[ben_straub]

OSX has definite advantages here.

1. The trackpad hardware is great. It's so good that when we were making the Bamboo Touch at Wacom, the Macbook Pro trackpad was the standard we measured ourselves against.

2. True pixel-level scrolling from HID devices. Windows has the concept of "wheel scrolling", but it's only vertical, and lots of apps won't scroll in less than a wheel increment (which is oddly 120 units), so you're stuck with jerky 3-lines-at-a-time scrolling. Oh, and it's vertical-only; there's no system standard for horizontal scrolling.

3. It's never had a software-based rendering and compositing engine for the windowing system. The Windows team is fully committed to backward-compatibility, which means allowing all sorts of wonky GDI-based pixel pushers to work they same way they did in Win95. OSX has been OpenGL-based from the start.

[tjoff]

1. Might be an advantage on a mobile device but a mouse is vastly superior for anyone wanting precision and/or performance. Too bad we can't combine gestures and a real mouse well (have been tried but in my opinion all attempts have failed).

2. Wheel scrolling is a feature. Yes, horizontal scrolling sucks but vertical scrolling is working as intended and something I really prefer. Yes, I'd like a good horizontal scroll but the use cases where you need it are extremely rare and often stem from bad UI design in the application - not saying that as an excuse but just that it isn't a big issue. Microsoft have tried scrolling wheels that can go horizontal as well but they were mindbogglingly bad (my opinion).

3. I don't see how that is an issue (in practice) for anything that isn't done for Win95. And if it was made for Win95 I'd rather be able to run it than not. Backwards compatibility at its best. Doesn't bother you when you don't need it but can still handle corner cases as well as can be expected.

[neebz]

regarding #2..

I used Mac for a week and went back to Windows. The jerky scrolling in Windows was driving me crazy. The fact was that before Mac I never realized that (maybe I'm numb to perfection) but it was only using Mac that it occurred how much crap scrolling is in Windows.

[emehrkay]

I currently have a vm of windows 7 open on my mac with the host file open in notepad. Two lines are selected (as I needed to copy them from time to time). If that window loses focus, the selection stays, but if I click the titlebar to that window, giving it focus again, those two lines are unselected.

There are many many quirks like this in Windows that you only notice once you use a different window manager.

[tjoff]

Sigh... this is an issue with your VM and not Windows.

[emehrkay]

You're right. The deselection doesnt happen if I click the titlebar, but it does if I click the content area (that doesnt happen in OS X, I havent checked any Linux window managers).

[tjoff]

Of course it does, when you click the content area you reposition the cursor and thus deselects the text. The alternative would be to not be able to reposition the cursor when you bring focus to the window which presents other "quirks" if you look at it from other angles (and it of course needs to be consistent, if you can't reposition the cursor why would you be able to press a button if the window isn't active? etc.).

OS X is quite unique in this and probably stems from the use of common menus for different windows, which also makes it uniquely inadequate for handling multiple monitors. I just can't take a WM that doesn't handle multiple monitors well seriously.

[emehrkay]

I, and a host of others, work fine with multiple monitors..

I'm sure if people were presented with both options; regain focus and lose selection vs keepi g selection, they'd choose the keep selection. It's as if someone used the computer and said "you know what would be useful?..."

[dristic]

I completely agree with this. I was a dedicated Windows user but I never realized all its shortcomings, scrolling being a big one.

[krevis]

How soon people forget! OS X had a software-based compositor until 10.2 -- that's when "Quartz Extreme" was introduced. Pretty sure the OpenGL path was planned the whole time, but the GL drivers were not nearly stable enough to use for such a crucial piece of the system.