Gmail added a “move to” drop-down that combines two actions that were difficult to find or difficult to understand: labeling and archiving. Instead of clicking on “More actions”, selecting a label and then archiving the message, you can now click on “Move to” and select a label.

Those who like keyboard shortcuts will be happy to know that the “Move to” drop-down can be selected by typing “v” and you can type the first letters of a label to select it.

I’ll give it a try, thanks.

I use a lot of ‘rules’ to tag and archive emails automatically. For instance, everything from Facebook gets tagged ’social sites’ and skips the inbox. In the GMail interface, it is still easy to see that there are unread messages in a particular tagged section. I have others for blog comment notifications, emails from Amazon, etc. You can set up the rules using either the email address of the sender or the contents of the subject line.

Used this way, tags are almost the same as folders.

I actually like it better than Lightroom, despite the latter being much more expensive. Musical friends I know also seem to think GarageBand is pretty good, for a consumer product.

Yes, this is true. I inflated the scope of the problem, which is there’s no right click -> cut but there is a right click -> copy.

“labels in gmail are better than folders”

I definitely think so. GMail is so good, it makes me hate Outlook.”

I too love gmail and labels are great. But so are folders and they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Google does a lot of good work but sometimes they like to reinvent the wheel a bit. I have an example of why I want folders, but it’s going to make me sound like a lunatic so go easy on me: Sometimes I don’t like other people seeing subject lines and the first sentence of emails that I may have in my inbox. Rather than having to worry about this, I’d rather just move them to a folder that’s then easily accessible. I dislike using the archive feature in lieu of this, because archived emails have to be searched, ie. you have to know what you’re looking for.

“It can be frustrating to use a Mac without Quicksilver.”

I think my largest source of Mac frustration is the advertising. This again goes against the “It Just Works” tagline, as these little things that make the OS usable don’t come with it out of the box (iLife, which does come with it is mostly useless). Of course OS X is a really great base for powerful computing and I genuinely like it for the most part. I keep thinking I should buy Apple stock before their inevitable netbook launch.

Definitely a Mac OS weakness. It can be frustrating to use a Mac without Quicksilver.

lack of cut and paste file management

What do you mean by this? You can move files between folders with the cut and paste key combinations.

lack of window maximize

There has certainly been heaps of discussion about this. I don’t mind the Mac system, myself, but there are certainly plenty of people who get really heated up about it.

labels in gmail are better than folders

I definitely think so. GMail is so good, it makes me hate Outlook.

spotlight stinks for searching

It does. I have mine completely disabled. Quicksilver is much faster and better for many tasks Spotlight is meant to perform.

there are more open source or otherwise free apps for Windows

True, and sometimes annoying – though there are also some good Mac-only free apps.

OS X won’t hand off things to the GPU (like video decoding) when Windows can

This will apparently be part of Snow Leopard.

This is good to know, I may risk an upgrade to test this out as this has been a large source of frustration for me. Thanks for the info.

“It just works” applies to everyday experience. I used Windows for years, then switched to Mac, and since then have had less than 5% of the problems I had running windows. Mac ads work, probably more to amuse existing mac customers who used to use windows than to sway windows customers, because they do map onto everyday experience.

“It just works” is ad advertising slogan – and the first rule of advertising is to ignore then 5% of the market who are specialists and have different perceptions of everything. If you’re part of this 5%, you can never expect mainstream computer marketing to apply to you.

That is simply the approach I prefer. Others have perfectly valid reasons for liking other things better.

I work with both Mac OS and Windows XP every weekday, and I definitely prefer how the Mac operating system works for day-to-day tasks. I also find that Macs generally handle more unusual tasks more elegantly, such as setting up a new computer by transferring files and settings from an old one.

People are right to be worried about viruses on Macs. I run the free ClamXav software.