Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
I have never 'used' a present day Mac, so excuse the ignorance when I ask, what do thse programs do that don't have comparable options exist on a PC? I trust you that they are amazing, but from my knowledge of them they have PC alternatives, so correct me if I am wrong.
And on the flip side, what programs (aside from most games) cannot run and do not have a comparable option on a Mac that is not running windows?
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You are correct, those programs do have PC equivalents but I heavily favor the Mac programs. I find those programs have a certain degree of visual polish, they all "talk" to each other and in many cases they are so easy to use it's astonishing.
I haven't used a PC since XP/Vista, so I'm sure Windows has improved many things with 7. These are just my impressions of the Mac products mentioned.
iPhoto - I've always really enjoyed the layout of iPhoto and how it displays your images. One common oversight is that it not only makes photobooks, but it makes nicer photobooks than I've ever seen available commercially. You can of course go online and find some upper scale companies that will make you a book, but the quality to cost ratio of a book from iPhoto is outstanding.
iMovie - I can very easily edit any movie and believe me ... I should have no part in movie editing.
Keynote - I don't use a lot of keynote as I don't give a lot of presentations, but again for me it boils down to a design preference. The fonts are really nice and the templates are very stylish. For many people that doesn't matter (and that's fine), but for me little things like that are very important. Also the ability to control the presentation from an iPhone or iPod Touch is pretty cool.
Garageband - This to me is the crown jewel of the "we make things work easier" line. I tried to get into music production on my old PC (using cubase) and it was nothing short of a nightmare. I can say without exaggeration that one night i was so frustrated I was almost brought to tears. Garageband is so effortless that it astounds me. I had a buddy come over last week and we were going to play around with it as I'd never really used it properly. I spent an hour looking at online tutorials over my lunch hour and after 10 minutes of tinkering we were light years ahead of where I was after an entire year of trying on my old PC.
Pages - I'm in the web/design field and it is common to get people send me design mock-ups in Word. I can't begin to explain to you how much I hate this. Word is a word processor, not something to be used for graphics. Oh it can do it ... it just does it horribly. The program I need everybody to use would be Adobe InDesign, but that's unrealistic as it's expensive and complicated (to people unfamiliar with Adobe's Creative Suite). Pages meanwhile is a very interesting blend of Word and InDesign. It's a full powered word processor and it can handle images/graphics and place them with pinpoint accuracy anywhere you need.
Numbers - In the same vein as Pages, numbers is a spreadsheet program that lets you play with more graphical layouts. I completely understand that most people just want a spreadsheet to tabulate data, but for me I like making my work look engaging. I'm very weird that way.