Miscellaneous Ramblings....

Entries from Sunday, March 18. 2007

Sunday, March 18. 2007

Life with Mac (1st week).... ;-)

It has been exactly one week since I have crossed the burning sands to Mac-land ;-), and I am quite happy to say that I have 95% of the things that I need configured done. Parallels Desktop is running w/ Office 2007 (needed for the some Windows-centric apps my work has), KDE is also running (that was a little bit more tricky) and my main environment is pretty well configured the way that I want it. I am pretty pleased to be able to do this after only a week on a totally foreign platform. Once nice nod to Apple is that any question I had (with the exception of configuring KDE), I never seemed to be more than 5 minutes away from the answer to any of my questions. Either it was intuitive enough that I figured out on my own or it was answered in the Apple help documentation, or answered in one of the many Mac Forums scattered around the internet (I have only had to pick my Mac co-workers' head only a couple of times ;-) ). In general, things seemed to just work right out of the box.
I'll be running more intensive performance tests on my new toy in the coming week, but things look promising so far - the only time I have been able to even start pushing my dual-core CPU was the source building of X11 and KDE. I have had the machine up for a couple of days with about 12 applications running (including X11 with several Eterm windows open and my usual Firefox session with my 15 tabs open) and things still seem to be humming along.

Some of the key differences that I found changing over from the Windows platform to the Mac platform were (Note: not criticisms, just observations):
  • No insert key
    (Update {6/20/07}: It looks like you can use the combination of the "open apple-mouse-click" to do the insert function under X11).
  • Getting used to the "open apple" or command key versus the "alt" key in Windows
  • Changes made from the System Preferences panel take effect immediately - no Apply button
  • Getting used to always looking for the menu bar at the top of the screen -- instead of attached to the application
  • Enjoying the consistency of all apps using the same keyboard shortcuts (i.e. "open apple"-, brings up the application Preferences)
  • Enjoying adding and using the Dashboard widgets (which pretty much beats the pants off of anything on the Windows side (and I have looked long and hard - Stardock and Serious Samurize do the best job that I have seen on the Windows side).
  • Yes, Spotlight is a much better search engine than Microsoft's Find utility (and quicker).
  • Firefox seems to be a little bit slower rendering some sites (not a lot, just a shade).          
    Having been unhappy with Safari (from being forced to use it on my sister's Mac), one of my first actions on my Mac was to get Firefox 2.0.0.2 installed. I noticed that it seemed to be just a little bit slower rendering some pages, so I tried the Firefox alpha 2 GrandParadiso (FF ver 3.0), which is much speedier, but crashes occasionally and doesn't support my favorite extension (del.icio.us bookmarks) yet (all part trying to live life on the bleeding edge). :-(

    • (For those considering switching platforms, there is the top 30 mistakes made by new Mac users, and a nice article about what to consider in switching from Windows to a Mac.


    In my Mac journey, here are some of the cool (mac-centric) sites that I have come across:
    All in all, a surprisingly good week. It was very nice to be able to pick up a totally foreign OS and be able to have it configured exactly the way you want it (even with doing odd stuff, i.e. running KDE window manager in parallel with the Mac OSX Aqua one) within a week - certainly not what I expected.
    (I am sure the members of my new Mac family will be waiting in line to tell me "I told you so!").
    Posted by Colleen Velo in Computers, Mac Comment: (1) Trackbacks: (0)
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