Review of the Macintosh PC, Tiger, OSX 10.4.

Part 1: Basic concepts of a Macintosh computer 


Hello to all readers and listeners of yet another review! And this is not the last review I'm making! There's planty more to go!

Today, I will be focusing all my attention on the Macintosh. Yes, I know, I have been on Microsoft's side for ages. I'm still am, even more so than previously. But my duty is to be a technology reviewer, not to be a fanboy and advertise a product. Yes, I'm clearly on Microsoft's side. And until I find a better operating system, I will continue to be. Well, so far, I haven't.

But this might varry for the people that might be reading this article. Again, I'm not trying to disconvince someone from using a Macintosh computer. If you want to, sure, go ahead! There's nothing wrong with Mac users, just as there's nothing wrong with Windows users. Mac has some neat features that windows users don't, while windows users have neat features that Mac users don't.

This review should help both the sighted and blind communities. For the sighted, I will be describing some of the preferences that come with the mac, and the menu items that are in there. However, the visually-impaired users get the better advantage: not only will you read about the menus, but also learn how voice over, the screen reader that comes (and always will come) with the Mac. I will be describing some of the aspects of the voice over system. These may be negative, or positive. As I go along, I might compare voice over to the mainstream screen reader out there: JAWS (Job Access With Speech) for windows. Again, both voice over users and JAWS users get an advantage in some areas. Which one's better, you'll have to decide. I'm not here to manage you're life. 

Why the heck did I go for the Macs, anyways? This has a simple answer.

As a technology reviewer, I'm dedacated to providing all of my readers reviews of the latest developments in technologies. The fact that the only operating system I had experience with is Windows, might discourage some readers. Although I'm very young in my field (2 or so years), I'm trying to gain as much experience with different platforms (or types) of products. The Mac is just a different operating system. And don't worry, soon enough, there will be a time, when Linux will be put to test. But for now, Mac was enough for me.

So, how long, have I used a mac? Not long. Only for about 40 minutes of my life. After learning some of the commands and then putting them to actual use, I had a very bad experience with the Mac system. And that 30 minutes was spent gradually in shool, once 5 minutes here, 6 there, etc. Unfortunately, I myself wouldn't buy a Mac. One of the reasons for this is money (spend $500 on a mac system, which I would only use for a few days or weeks.), and the other is the use. Let's face it, I was born as a Windows user. I could spend that $500 or more on new technologies that might benifit me in the rest of my life.

As such, some of the info (or most of it) will be based off a tutorial that I heard on ACB Radio. I will include my experiences with the mac in the fields of performance, usuability, stability, and orientation. Most of the information regarding these four parts will reflect what I have noticed in that 30 or so minutes. The rest (keyboard commands, applications, etc... ) will largely be based off the tutorial I listened to. 

Ok. Let's get you orientated with a mac. As you might of felt (or scene), the mac is, in deed, shaped like an apple: the screen is in front (built in), and all the ports are on the back. One reason, in my opinion, why Macs are better in this filed is due to the builtin screen: You don't have to waste $50 for a new, good quality screen. I also like the fact that the mac mini (which was probably the one I was using) could easily fit on a desk, and it doesn't take a nice stretch to reach a USB port on the back of the system. On the front panel of the mac (at least the one I saw at school) is a headphone Jack. This, again, is a benefit, as you don't have to groap around at the back of you're computer for a headphones. The Mac minis also have built in speakers, another nice thing about the mac's structure.
Ok, so in orientation, the Mac outnumbers the Windows  PC. With a PC, you have to buy a monitor, speakers, and maybe a USB port if you don't own one. There's no real "mini" version of the windows pc: Most of them are stored under the desk. I might be confusing the MAC Mini with some other model, though. No one actually told me upfront, "hey dude, this is a MAC mini!".
 


Ok. Now that we talked about the orientation of the mac... I think you're ready to learn all about it's  interface. Oh, wait just a minute. I forgot to talk to you about the keboard.

Ok, so the letters, of course, are layed out just like they would be in a Windows keyboard. However, the things that are to the left and right of the space bar are different:
to the left of the space bar,  going in order, are the following keys:
command, option, control. 
On the right side of space, the same keys are present, but backwards.


Ok, that's all for the orientation, I promise. Now let's move into the deeper things: Using voice over.
So what happens when you start voice over (command key +f5)
 On the mac I used, there was no special message. For others, I heard voice over saying things like "voice over started" or something similar. right away, you're placed into the window that you were in when opening voice over.

There's a voice over modifier key. Think of this as the JAWS key: Pressing it with another key does different things.
For Voice over, this modifier shortcut is control option + a command.
For instance, control option K brings up keyboard practice mode, which is a nice way to practice using the keyboard and get used to it. 

By the way, I should point it out that for now, there does not seem to be a way to stop voice over speech ; hitting the control (or command) key seems to do nothing, nor the escape key. This is very annoying, as one thing I do very frequiently is stop speech if JAWS is reading a long dialogbox. Of course, if you press a key, the speech would interrupt, but this could lead to you editing a document or what not by accident.
 
Ok, so let's start with the real basics of a mac. not Surprisingly, there are a lot of similarities between a Mac and Windows. For example, to switch between an application, you use command tab instead of the alt tab. That's exactly the same orientation of you're hand as you would use in windows. The only major difference is that there's no start menu; to bring it up, you have to use control option m. It's actually called the apple menu. Hmm, doesn't that sound like "start menu?"

 to bring up the context menu, you would use control option shift m. This exactly the same orientation as you would find in the windows context menu.

