I'm a traitor...
Well, isn’t this interesting.
As of yesterday I’ve entirely entered the Reality Distortion Field.
The best thing about spending far more than I’m comfortable with in order to buy a Mac is that it’s suddenly made me slender, suave and stunningly attractive in a black mock turtleneck. My mere proximity to it’s sleek aluminum lines have caused me to devastate the hearts and minds of those around me as I’ve reached out and became instantly more productive and creative. Look out, ladies, I’ve got me a Mighty Mouse and I wield it with both hands.
Seriously, I like a lot more than I dislike. You can count on me to confirm the quality of the hardware. I like the feel of the keyboard, I like the design, I like mostly everything about the physical system.
As far as OS X, well, I’m happy I’ve got some experience outside of the Windows user interface. This is certainly different - to the point of bewildering at times. How do I minimize the all the windows on the screen? Expose is really nice, yes, but it keeps storing all this crap on my desktop and I need to find it. I guess I need more experience using Finder.
On the other hand, I hate having crap on my desktop. I like in a world of directories and subdirectories with a nice, plain, boring desktop with absolutely nothing on it at all. I’ve got .dmg files lined up down the right side of the screen and at this point I don’t know if I can delete them (coff drag them to the trash coff) or not.
The first thing I downloaded and installed was Firefox. Safari’s okay, but I’m sticking with what I prefer, thanks. The mail program is good enough for now. I rank it a thousand times better than Outlook and regretfully about on par with Thunderbird. I spent a while setting up rules for email last night and I’m reasonably happy with it.
I dearly miss Trillian, though. I’ve bought the Pro version for myself and it’s far and away my favourite messaging program. iChat is a very pale comparison to it. I’d happily pay for an OS X version of it.
Strangely enough, I have yet to plug in my iPod, but I don’t expect many surprises there as opposed to how it works on Windows. I did plug in my camera and it integrated perfectly with iPhoto - which I offically mostly like. Put that into the “I gotta play with this more” category. I haven’t plugged in the GPS, but I’ve been mostly assured it will work just-fine-thank-you. I’ll take that on when I’m ready to get smarter again.
I’m not quite getting the hang of right-clicking with the Mighty Mouse yet. I seem to have to fail the first time I try and then I get the right click on my second attempt. I’m seriously pissed off that I can’t get a track pad with two mouse buttons. I’d spend $100 for a second button on there. Apple’s making a mistake by not giving people like me an option at the very least.
I ‘bought’ NeoOffice today. I chose to not buy Office and I’ll be using NeoOffice instead. I’ve got Office 2003 should I ever need it, but donating to NeoOffice is a lot cheaper and it’ll probably handle everything I’ll need. The only other thing I’ve downloaded is Google Earth which is stunning. It runs so much more smoothly than I’ve ever seen on any system I’ve ever had - except perhaps my system at work which could give this a run for it’s money.
I’m not a full time switcher, I’m certainly tackling a new system to learn and push myself, but also to understand where Apple is going. I’m looking forward to seeing Vista as well, but certainly this is going to be my primary system for a while. And it’s awfully nice to be beside my Lady-love typing madly as we compete for the wireless resources.
I’ll also be very happy to advise that you should at least consider a Mac as your next personal computer. It makes an awful lot of sense for people who mostly surf the web and doing basic computing to move away from the dominant platform. I wouldn’t recommend it if I weren’t willing to consider it myself.