Mac OS X and Windows XP: Things they should steal from each other

There is a lot to love about OS X when you compare it to OS 9. There are many things that XP improves on over Windows 2000. There are also many things that I could live without on both platforms. They are both resource hogs (especially when it comes to RAM). I've watched both operating systems take previously very usable machine from snappy, responsive computers to crawling, page-file hitting geriatric retirees.

However there are a few things that only become apparent when you switch from usingone platform to the other in the course of your day. This is especially true with applications that run on both machine: Firefox, Thunderbird, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc. So without further ado...

Things that I wish OS X would steal from XP:

1) Arrow tabbing dialog buttons

A dialog box comes up and asks you if you'd like to quit without saving. In both operating systems, one of the buttons is highlighted, which allows you to hit enter (return) to choose that option without moving your hands from the keyboard. In XP, if you'd like to choose another option, just use the arrow keys to move the highlight to another button and then hit enter. In OS X, you have to use the mouse to pick something else.

In fact, if there's one thing that XP does better over all, it's allowing the end user to drive the box for long periods of time without taking his hands from the keyboard. OS X is better at that than OS 9, but it's still not the same.

2) User definable eye candy

Both operating systems feature 32 bit icons, transparency effects (like drop shadows), lickable window widgets and font smoothing. OS is arguably prettier (your mileage may vary) than XP is with all the goodies turned on, but at least in XP I can turn the goodies off. Why would I want to do that? On newer machines it allows me to reclaim my system resources for actual work, and on older machines it can mean the difference between usability or not. In XP, I can set how much of my CPU cycles and video card memory I'm using just to redraw windows. In OS X, Steve Jobs decides how much of my machine's resources are used just to boot the thing up into idle.

Things that I wish XP would borrow from OS X:

1) Simplified Networking

In OS X, the network options are all configured from one pane which can give you an overview of everything or zoom down to the MAC address of your Ethernet card. Airport does a great job of locating and front-ending wireless networks that are in reception range. Multiple configurations for all of this are stored in the locations area. With a single drop down choice from the apple menu, my machine can switch to appear at a specific IP on my office LAN or change and get my IP from my DHCP router at home. This is very nice for laptops.

In XP, there are multiple layers of everything and they are all tied to your hardware devices. Not unfathomable or unusable, just needlessly complicated for the end user. I'd love to see some kind of location functionality on the Windows laptop we have at home.

2) Fast User Switching

In OS X, you can log into another user account, fire up some programs, do some work and then switch back to the first account without quitting any applications or logging out first. You can run as many accounts simultaneously as the machine can handle. It's not something that most people need, but it's nice to be able to do. I use it for light admin stuff that I don't want to use the command line for. Families that share one computer and coworkers that have different accounts on one machine are just some people who can benefit from this. In some environments, it's practically a selling point.

3) Password Verification for Everything

In XP, you visit the wrong page on the wrong day you can end up with all kinds of "Browser Help Objects" installed into your system feeding you pop-ups, hijacking your hosts file and redirecting your browser to places you don't want to go. In OS X, I can't even install security updates from Apple without verifying things with my password. I've had to manually remove spyware infections from Windows boxes at work before. I'd much rather type my password a few times a month.