Let's talk about the Mac Menu, the first thing you would want to access when using a mac.
What's really nice about is that it changes. For instance, if you land in "finder", which is equal to "windows explorer" in Windows, press the apple menu shortcut (control option m), press right arrow, you'll find yourself  in the finder menu. This is like having the start menu integrate with the normal file/view/tools menu that you find when pressing alt. I think this is a nice feature, though for me, it would take years to get used to not pressing alt to get to the menus. 

The apple Menu contains similar items that are in the start menu: Software update, apple support, force quit items... and of course, you're programs. Another nice feature is that shutdown options are directly integrated in there: You have an option to sleep, logout, shutdown, restart. There's even a command for logout: command shift q. How nice. 

The taskbar is called the dock. You can think of this as the taskbar: It does, in fact, include you're running applications. The dock is configurable from the start menu, via a nice submenu called dock.

So, as you can see, the Mac is very customizable. This is the same with voice over: It can be customized at least to the point that JAWS can be.

Now that I loored all of you into the topic of voice over customization, let me talk about voice over and it's menus. It's quite different than what you would expect in a main stream screen reader:

The voice over menu can be brougt up with the command option f7 key. This is a nice menu that includes options like, voice over utility (which let's you customize voice over to you're choice), orientation (which is a handy dandy quick keyboard guide). There's also a navigation menu that tells you all the navigation shortcuts.  

Ok, so the voice over utility. It's a dialog filled with tabs. What's interesting about them is that they are organized into a list. So, you know exactly how many tabs the particular dialog would include, a very  neat feature in my opinion.
A tipical dialogbox (like the voice over utility) includes the same kinds of controls that you would expect to see or hear in windows. There are buttons, radio buttons, check boxes... all the good dialog controls. However, instead of using combo boxes, a MAC pc uses something called a popup menu: Press space on this, and a menu of options will appear. To me, this doesn't really matter. I'm not sure if on a webpage, combo boxes are converted into popup menus, though I would expect them not to be.

There is, however, a difference on how you would interact with a particular control: In windows, you're probably used to interacting with a slider, or "left-right slider", with the left and right arrow keys (duh!). However, this is a bit different with voice over: You have to press command shift down arrow to move the slider. What  a neat and finger-concerving command.


Some options that I was able to look at in the voice over utility included:
In the general tab, you can set a log-on greeting. This is a very nice feature, and I truly wish that it would be ported to JAWS as well: You can just type in something, and when you start Voice over, it would speak that message.
As you would expect with other screen readers, there is an option to "announce modifier keys". These are keys like control, insert, alt, shift, etc. that you press with another key to get a resulted command. This is useful when you are learning the keys around the space bar, and for some time, I actually turned it on.

There's also a tab to set cursor options. This means that you can set the behavior of the cursor, like if it should move along with the voice-over cursor.
There are a few voices available with voice over. These sound pretty robotic to me (even though I use a robotic voice all day with JAWS), but they are deffinitly better than narrator. 

Another neat feature (which I have not really scene) that is in the voice over utility, is that you can set a different voice for an event.  

There's also an option (which I actually looked it), which let's you listen to text that the mouse is hovering over. For now, this does not seem to work with the popular JAWS screen reader, however, after some research on some other screen readers, I noticed that window-eyes can actually do this. 

Roomers also tell me that an option let's you actually see the text that voice over is saying. For the sighted, this is very useful, as many will not understand the voice.

Ok, here comes the very evil side of the macintosh and voiceover. Well, mostly voice over. For a minute, I'm going to jump forward to using the internet with a MAC ; You know the basics and now can navigate around a MAC.

You can fire up a safari or even an html helper window. The easiest way, for now, is just to launch the help window, which is an html content itself by pressing control option and the slash key. 


If you activated Safari from the apple menu, you'll notice that tabbing around the thing will not help. You'll just move around the address bar, and the quick / common links page. I myself didn't understand at first why the heck I can't access a webpage, but then realized one of the most annoying features of voice over: In order to be able to interact with an html page, you have to "interact" with it by pressing control option shift down arrow. What an annoying key combanation! At one point on the page, you'll hear or see voice over say, "html text". This is when you have to press that key combenation.
Once you did, voice over will state, "interact with html", and after that, you can just press you're scrolling keys (control option up/down in this case) to move around the page. First off, pressing control option up/down arrow in itself is very annoying. This is why I never liked to use voice over and the internet.
To activate a link, press control option space, another keyboard shortcut that is very hard to memorize.

To go to a webpage, press command +o. This brings up a dialog, and there you just enter the website.
 
In the terms of web-pages, Voice over is weak. In JAWS, many of you might be used to pressing h to move to the next heading, l to move the next list, etc. Well, in voice over, none of those keyboard shortcuts can be used.

So, basically this means that you have to use manual navigation with control option and the arrows. At first this seemed easy, but it got more and more fustrating and I quit out of the webpage. (at the time, me and my braille teacher were looking up keyboard commands for "apple works" software, and we went to the apple site to find this with voice over.)


So, the fact that you can't really use the internet means that do not expect (if you're blind) to be able to perform the same way that you're partners do. I mean, you could use the internet ok, but after a few minutes, you would be breaking you're keyboard in shear fustration.

to be continued in Part 2: Preferences menu, and some other MAC software.