Let me preface this post. I am not a Windows Fanboy, nor am I an Apple athiest. I just love technology when it makes life easier. The more intuitive, the better. The shorter the learning curve, the better. However, I must caveat, I think more like a Windows user than a Mac user. How do I know this? Because many things are intuitive to me on a Windows machine, but I am all thumbs on a Mac.
A couple examples. I tried to help my son with a school project. He just needed some pictures from the internet. We were on my Windows machine, I surfed Google images using Internet Explorer, found exactly what he needed, right-clicked, selected download, and voila, images saved. 4-5 seconds of work. I was ready for the next image….but he wanted to finish his paper on the Mac. No sweat right?…Open up Safari, surf the same Google Images, find the image, but wait…where is the right click? No go–only a single button under the mouse pad. Hmmm….How about drag and drop….no? O.K. search the internet but can’t find the right search term to solve my problem. Call a Mac friend who made it all clear. I had to learn the “two finger” drag. Interesting. O.K. new pardigm. I can learn right? But it was not intuitive for me.
I installed iTunes on my Windows computer to help manage all our iPods and iPads and to interface with our Apple TV. Easy and works great. Kind of. You see, I can’t really share the music with my four computers. If I plug an iPod into the desktop, and sync music there, it does not allow me to sync music on my Laptop with the same iPod. You can only sync with one machine. Hmmm. Apparently that is bad. I can link accounts, but I still cannot plug and play into different machines. The iPod will reset and all data will be lost. Amazing. Want to sync some images? Good luck, if it is not your registered computer, you get the images that were on that machine rather than the machine picking up your pics. Probably not what you intended when you visited your friend. Oh, and you lose all your images. Hope you saved them someplace else.
And the real frustrating one: I created a playlist on one my iPods. Easy stuff. And then I wanted to move that playlist over to my computer. No Go. Then I tried moving the music to a specific folder on my computer so I could get the same music/playlist on another iPod. No Go. Is what I’m thinking so difficult to do? I want to drag and drop the playlist to my Desktop iTunes. Again, searched the internet, and discovered that you need a third-party program to do what I just suggested. Really? Really!? Is this what they mean by “it just works”? Works for whom? So I tried adding a comment to the comment section on the iPad, resynching and the finding the files with those comments. But you can’t search “just” comments. It automagically searches everything. What am I missing?
And another thing, why does iTunes recognize lots of video formats, but does not bother to convert them when I try to drag to my iPad? It just tells me I can’t put it on my iPad, but does not give me a hint on what I should do.
I could go on about these quirks, but alas, I have to go back to installing a fresh copy of Win7 on my old 2007 laptop. Oh, done. That was quick! 17 minutes from a blank drive to a full install. With no interruptions and very little required of me…a step in the right direction.
At least I have finally figured out that to eject a CD from my Mac! O.K. this is basic, you drag the CD to the trash bin! Clever. But way beyond what I would have guessed. Another win for Mac. Not so much for me. I keep trying. But this really can be trying!
Will continue trying to master both Mac and Windows. And Android and iOS….
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