BlogDale

Please don’t tell on me. I bought a mac.

<whisper> OK Steve, you were right.  I do like it. </whisper> (Steve knows how hard it was for me to say that.  In public, as well).

Yes, I know, one of those “plastic toys” (I got round that, mine’s aluminium). After a lot of thought and anguish about how I’d need to transfer all my Windoze expertise and Stuff (lots of Stuff) across to a Mac, and how there would be a huge learning curve, etc., etc., my thirst for adventure exceeded my reluctance and I made the jump. Don’t get me wrong, I still have the PC running right by me - Just In Case, you understand - and I have taken out insurance against hitting technological brick walls such as You Can’t Do That on a Mac. Umm..the insurance is that this Mac runs Parallels so I can run Windows on it (and Linux, w00t) all at the same time. Scary stuff. I’m still gathering confidence to run Bootcamp so that I can run Windows DirectX 3D games on this baby (Parallels won’t do it - yet) but when that’s done I shall retire the old PC to the children’s room.

Admittedly the Mac cost a whole bunch more than the old PC but as Grendel (the PC - don’t ask) was an ebuyer special at £127 it would take a lot of beating. It’s been reliable and it coped politely with my impatience when I was asking too much of it, which was nearly all the time. So full marks to the old PC for being a Good Egg but one needs new challenges, what?

Enter the Mac (doesn’t have a name yet but it might be Duncan - again, don’t ask). I’ve been using it for about four days now. The old Learning Curve fear seems to be confined to the single-button mouse and the weird unfamiliar keystrokes. And I could get round this easily if I ran Synergy or VNC and operated the Mac from the PC. I’ve used LogMeIn to get to the Mac from the PC and it’s flawless - so what’s the problem? (Ans.: there isn’t a problem). So far there isn’t any appreciable difference in using the Mac apart from differ’nt strokes of the keys (aside: I just used CTRL-LeftArrow to highlight a word and it doesn’t work like that; the Mac went into Spaces which is a multi-desktop thang, changing my desktop. Mildly annoying right now but ultimately highly useful. So I have to learn a new set of codes; big deal).

Those who know me well will recognise my penchant for free and open source software and might be concerned that I was leaving all that behind me for proprietary brand lock-in. There was no need to worry. It seems, folks, that there’s as much Out There for the Mac as ever there was for the PC. Not that I’ve needed much, really - most of the stuff I’ve needed comes with OS-X Leopard anyway. And herein lies the major difference I’ve found with the Mac - even with my lengthy experience of the Windows OS I would often find that I had to search for things in obscure places, trying to double-guess the programmer for the way he/she might have named and classified the application. It’s slightly different with the Mac - the things you don’t need Just Aren’t There. Conversely, the things you do need Just Are, where you’d expect to find them. Actually, it’s taken me a short while to realise that generally the basic stuff appears in a window onscreen whereas the more advanced stuff, the demons that you might get into real trouble with, are available from the dropdown menus. Here there may be dragons, but the safe footpath is clearly marked anyway.

More on my Mac excursions to follow,  but for now, a few points:

• It Just Works.  Open the box, plug it in, plug in your peripherals and you’re away;
• It Plays Nicely.  Mac softwares talk to each other in nice ways it seems, so my creativity (which is lamentable anyway) isn’t stifled by having to search for Stuff because it’s already there where I need it.  This has been a pleasant surprise on more than one occasion;
• It’s Just a Computer - Mac/PC/Linux/Unix - who cares?.  Difference is that this computer runs all of them so I’m not restricted in how I work.  The nice thing is that I can run a Terminal window in OS-X and use Unix commands in there, at least I can use the ones that a *nix-wannabe needs; made me feel all warm and cuddly when I found that;
• This is the quietest computer I own, apart from my phone;
• Sound interface is a bit annoying but I understand it’s better on other Mac flavas;
• Webcam support is lamentable.  Sorry Mac Lovers but it ought to be better than this.  Although, I guess the webcam market has grown up around the PC since Mac users would have bought an iSight camera anyway, ‘cos they are loyal and they Lurve anything with an “i” in front of it.  And they have too much money otherwise they wouldn’t have bought a Mac, would they?
• Putting an “i” in front of anything to do with a Mac is as much a coup de grace as making people type “win” to run their GUI (remember those DOS days guys?).  Does it kind of subliminally auto-suggest the differences; the Mac is about personalisation, creativity etc. and the PC is for winners? I’m going to stop thinking about this or it’ll become a personal hangup; I hate the language being hijacked for corporate gain but I know I’d feel differently if I’d thought of such a great marketing idea.

Reporting again soon, readers, with some thoughts and experiences on particular software.  there’s a lot to play with.