Sign of pending apocalypse?

I love Windows. Almost always, I have found something in Windows that makes me love it. I loved Windows for Workgroups; loved how things changed in 95, and then truly loved NT and 2000. I was over the moon for XP, and I really enjoy using Vista every day now.

Time for the Mac talk: I hated--neigh--absolutely loathed OS 8 and 9--hated almost everything about the "flavored" iBooks and iMacs. But now I use OS X, somewhat for development purposes, but more and more because I really like it. I don't know how this happened, but I think I'm going to have a go at saying why.

Explorer sucks. Finder does not.

Simple as that. Sort of.

Actually, I'll back off a little from saying that Explorer sucks; some things about it are good. I like that it remembers my favorite folders off to the left. I like that I can click on the toolbar at the top and go back up the folder hierarchy. I like the little helpful shortcuts that it puts for your different file types, so that if you click on an MP3 file, it might suggest Play, Burn, Send to Portable Player, etc. That's handy. I don't like, however, how hard routine file maintenance is. Getting organized if you have even a moderate number of files and folders to sort through is almost painful. You highlight the stuff you need to move, and then you cut, switch folders, and paste. Or you open up both windows to begin with, then you highlight, then you drag down to the taskbar, wait for the second folder to pop to the top, then drag up into it and let go. Hopefully you haven't had a hand twitch, or you've dropped everything and have to go select all you files again. Your other choices are to either buy a large monitor and try to feng shui your windows so you can drag it over the border and into the destination folder, or turn on the folders pane and try to figure out how to properly waggle your cursor so it will make the sub folders drop down so you can access them. I don't know any other way of dealing with it except to tough it out, or download an explorer replacement.

You know how you deal with it in Finder? There's a little button you click that puts panes all the way across the windows you're already working in. Then, when you open a folder, its contents flow into the next pane, leaving you able to drag anything as far up or down the folder hierarchy, or in any folder, whether you've opened it or not. Simple as it could be, but very powerful, almost deceptively so. I now frequently find myself switching over to the Mac box, mapping my Windows drive through the network, and doing my file maintenance that way.

This is the first case of my preferring the Mac to my PC. Could this be a harbinger of things to come?

I'm wouldn't hold my breath. But I would give myself kudos for becoming more open-minded...