Apple User Podcast

We all notice the advantages of our Macs over time, sometimes, we don’t discover great features until they are pointed out, last week in a stellar blog post, Thomas Hawk wrote about some of the spectacular features of his new MacBook Pro MacBook a few hours later and sure enough, using two fingers on the MacBooks touch pad scroll in whichever direction you’d like to go, horizontally, diagonally or vertically. I was amazed and the genius in design and usability of this Touch Pad scrolling feature, I’ve seen scroll areas to the side of the touch pad on Compaqs, but having been a PC user for ten years, was used to a nervous breakdown of windows if two fingers touched the keypad at the same time, some laptops wouldn’t respond at all (resulting in tech support for colleagues whose palm was resting on the Touch Pad declaring “this touch pad is non responsive”) and ’smarter’ laptops who would simply only acknowledge the latest or most forceful finger on the touchpad.

Never before had I seen such an elegant way to provide scrolling functionality to a laptop, This is an example of finding a great feature after being a MacBook user for six months and there seems to be no end to the features to be discovered in your Apple products.

As anyone who has used a PC can testify, from the first minute using it, you notice drawbacks, just the other night I tried Vista, and immediately had difficulty connecting to the open Wifi access point in the same room, then to adjust the volume, I had to press four keys together!

This brings me to the second subject of this post, I came across this post by PalmerDeville in the comments section regarding the Microsoft Zune Player on Amazon.com, It highlights drawbacks that though unoticeable to a first time buyer are shocking to an existing iPod user, for example:

• The Lyrics function on the iPod and in iTunes was one of those great ‘Discoveries’
• The Gapless playback function is a recently added feature that makes live albums a joy to listen to
• Lossless Audio is a necessity on a music player, It’s perhaps comparable to Manual Transmission on a sports car.
• Volume Normalization is another de facto function
• TV-Out being limited to 320×240 is essentially making the function useless, my friends mainly like my video iPod because we can plug it in to an 42″ LCD TV and watch the Full Quality DVD Rips I’ve made.

The Zune lacks the above functions and even more, the full list is below:

Zune:
1. No variable scrolling rate (ie clickwheel)
2. No in-device podcast support, (ie chapters and bookmarking).
3. No lossless audio quality option.
4. No gapless playback.
5. No volume normalization (one song loud next one quite)
6. TV out only 320×240 vs 640×480
7. On-the-go playlists don’t sync back to PC
8. No external Hard-disk support.
9. No free hands-on support at 160 locations (Apple Store).
10. No games.
11. No lyrics option.
12. No clock, alarm or sleep timer.
13. No passcode protected screen lock.
14. No Audiobook support.

With these drawbacks in the Zune and new features being added and discovered constantly to the iPod its hard to see anything Microsoft makes as worthwhile.