05 December 2006

Copycat

During the last MacWorld Expo, Apple put up a lot of banners promoting its upcoming version of Mac OS X (Codename: Leopard). One of them is really funny: "Redmond has a cat too. A copycat." The mention of cats is of course a reference to Mac OS' codenames like Tiger, Panther, etc while Redmond's 'copycat' is none other than Windows Vista, obviously.
 
I thought all this was just the usual Micro$oft bashing but when I saw some screenshots of Vista today, I gasped in horror. Some of them really DO look like Mac. Especially the Save and Open dialog boxes. It is really as if Microsoft lifted the whole thing up from Mac! If that's not proof of Mac OS' superior usability, I don't know what is. Perhaps the thing that is annoying me the most (as a Mac user) is that 90% of users will upgrade to Vista and praise Microsoft for finally improving the user interface, when in fact Mac users have been doing that for the past half decade.

4 comments:

Innocent^^Guy said...

Oh, thats just being selfish simply because you are a Mac user. Didn't see you said anything when IE lifted the whole thing from Firefox? I thought you should have gotten the picture of how Micro$oft works when that happened.

Zemien said...

Yes, I'm a selfish Mac user. And you're jealous.

Anyway, there was no need to say anything about IE coz they didn't copy Firefox. Tabbed browsing wasn't invented by Mozilla - back in 1998 when you people were using single windows, I was already tabbing through the Web with a little app called NetCaptor.

And in fact, NetCaptor wasn't the first IE skin to implement tabbed browsing as well.

Of course, there's no point avoiding the fact - i'm a selfish Mac user. Boo hoo.

Innocent^^Guy said...

Bluek :P

Zemien said...

william: Maybe it's just coincidence, but my "User Centered Design" lecturer was no humble person herself. But I got an 'A' so I wouldn't complain...