If you’re not in the least bit interested in my experiences with my new Mac then you can safely skip this post. Otherwise, read on…
The good bits
- Bootup and shutdown are very fast in comparison with my Wintel laptop, but this may be because my laptop has quite a bit of software loaded on it and a number of things which run on bootup: virus scanner, memory manager, ActiveSync, phone manager utilities, Microsoft Antispyware and a series of hotkey/background utilities for managing my sound and video. The majority of those won’t be needed on the Mac.
- Despite mice with more than one button being a rarity in the Mac world, my two-button wireless mouse with scroll wheel works just as it did in Windows. If you’re only used to one button then trust me, you don’t know what you’re missing.
- Not really tried it yet but installing and uninstalling applications looks like a sinch.
- iPhoto is an awesome tool to have out of the box. Not quite as powerful as Picasa for Windows but a nice tool to have.
- Seems to work fine with all of the hardware that I’ve plugged into it thus far.
- Preview works well as a PDF viewer. And I appreciate native support for creating PDFs when printing, rather than installing an add-on like PDFCreator (or the full Acrobat package, obviously).
- The Terminal, and all its Unix command line goodness.
- Nice to see iChat making the first steps into cross-network support by allowing connections to Jabber and Bonjour as well. That said, I’ll be downloading Adium X to enable the other networks.
The bad bits
- OS X is still not properly respecting my keyboard layout. Sure, I’ve found the options that let you change it, but what it thinks is a UK layout, um, isn’t. When I press Shift+2 I should be getting “, not an @ – that’s what it’s labelled as.
- Closing applications takes some getting used to. Clicking the red X doesn’t actually close it – it just sends it to the dock. You have to press Alt+Q or right-click its dock icon and choose Close. Minimising sends it to the right-hand side of the dock, incidentally.
- Though it’s not as bad as many PC manufacturers (see Ed Bott’s weblog entry) there’s still a bit of bundled crap that I don’t really want, namely trials of Keynote and Microsoft Office:Mac 2004. I’ve downloaded NeoOffice to replace the latter.
- iSync doesn’t support my phone (Nokia 7250i) or PDA (Dell Axim X50v). Though I will be getting a better phone soon (next 6-9 months, I reckon) and The Missing Sync fixes the latter problem, albeit at a cost of $40.
Software I have lined up to install
- Deer Park Alpha 2
- Thunderbird 1.0.6
- Adium X 0.82
- NeoOffice/J 1.1
- VLC 0.82
- Flickr Uploadr for Mac OS X
- Flickr plugin for iPhoto
Any other suggestions? I’m considering buying Transmit but would appreciate some free alternatives. I might give FireFTP another spin once DPA2 is running.
