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cheerfulI've had my imac for five weeks now, and I feel pretty comfortable with it now. I'm definitely happy that I made the switch, and it's generally a pleasure to use. It hasn't been without its problems though, and its clear that the mac is still behind the curve when it comes to support, but it more than makes up for it in other areas. I'd be grateful to hear from mac owners about some of these issues, or from anyone really who has any interest in this stuff :)
Things I really like about the mac:
- The User Interface.
The user interface for the mac is fantastic. It takes a little getting used to, but in general it seems a lot more responsive, and much better for dealing with the sorts of files I use. I love the ability to have giant thumbnails with useful contents, and I like that I can preview PDFs, DOCs and PSDs without having to open any programs. I love the fact that there are lots of design conventions that applications adopt in order to keep the experience consistent. It sounds lame, but I especially like the fact that everything animates into position - it makes the whole experience feel very solid. I still like Windows, but I find Mac OSX to be more 'comfortable'. - The Dock.
Initially, I found the dock to be weird and confusing, but now I find it second nature. I like the 'stacks' feature a lot, I like the feedback on application progress (like new messages from Adium, or speed reading from Transmission).
- The Keyboard. Best keyboard I've ever used. I'm oddly smitten with the 'pause itunes' button on there as well.
- The Dashboard
I keep a 'web clip' of my google calendar on here, as well as using the gmail gadget, and a few other gadgets too. I quite like the stickies, and in general I like the idea of all this stuff being resident but well out of the way.
- Front Row (the media-centre style front end, with remote control)
This was something I didn't even consider of interest before I bought the mac, but I have taken to using it almost every day. It's really great to use Front Row to watch videos, listen to music, or listen to podcasts. It helps that I have 'Hazel' to automatically move any movies that I download into my proper Movies folder. I love the tiny remote control as well, and video-podcasts now make a lot more sense to me. The fact that front row sits on top of all the other applications means that I don't have to care whether the mac is doing stuff, I can just grab the remote and fire up Front Row at any time. - Speech
I really liked this on my old ibook six years ago, and I still like it now. Getting an audio alert when an FTP file has completed, or failed, and any number of other alerts... is really useful. It means I can concentrate on what I'm doing without a pop-up window interupting me. - Boot Camp
I don't use it very often, but it does work fantastically. The only thing I've used it for lately is printing (see below), but it's nice to know I have the option. I intend to give Half Life 2 another shot at some point, for example, and I will definitely be using this for 3DS Max. I have itunes setup so that it accesses all the music from my mac hard-drive, so it's pretty comfortable to work in XP on my mac. - iTunes.
I've been using this on the PC for ages, but it seems to run much better on my mac. I have album artwork for all my music (about 200 albums) and the general user experience is fantastic. I've never really had a 'well kept' music collection on PC before, but now I have everything tidy and organised, it's great.
- The mouse's 'scroll ball'.
I was prepared for doom and gloom with this, but in fact I find myself making good use of it. Sidewards scrolling actuallly makes a lot of sense at times, and it works a lot better than those stupid tiltable scroll wheels. - Sleep mode!
I never turn off my mac. It sleeps if it isn't doing anything, and it stays awake but whisper quiet if it is busy downloading or processing. It basically acts a lot like a laptop. I've never had sleep mode work nicely on a desktop PC, but this works great on the mac and I love it.
- No 'fullscreen' option.
This is something I'm getting used to, but it's initially a bit weird for everything to be so window based. Things like 'expose' help a lot to cope with this, but with certain sorts of work I quite like working in fullscreen mode. I'm getting used to working this way though, and it isn't too bad.
- The mouse 'movement'
I'm not very fond of the way that the mouse pointer moves on the mac. It has a completely different set of acceleration curve and movement speed options, and it feels very different than Windows as a result. I having two large monitors makes this problem more pronounced, and I'm getting used to it, but it's not something I'm fond of.
- My Printer
Or rather, my mac doesn't like my printer. My HP 1018 Laserjet doesn't work at all on the mac, not even with weird fruity 3rd party drivers that I wasted time with. Consider me shocked that HP would be so lame as to not have mac support. I had considered printers to be pretty 'universal' now, even with linux. - Ejecting USB-keys / SD Cards
Windows XP has had it for a while so that you can eject any SD card ormemory stick without risk of it breaking. The mac, however, is stillvery picking about when you remove these that they need to be ejected,which is a bit of a nuisance. - Parallels.
Parallels was a big fat disappointment to me. It didn't support graphics hardware properly, and has weird restrictions (like it won't access all the USB drives that my mac has access to, etc). It also buggered up my Max license too, which I need to fix - seems that max's anti piracy stuff considered parallels to be a weird hack.
2008-04-02 12:05 pm (UTC)