A friend was over the other day, and we were printing her resume. While we were in the process of fixing it up (my publishing background makes me more tweaky on that kind of stuff than a normal programmer), we were using Word on my Mac.

It often amazes me, having a Windows using person sit down and watch me use my Mac. I always get all these questions, and things that we (as Mac users) take for granted are like a Christmas surprise to these people. The catcher is: I was just using my computer normally - I wasn't even using the geee-wizz features of the OS (Expose or Dashboard, both of which I use a handful of times a day)

Almost the first thing I got questioned about was my use of Desktop Manager. I said "That lets me keep a bunch of workspaces open at the same time. Like I can keep my email + IM programs up, but in the background, and when I want to switch back with them, just activate that desktop. Or I can work on two projects simultaneously, each one in a different work space")

The next thing she noticed was my IM client - Adium. She was amazed how I could just hover over an IM name and have the away message displayed in a tooltip. (Oh, and how I have all my IM names in Address Book, so Adium displays the person's real name and not their AIM screen name.)

Then an IM came in. I have my Adium set up so that the first message I get from a person is read aloud via Apple's Text To Speech Engine. So my computer starts reading it aloud... it's incredible to me how PC people go crazy over Macintalk.

We were in Safari, and we couldn't spell something. So right clicked on the word, and the correct spelling was in the popup. (Woohhh!). Ummm... Windows doesn't have this? (to be fair, most Mac apps don't either. Cocoa apps get it for free, and it's a wonderful thing.)

Even in Word I would sometimes do interesting things. Like Option-Arrow to go to the previous/next word, and Command-Arrow to go to the end of the line. (Home and End does this on the PC, but I can imagine the Mac Word team having to implement the Command/Option arrow thing after a million feature requests for this from the Mac people requesting it after seeing how powerful that combination is in MPW Shell/BBEdit.).

Of course, using Word isn't fair: throw a few basic publishing techniques (ie: Paragraph Styles, which nobody seems to get) at Word and while the mere mortals tremble, I curse 'cause Word's fighting with me.

Anyway, we were focused on fixing/printing her resume, so I wasn't doing my normal ADD-like (actual) task switching, and I'm certain that, had we been doing more than Word work, she would have been enthralled at any number of things like:

• How I launch apps (I have a Spotlight query that lists all the applications found on my machine, then I type the name of the app I want to find into that query and let Spotlight find the app whose name matches. A little slower than my old friend TigerLaunch, but less mousing.)
• NetNewsWire. 'Cause everybody freaks the first time they get RSS
• The Dock. The Dock is cool (especially how I put folders in it and use it as a quick navigation system.)

Oh, and we have no viruses and spyware. Next person that says "Ohhh, you use a Mac" like it was some kind of social leprosy I'm going to seriously laugh sooo hard at them. They just don't get it.