If you read my Twitter stream, you’ve probably realized I’d been stupid enough to decide to do another multi-vendor experiment: I’m trying to figure out whether an old grump can adapt to a MacBook Air.

Warning: What follows is a rant. You might want to skip this one and read something more technical.

No problems so far with reliability or software stability. I love the design (who doesn’t), the speed, the weight, and the fact that OSX is Unix-based. Opening gedit from a remote Linux box on which I have to change a few config files, doing ssh or running perl without installing tons of add-on software is a godsend ... but I still have the feeling that MacBook is a toy designed for creative people, not for people who have to get a job done.

Let’s start with the menus. There’s a reason I know every possible shortcut and Ctrl-Shift-Alt/Something/Something-else-totally-weird combination in every program I use – I can blind-type and I don’t want to waste my time moving to the mouse, carefully positioning it to the top of the screen (not top-of-window, that would be way too close), and wandering through menus to select what I need.

I can use most of the Windows applications I need without mouse. I almost never use Mouse in Word and PowerPoint is the only major exception, but even there I use mouse only to position the objects (and I would use arrow keys if I could somehow select the objects) and deal with the keyboard stupidities Microsoft created in place of the traditional menus. With Mac, using Office for Mac or any other program, I waste more than half of my time playing with the trackpad.

Oh, did I mention that my Thinkpad has a TrackPoint so I can move the mouse without moving my hands? Can you imagine how frustrated I am with all the extra movements I have to do? How much time I waste doing that? Probably way more than I gained due to MacBook’s fantastic speed (I haven’t ever seen a Windows system as responsive as MacBook Air running VMware Fusion). Oh, you do know how simple it is to do drag-and-drop with the TrackPad (you almost don’t have to move your fingers). Welcome to the Trackpad hell ;)

No, I won’t even mention that all Alt/Ctrl the keys are in the wrong position (or that I have to press Alt-arrow to get the behavior of Ctrl-arrow, and Cmd-R to get the behavior of Ctrl-R). That’s just my muscle memory; I can get over it ... but there’s something else fundamentally wrong with the Cupertino Fruit Company – the morons think they are above standards.

You see, every single country in this world has its own keyboard standards (US and UK included, but they do have slightly bigger market share than some other countries ;). In Slovenia, the keyboard should look like this ... and it does on every single computer I’ve ever seen (years ago you couldn’t even sell a computer if it didn’t have the right keyboard), apart from Mac. Steve & Co obviously thought they are above those minor details; Y and Z are switched on their keyboard, and it has several other characters in the wrong position, not to mention characters like @[]{} that are in totally unexpected places (and they’re not even shown on the keys, so you have to guess where they might be hiding). Probably doesn’t matter to people who peck-type, but for some of us it’s a major annoyance.

To add insult to injury, VMware Fusion does the proper thing, so my Windows 7 running within Fusion has everything at its expected place ... but that only works as long as I don’t look at the keyboard.

Then there’s the language thing. I happen to be used to Slovenian keyboard, so I use laptops with this key layout. I happen to be writing in two languages (English and Slovenian) and want to use spell checker. No problems on Windows – you can define any combination of language/keyboard layout, so I’m writing this post using English language (so the spell checker kicks out all my stupidities) and Slovenian key layout.

The wise guys @ Cupertino Fruit Company know better – who would ever want to write in more than one language? The language and keyboard layout are tightly coupled in OSX. You cannot write in English using Slovenian keyboard. Who would ever want to do that?

There’s probably some obscure configuration file I can hack to have it my way (pointers appreciated ;), but the narrow-mindedness of the standard setup is astonishing.

Last but definitely not least, the Office for Mac applications are broken in too many details (yeah, they do look the same and read the same files). Let’s start with the Outlook – it allows me to import my Windows Outlook file, but doesn’t want to use its Inbox. What? You want me to have “old” and “new” Inboxes? How stupid to you have to be to do something like that?

Then there’s Word. No useful shortcuts apart from basic text editing (see above for my opinion about keyboard shortcuts for menu actions). Even worse, some things just don’t work (example: highlighting). Full-screen is a joke. I spend twice the time to write something in Word for Mac than I do on Word for Windows.

Before you tell me I should switch to a completely different application suite on Mac (and you’re probably right), here’s the problem: I have years of emails and gigabytes of existing content that I’m frequently using. I cannot switch to something completely new. Lock-in? Definitely.

I’m not giving up (yet) ... I’m just disappointed that I’m back to the old “laptop + PC” days, only this time it’s Thinkpad (for serious work where speed matters) and MacBook Air (for the office meetings and travel). Too bad ...