As mentioned, I now have a Powerbook. This is the first time I’ve used a Mac for an extended period, so does it live up the hype?

Well, yes. I’ve been using the laptop exclusively for the last week and it just works unbelievably well. The first task was to upgrade to Tiger. This was just a case of putting the disc in, clicking ‘continue’ a couple of times and then waiting for about half an hour. No mid-installation reboots, no bluescreens, no hour-long ‘detecting non plug-and-play hardware’ nonsense, it was done within one episode of Buffy. I’m impressed already.

Third-party software installation is also a breeze; you download, you open the installer, and it’s done; it’s such a contrast to Windows, where each bit of software would have asked me an interminable amount of questions about where I want to put things, where I want to save icons, if I want to read the readme, if I want to register the software, make a cup of tea, and so on. It’s also a complete contrast to Linux (despite its unixy internals), which would have had me chasing around the internet hunting down gzipuplib 1.4.5beta and imgshowgnukit 0.0.0.2 before allowing me to continue compiling from the source. It’s nice to have the unix shell when I want it, though, without having to arse around with Cygwin.

Most of the software that came pre-installed I haven’t actually tried out yet, because I don’t make my own films or my own music and I don’t have a photo collection that needs organising, but what I have tried, I’ve generally liked. Safari is an excellent web browser, iTunes works better here than on my Windows machine and iChat seems nice, though I don’t know anybody else who uses iChat so it’s been a tricky one to test. Exposé is as useful as it is fun to play with, and I’ve also discovered that I’m woefully bad at playing chess — at least, against a G4.

Spotlight deserves a special mention. Though I’ve always been quite anal about organising my files, I love its live search capability. Forget about clicking through an applications folder, just typing ‘chess’ or ‘ecto’ and having it appear as you type is wonderful, and I’ve started using it just as a quick way of launching files and applications. It’s smooth and fast, though I only have about three documents on the hard drive so far so I think that’s to be expected.

It’s not all ha ha, hee hee.

I’m less impressed with the much-hyped Dashboard, but this may be because I’ve seen all this before, back in the days of DesktopX from Stardock (circa 2000). It all works very well, but I’ve little interest in all these mis-matched gimmicks, particularly as (so far as I can tell) you can’t have them free-floating on your desktop — you actually have to press the Dashboard button to make them visible. The default email client, ‘Mail’, is also boringly unimpressive though it does the job.

The only problem I’ve encountered so far was when I tried to connect to a wireless network; every attempt I made failed, with the unhelpful error message declaring “There was an error” and not giving me anything to work with. I don’t think there was anything wrong with the network itself as I could connect a Windows laptop to it just fine. Oh well; further experimentation with other networks might make things clearer, but I would have preferred a more elaborate error message from the start.

Things I’m missing.

There were some things that I’m used to in Windows that I couldn’t work out here in MacOS, such as:

• There’s a ‘backspace’ key but no ‘delete’ key (or…possibly vice versa); in Windows I’m used to being able to delete text in both directions — can I not do this on the Powerbook?
• I miss the right-click button and all those lovely contextual menus. How do I, for instance, copy the URL of a link on a webpage, or view the properties of an image without it?
• How do I uninstall things? Just drag the program icon to the trash?
• Is there an equivalent of the Windows ‘hibernate’ option?
• Where the bloody hell is the ‘#’ key?
• Is there an equivalent of pressing Alt Gr and e in order to get an é appearing, without having to open up the ‘Special Characters’ window?

Any help on these things would be appreciated.