Get a Mac?

Macs have been getting a lot of press over the last year or so and have been making some big gains in the computing world. What I am going to try and do is talk about my experiences with my Mac.

Firstly, to let you know where I’m coming from, I’m a Windows user no doubt about that. I have used pretty much every version since DOS 4 and know each system pretty well. I will admit I don’t know everything about Vista, but that’s because I haven’t got it yet. In terms of computing experience I’m 21 and have been playing with computers since I was pretty young really. I do everything from web browsing to video editing and most things in between. These days I mainly specialise in MSSQL, MySQL, PHP and C#.NET, although my biggest skills come from MSSQL. I have a fairly wide, although limited experience with Linux and I not a huge fan of getting into code on my OS, hence none of them have really ever sat very well with my. I’m sure one day I will find an rpm that just works, but we are a way of that me thinks.

Anyway, so about a year ago I decided I was going to get a Mac. Now I was looking into a Mac min as they are about as cheap as they come and let’s face it, Macs are not cheap. Given I was buying this to play with and to test I was not going to go the full whack and get a G5, much as I may have wanted to.

A friend at the time was selling his powerbook and offered it to me, so what I actually snapped up was a PowerBook G4. So its PPC and it has half a gig of RAM. I agree not top of the line, so I will let it off for being slow sometimes. It is running OS 10.4 fully patched. As for additional software, it currently has iLife, iWork 06, Office 2004, Firefox, Adium and Skype on top of the original install base. It also has Synergy installed in a GUI form, although this has stopped working for some reason.

First impressions of the system was it looked very impressive. I would probably call it quite quirky. Things like the password box shakes if you get the password wrong. Not that cool, but quite funny. Getting used to the look and feel is quite easy. As far as a lot of people will be concerned it works very much like windows. You have icons, you can doubt click on them, they open. Not hard.

At the bottom of the screen you have this shortcuts bar called a dock. This is in short a whole load of shortcuts to all your application. If you have something open it sits on the dock, even if you don’t keep it there, and when you minimise something it goes to another side of the dock. You get a little black arrow under any application that is open which I guess is one way of doing it.

At the top is the apple menu. Well, I guess that’s what its called, I don’t actually know. This has an apple in the left which you click on to get to system preferences and to shut down etc. It also works like the top bar of any application you have open. So it changes. It contains the file menu, the edit menu etc. So in other words, when you have word open, the file, edit, view, insert etc menus are not part of the window, but sit at the top of the screen all the time. Again, just a different way of doing it. I’m not that keen on it, I find it a bit annoying as if I’m working on two things side by side, I have to click the application window to then move back up to the top to get to the button that’s now there because the right window is selected.

The top also acts like a system tray, although this is unimportant.

System preferences are quite easy to use, works close enough to the control panel not to care really. Most things you would expect are in there. No way to remove programs from there, nor does there seem to be any firewall. If OSX does have a firewall built in, I don’t see any options for it.

The biggest issue I have with the desktop is there is no one place to get to all your programs. Either you have it in your dock, or you have to go off to your applications folder and find wherever the file is to open it.

The window manager is one of my biggest complaints, especially given its rather hard to get away from. For example, you can only resize a window from the bottom left and you can only drag it around from its top bar. So the other day when I changed my screen resolution to fit on a data projector I could not get to the bottom corner because it was off the screen, and I could not drag the window up because it would not let me take my mouse past the screen top. I had to change resolution back down, resize the window and then change back again. Also, of the tree buttons, close, maximise and minimise, maximise doesn’t actually take up the whole screen. Different, but I can live with it. I do find myself resizing windows quite a lot of the time and it has to be said this is not very impressive how hard it is.

Next, the most annoying thing the window manager does EVER is its so inconsistent. For example, look at a folder and what’s inside. If you are viewing with the tile view then you can use both The apple key and the shift key to multiple select icons. Now change into the list view and you will find the apple key still works as it did a second ago, but the shift key now does list selection. I have yet to work out how to do list selection in the tile view.

Ok, the right click. Possibly the single most annoying thing you have to get used to. You see, OSX has a right click. There is a whole right click menu for many many things. They have mice with right-click and for years you have been able to plug in pretty much any two buttoned PC mouse in and use the function. Yet for some reason they make their laptops with only one button. I thought the idea of making both the hardware and the software was so it all fitted together nicely and just worked. Seems like they missed something to me. Yes, you can control click, but trust me, its annoying as hell.

I think I will stop there for now, and actually I haven’t even got onto the bit I wanted to. I have my fair share of Mac horror stories, but I will write them later I think. Some of you know the issues I have been having, but I thought it might be fun to write a few of my impressions having been going with it for about a year.