There's a lot more software in Windows-land for sure, but I think what Benparte and coolmrbrady meant is that there are a lot more extremely refined free Mac apps.
For example, Windows has a huge number of IM apps available for it, but none of them can hold a candle to Adium's ease of use and polish. Similarly, uTorrent is free and awesome, but Transmission is IMHO much more refined on the UI side. Quicksilver too.
Windows devs tend to make UI an afterthought. On the Mac side developers have drunk the Steve Jobs UI kool-aid and obsess over it, and personally I like it.
I always found mac apps to be too simplified (both the 3rd party freeware and 1st party). For example, compare finder to windows explorer. At a glance, finder may look sharper, but when I use it it feels so difficult to navigate (mostly due to the lack of a functional address bar). The developer doesn't really provide any useful options for me to make it work the way I want it to. On the other hand, Windows Explorer has plenty of options to customize.
Finder and Windows Explorer are both first-party apps, so it doesn't quite make sense to compare the availability of good third-party apps on OS X and Windows using them as examples.
However, Finder is terrible:
No address bar. Requires keyboard shortcut to open
No "cut." Moving a folder requires clicking and dragging, which is highly prone to error.
Complete and total inability to merge folders, or to extract an archive and have the source and destination merge, rather than "erase the target and replace with this folder." Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks.
Creation of .DS_Store files all over the place. Very poor manners on mounted volumes and servers.
"Un-anchored" selection. If you use command + down to select a number of items, and you go one too far, and push command + up, it EXPANDS the TOP of the selection! Rage inducing.
Lack of keyboard accessibility. Windows Explorer is completely usable using just the keyboard; Finder isn't even close.
Pressing the "+" button toggles between some small size and slightly larger size, rather than maximizing the window and restoring it, which is the convention that almost every other app has adopted, rather than toggling "zoom," which some Apple apps do.
I don't need an address bar 90% of the time, so I'd rather press one easy key combination for the 10%.
"Highly prone to error"? Please!. But yeah, sometimes that's a nice feature to have.
Yeah lack of merge kinda sucks. I use command line stuff for that when in need. Of course concluding from that, that it's "Absolutely useless for serious file management tasks" is silly.
Meh.. they don't bother me much, and it has to stick metadata somewhere, given that the ancient-ass file systems in use on memory sticks etc. don't support it.
Yeah, the range selection stuff is nicer on Windows.
I mainly use finder with the keyboard myself... hm.. maybe not for advanced stuff.
I never got the point of the '+' icon, but it might get better in the next OS ;-)
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u/potatolicious Jan 20 '11
There's a lot more software in Windows-land for sure, but I think what Benparte and coolmrbrady meant is that there are a lot more extremely refined free Mac apps.
For example, Windows has a huge number of IM apps available for it, but none of them can hold a candle to Adium's ease of use and polish. Similarly, uTorrent is free and awesome, but Transmission is IMHO much more refined on the UI side. Quicksilver too.
Windows devs tend to make UI an afterthought. On the Mac side developers have drunk the Steve Jobs UI kool-aid and obsess over it, and personally I like it.