registry is replete with warnings about editing the registry and make sure you back it up before modifying. OS X just doesn't have such a thing. Sure there are files that are responsible for configuring the OS, but I've yet to have to go looking for them or modify them. And, as previously mentioned, apps may have .plist files but that's pretty much it and each app has it's own. This is just a more intelligent way to do things in this man's opinion.