So Bwana asked me to document my descent into Macness. "Abandon all right-clicks, ye who enter here." The Powerbook and I spent some quality time together over the weekend, and I'm starting to get a bit more comfortable with it. So what's good, what's bad, and what's ugly?
Compared to the mess required to get a new XP install up - it's cake. There were a few patches that needed downloading, but it was easy to do. I DID have to install, reboot, check again, install and reboot but it was pretty straightforward.
The most nagging thing is that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V aren't cut and paste - it's Apple-C and Apple-V. Not at all used to that yet.
At work (where my desk is really entirely too high) I have a problem where I move the mouse cursor while I'm typing (my palm brushes the touchpad). That can be pretty crazy since there is a corner that activates Expose and suddenly all my windows move. There is an option to disable the trackpad if you plug in an external mouse, which I usually have at work - I haven't decided if I want to turn that on or not.
Expose just rocks the casbah. I used to hate the Mac plethora of Windows, and the difficulty of finding a particular app, but Expose makes that like buttah!
Out of the box, the function keys all do "laptoppy" things like volume controls, or contrast or whatever. There's a modifier key to make them be normal, which was annoying. I finally got annoyed to figure out how to swap that behavior yesterday - and apparently the option to switch it wasn't provided until Panther.
I had it three days before I *needed* a terminal window to get something done - and I think that was just because I stuck a Unix app (OpenOffice) on it. Good power user tip - the root account isn't enabled by default. OpenOffice put a folder on my drive that was owned by root, and not writeable by admin users. I wanted to change it, and had to sudo over to root to get it done. If you're coming to Mac from Linux - google it, I forget the exact process. Basically the root account is marked as not being login-able or having a valid password. :-)
It's gorgeous. It's hard to quantify but just messing with it is FUN, in a way that Windows never has been.
Out of the box it was set up to sleep after a timeout, even on AC power. When it sleeps it signs out of iChat everything. It keep screwing up downloads until I figured that out and changed it.
Right now I'm running 7 apps, several with multiple windows open, and it seems very natural to navigate. The Dock is sweet - it's out of the way, and the Start menu is long gone. If you think about the whole list of apps at the botton of the screen - that's a very awkward UI. And the actual MENU itself? Utter crap. I have to manage my Start Menu every few weeks - or it gets longer than my screen is tall.
Compared to the mess required to get a new XP install up - it's cake. There were a few patches that needed downloading, but it was easy to do. I DID have to install, reboot, check again, install and reboot but it was pretty straightforward.
The most nagging thing is that Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V aren't cut and paste - it's Apple-C and Apple-V.
At work (where my desk is really entirely too high) I have a problem where I move the mouse cursor while I'm typing (my palm brushes the touchpad). That can be pretty crazy since there is a corner that activates Expose and suddenly all my windows move. There is an option to disable the trackpad if you plug in an external mouse, which I usually have at work - I haven't decided if I want to turn that on or not.
Expose just rocks the casbah. I used to hate the Mac plethora of Windows, and the difficulty of finding a particular app, but Expose makes that like buttah!
Out of the box, the function keys all do "laptoppy" things like volume controls, or contrast or whatever. There's a modifier key to make them be normal, which was annoying. I finally got annoyed to figure out how to swap that behavior yesterday - and apparently the option to switch it wasn't provided until Panther.
I had it three days before I *needed* a terminal window to get something done - and I think that was just because I stuck a Unix app (OpenOffice) on it. Good power user tip - the root account isn't enabled by default. OpenOffice put a folder on my drive that was owned by root, and not writeable by admin users. I wanted to change it, and had to sudo over to root to get it done. If you're coming to Mac from Linux - google it, I forget the exact process. Basically the root account is marked as not being login-able or having a valid password. :-)
It's gorgeous. It's hard to quantify but just messing with it is FUN, in a way that Windows never has been.
Out of the box it was set up to sleep after a timeout, even on AC power. When it sleeps it signs out of iChat everything. It keep screwing up downloads until I figured that out and changed it.
Right now I'm running 7 apps, several with multiple windows open, and it seems very natural to navigate. The Dock is sweet - it's out of the way, and the Start menu is long gone. If you think about the whole list of apps at the botton of the screen - that's a very awkward UI. And the actual MENU itself? Utter crap. I have to manage my Start Menu every few weeks - or it gets longer than my screen is tall.