Dr Richard M Marshall

I've always liked to build things. Since I outgrew Lego I've been building software, development teams and most recently companies.

I'm Founder and CTO of Rapid Mobile Media Ltd in Edinburgh, Scotland. We founded the company in February 2004. We mobilise applications, but are now focussing on Ad360 Mobile Advertising Platform.

I like to think of us as creating mobile applications that people actually use, but we go much deeper than that.

This blog, however, is much more about my observations on the last frontier, the world of mobile technology. And anything else that crosses my path.


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As bad as each other

I always wonder why Mac zealots get so excited about why MacOs being super wonderfully spiffingly better than Windows. I’m sitting here with my MacBook beside my Dell running Windows XP. They both annoy me. Why, for example, doesn’t my USB memory stick not show up in Finder while it is clearly on the desktop? Why doesn’t my shared server connection appear automatically when I log in? They both work on Windows. When does MacOs decide that a WiFi network is trusted? It seems pretty random to me, I have to say, as I have to manually select it a few times and then, lo, it stops asking. Ensuring that the network in the System Preferences list doesn’t make any difference. Sigh. Again, on Windows, this just works.
And on Windows, why does it still take so long to delete anything?

Pots calling the kettle black! Perhaps the marketeers are feeling the same - all the recent Apple ads they focus on the iThing applications.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 1:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “As bad as each other”

  1. Sam Halliday Says:
    December 29th, 2006 at 4:12 pm

    I see you have still not learnt the wonderful way of the Mac… if it doesn’t do what you wish, then a simple trip to Preferences will fix it ;-)

    In Finder -> Preferences you will find buttons to display these discs in the sidebar, and Apple -> System Preferences -> Network -> Configure are your trusted network settings.

  2. Richard Marshall Says:
    January 3rd, 2007 at 3:38 pm

    Well, the way of the Mac doesn’t always leap out and grab you in an obvious way!

    The Trusted Network Settings don’t work predictably, as far as I can tell. I’ve found it, shall we say, temperamental?

  3. Duncan A Says:
    January 8th, 2007 at 3:21 pm

    I’ve found what little Apple software I’ve used to be surprisingly hard to decipher. It tends to be intuitive and slick - *once* you know how to do things! I find Windows much easier to poke about and figure out for yourself how to do what you want - with the Mac you have to ask a veteran or consult the Oracle of Google.

    I’m probably just hard-wired for Windows, having been brought up on it, but I still think it’s surprising given Apple’s reputation for slick, intuitive UIs.

    Dunc

  4. Keith Says:
    January 11th, 2007 at 9:54 am

    >if it doesn’t do what you wish, then a simple trip to Preferences will fix it

    I thought it just worked!

  5. Keith Says:
    January 11th, 2007 at 9:56 am

    Seriously, though. I agree. I’m doing this on the Mac and my view is that the Mac uses a fairly simple and time-honoured trick. Hide the complex stuff and make it easier to do simple stuff. This makes is virtually impossible to work out how to do complex stuff.

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