starseerdrgn | Basic thoughts on: Apple stuff

(This is what happens when I'm bored, and have a lot of thoughts.)

* Snow Leopard (10.6) is still beautiful, and I wish I could keep it over needing El Capitan or Sierra.

* Fuck you, web devs, for not following graceful degredation. That goes double for you, Discord. Don't just give me a blank screen if the browser is unsupported. That's F- material right there.

* Upgrades are so freaking effortless with OS X, compared to Windows. The only real problem is getting the shit to download within an hour.

* iWork '09 really does have the better interface. It's kinda like Office 2007, and everything after that being shit.

* Note to self: get boxed copies of iLife '09 and iWork '09 when you can afford it. Likewise with the older Mac OS boxed copies. They'd make for great desk art.

* Even with a Core2Duo, this iMac is screaming fast compared to the Dell. I'm honestly surprised. We'll see how I feel about it with El Capitan installed, though.

* The Apple Pro Mouse (M5769) is actually really comfortable in the hand, though I still prefer having all the buttons on the Blackweb mouse Sildrae gave to me.

* Slot-loading optical media drives are still my favorite. 💖

* Being able to boot an entire system off of a flash drive still amazes me.

* Having Xcode be free for OS X—and even included with Snow Leopard's DVD—was a massively great idea. It's a full-blown pro-grade IDE, unlike the older lesser versions of Visual Studio. VS 2010 Express was nice, and VS Community is still good for being free, but Xcode is much nicer.

* iMovie... Windows 10 doesn't even have a free music store app anymore (Groove is being discontinued for Spotify to take over), much less a free video-making app. Windows Movie Maker was nice. Then they killed it and Windows Live Essentials off with no real replacement.

* iWork is now free for newer Macs. Office is free...for the web only. I wonder how long Microsoft will be able to keep that up, especially since GDocs, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and iWork are all free and kick the ass of their web office suite. Seriously, it's horrible. If you're going to use a web office suite, use GDocs or iCloud's web apps. They're far superior.

* Safari and WebKit are so much nicer than even modern Firefox. It actually works well, doesn't change things like an ADHD-riddled 2 year old on caffeine, and renders things quite nicely. It's just too bad they stopped updating Safari for Windows, cause I'd switch to that in a heartbeat.

* Why the hell don't more laptop makes use magnetic plugs instead of the crappy barrel jacks? Seriously, they're device-savers. ...That's probably why.

* Okay, seriously... iWork is free, iMovie is free and pro-level, iPhoto and the Photos apps are free, GarageBand is free, Xcode is free. Why doesn't Microsoft try to follow suit again? They could make a killing just off that, but instead, Apple could royally fuck them over if more people knew about this. Even with the price of the hardware, a lot of creative types could really benefit from the free software. The only thing holding it back is the pro-grade hardware...and gaming.

* And hell... Not only is XCode free, but so are some basic books on learning how to make iOS and Mac OS apps rom Apple themselves, through the iBooks store. I have a few of the titles in my library myself, and have slowly been learning how to make a game natively in Objective-C. Microsoft has free videos, but most aren't even from Microsoft themselves.