The First Week With Mac

I've had my Mac for a little over a week now and I'm feeling comfortable with it. I like how the most common defaults are just selected for you and it seems a lot of thought has been put into the interface. For example, usually there are no OK buttons on dialogs and it generally selects the right default for you. The screens are just simply gorgeous!

I love the quickness of putting it to sleep! Wow! Booting it up from scratch is slow, but I've only had to do that once so far. I just put it to sleep. Nice.

I'm enjoying Dashboard and I've already gone a little nuts with it. I think I have something like 8 widgets. I have a weather one, two quotes of the day, inspiration for the day, word of the day, unix command lookup, ruby documentation, and a thesaurus.

Switching between applications is nice. It took me a little time to get into the multiple windows per application way of thought. In Windows, everything is a window with no grouping by application. Mac groups windows by applications and makes it super easy to switch between.

The only problem I've had is re-learning key mappings for Eclipse and Squeak. They are generally the same, but it's the apple key versus alt key on Windows. The keyboard is a laid out a little differently too, but I'm not complaining. It's just taking a little to get used to.

I'm loving Self. It makes the whole reason for getting the Mac worthwhile. I've been going through the tutorials and I've only scratched the surface. But, language-wise I'm so impressed with Self. They take their simplicity seriously!

On more thing, I can now read postscript files directly! Yippee! They get converted automatically to PDF and that is wonderful. I can see I'm going to go super crazy with academic papers. Mac will be my pipe for my crack.

My Mac didn't come with an AirPort card and the battery lasts 1 minutes. I'm missing my wireless and I got to have battery power. All in all, I'm having fun with it. Right now, I'll be staying in both Windows and Mac. But, there's a lot of cool things on the Mac that I still need to explore like XCode. I'll keep you posted!