The Powerbook
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.
I’m feeling very useful suddenly…
It might seem obvious, but Apple’s built in help system is usually very useful unlike most Windows counterparts.
Other than all that, welcome to Happyland™!
Blast! My nicely formatted post has been killed… it looked nice in the preview!
Sorry about that Chris, I’ve fixed things now. I wish I could work out a way of stopping the live preview from showing forbidden tags..I’d disabled list elements because people had a tendency to not use them properly and then I’d have to go and edit the comment to get things to validate, blah blah blah.
Anyway, thanks for all the tips. The 3 key has the £ symbol, no sign of the # symbol on any of the keys at all…
I did find the sleep mode, but it’s not quite what I’m after. Or, it may be, and I may just be misunderstanding it, but the hibernate option in Windows writes the contents of its memory to a hard drive when shutting down completely, and then restores the memory from that when booting up again. The Mac sleep mode appears to still be using up power.
The # symbol is found by pressing alt-3
alt = option
Welcome to the wonderful world of Apple. Its good here.
Ahh… the good ol’ English localisation where things (generally) have the correct spelling and the local currency gets a mention. Although technically now it’s just International English so it’s not quite so customised as it once was. At least they know we’re not all Americans.
I found some useful sites regarding hibernation or lack thereof. As noted, sleep seems so efficient that they’ve not made hibernation a priority.
Finally, perhaps if you add a checkbox on the post form along the lines of "I’m a web developer honestly I am and I can write valid XHTML 1.0 strict markup." That said, I hardly win points for being observant having completely failed to spot the support of
<kbd>which would have made my previous comment look much better.Is there anything like the hotkeys and VWM’s you get with windows and an alternate shell? Those are the things that I find I really miss when I’m forced to use exploder. It sounds like Spotlight would provide most of the functionality of lsxcommand. I guess the Mac community was never forced to innovate in quite the same way that Windows users were – because the built-in functions don’t suck so badly.
I haven’t noticed anything like VWMs or hotkeys; I suspect that hotkeys exist somewhere, somehow, but for a VWM you’d need to get a third-party app. Doesn’t Windows have hotkeys of some kind?
If you’re running explorer, I think you can assign hotkeys to individual shortcuts on your desktop or in the start menu. You have to do it on a per-shortcut basis, though, using the properties dialog. There’s no way to assign them all through a single interface, at least AFAIK. Third party-apps are much better than the intrinsic explorer method.
Have you had a go with Automator? That’s one of the new Tiger things I would really like to play with.
And in fairness to Linux (Debian, anyway), installing 99% of software is just
apt-get install stuffand everything is downloaded, configured and installed automatically.I haven’t looked at Automater at all, I don’t really have any need for it yet. As for that
apt-getstuff, I’ve heard it works well, but I tried Debian a couple of years ago and it never worked that well for me; I was still always having to hunt around for obscure packages and libraries and whatnot. Plus I could never get my graphics card to work either. Gave up, eventually, and I think I gave the computer away.Now hang on a second, don’t go slating Windows for third-parties creating crap installations! MS have spent plenty of time developing Windows Installer and when used properly it works wonderfully well. In a business environment it really shines.
> In a business environment it really shines.
That’s because the constant slurry of viruses crawling over it, polishes the finish to a very high sheen.
Don’t get me wrong. I am very gainfully employed as a Windows developer and I know that Windows is where business is. That doesn’t mean that I like it. Since Jobs came back, Apple is where all the best innovation is again. I really wish I could make a living writing software for Mac. Until I can, I am trapped in Windows land. I still play with Linux from time to time, it just doesn’t make sense to use two different operating systems.
Boot Linux: check email and to do list.
Boot windows: work a bit.
Boot Linux: check email and update task list.
Boot Windows: work a little more.
Have Lunch…
Just doesn’t work for me.
Safari has a really weird way of loading images; it sorts of drags them down in from the top of where they’re supposed to be, if you see what I mean.
cletus,
You misinterpreted my meaning, or maybe I just didn’t explain myself correctly. I didn’t mean that windows shines, that it will never do, I mean windows installer shines in a business environment. This is of course when the install has been developed correctly, which is generally a rare case with third parties, even the large ones (AutoDesk spring to mind).