5 things I like most in Mac OS X

I am using a MacBook for about 6 months. I’ve been really impressed by the performance and stability of a Mac. Following are the features I like most in the Mac OS.

1. Spotlight

Though this feature is imitated in some Linux flavours and Windows Vista, this works best in Mac. It is really fast and finds everything including applications, images, pdf, web pages etc and shows in groups. It also finds the term in dictionary also. It is quite useful that we don’t even need to open the Finder (like Explorer in Windows) window. just press Cmd +   <space> and enter some characters and your applications/documents are shown. Excellent!

2. Expose & Spaces

Expose is a unique feature which shows all the open windows neatly arranged in the available screen space. No matter how many applications you’ve opened, all of them will be arranged for you and you can switch to any application. Also, it can show only the child windows of any applications.

Spaces allows you to rearrange your applications windows to multiple virtual desktops – it is exactly similar to the functionality which is common to almost all Linux flavors.

Screen Corners allow you to configure some actions to happen when mouse pointer is placed at each corners of the screen. For eg: you can set it to show desktop when the mouse pointer is placed at the right top corner.

3. Dock

Dock is another excellent and good looking feature which can be used to hold application shortcuts and to switch between open applications. It differentiates an already opened application by adding a shiny dot below the icon. The dock is successfully ported into Windows  & Linux to a certain extend, but in Mac, it really looks nice and is stable.

4. Global Menu

I liked the way how mac handles application menus. Instead of showing a separate menu bar in the application, it will be shown in the global menu bar which is always shown on top of the screen. So the application will get most of the screen space. It is a perfect merging of applications to the operating system. But for a new user, it might be a little confusing.

Some developers has ported this functionality to Linux(I’ve checked this in Ubuntu), but it is not stable and buggy.

5. Dashboard Widgets

Great feature which allows you to place small applications or widgets in a virtual place called dashboard. Unlike Windows Vista sidebar widgets, these won’t show in part of the screen and hence valuable screen space is saved. It will come to life when the Widgets shortcut is activated. There are hundred of widgets to choose from. The widget settings page shows some nice animation effects.

Using Awn manager, similar functionality can be done in Linux, but it is not a stable product.

Related posts:

1. Mac4Lin 1.0 – The easiest way to dress up your Linux desktop to look like a Mac
2. Windows, Linux and Mac – A comparison