re: The master bar at the top.
one of the reasons, I wish I could find the article that talked about it (It might have been Joel Spolsky "User Interface design for programmers"), the master bar is at the top is because it's much easier for a user to move the mouse pointer all the way to the edge of a screen than it is to hit an arbitrary point in the middle of the screen. It's the same reason the taskbar is at the bottom, unless you move it, and generally why the Office taskbar and OSX dock are located against the edge of the screen.
That's also why all (most? I'm not sure, I'm not a Mac owner yet) applications written for the Mac have to use the master bar as their menu bar. So the user doesn't have to hunt around for the applications menu.
It sounds like it'd be more confusing to the user for the menu to keep changing depending on which app is running, but it isn't. It's easier for the user to hit the menu target than to go down 10-20 pixels more to the applications menu (a'la Windows applications).
As for why I'm thinking of switching from PC to a Mac for home use (I'm a Windows based developer at work), I'll point to this post (
http://www.blognewsnetwork.com/membe.../30.html#a6685) by Adam Curry (yes, that Adam Curry. He of the big hair MTV fame)
Quote:
I bit the proverbial bullet last night and re-installed my OSX system. I must admit that it was totally painless, took a bit to download all the updates (about 100megs) but so far (stay away Murphy!) everything seems not only back to normal, but better than before. All my apps still work, prefs are still in place...
Just like the old days when your Mac would hang or crash, just shut down, shake twice and restart... I'm lovin' it!
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edit: Whoops, I remembered the title is "why do you hate macs?" I hate them because they cost more than Wintel based PC's and I'm not sure how much more bang for my buck I'm getting since the architecture is so different. Being able to write for specific hardware does make a difference. My XBox is much less powerful than my XP Desktop, but my Xbox will be able to run Doom3 @ 60FPS, Doom3 with everything turned off on my desktop is a slideshow. So a 1GhZ Mac may perform just as well or better than a 2GhZ PC depending on the configuration and the amount of cruft on the Windows box.
That and the Macs are kinda fruity, pun intended.
