I've been using a mac for about... 10 months or so now... so i thought i'll just take some time to summarize why i love my mac.
There are tons of articles praising macs, and even more die hard mac fans who would literally defend the mac to their grave... i dont think its all that fantastic and erm... godly as many make it out to be.... There are quite a few things here and there that makes my mac experience incomplete (at least w/o some EXTRA, and often paid, programs). Still, i'm loving the overall experience... In many ways the mac is more user friendly and convenient than windows... its undeniable that microsoft took ideas from apple when they came up with the sidebar + applications in vista, and the subsequent grouping of application windows in windows 7... what else did they rip off macs? lol.
The greatest change from windows and mac is probably the dock and how windows from the same application are grouped together.... unless you were a windows 7 user that is. It took me some time to get used to Expose. At the beginning i had great trouble with the idea of using both Expose and the dock... Let me explain the background situation 1st. I use firefox, chrome and safari all at the same time so i can say log in to different forum accounts and post at the same time. So previously i used the Expose function to view ALL open windows to switch between different browsers. Which gave me a huge headache as all forum windows look the same regardless of which browser it was opened in (even worst when all the preview windows are really tiny when there are many app windows open). Than figured, and slowly got used to the fact that i can use the dock buttons, and the Expose function to show all windows in the application ONLY. Now its no longer a problem for me... in fact, even when i switch to xp (cos the darn maple which doesn’t run in mac, even when i'm using parallels!) i move my mouse to the corner to switch windows... only to find that i have to click on the task bar instead.
OS X Lion is coming in July, and it brings along many features including mission control... from the preview it seems much better than the current expose as it shows at a glance which windows are from which application. Greatly looking forward to when Lion hits the stores. sadly i believe i'll have to pay to upgrade though :(
Another thing actually had to google on like the 1st day of using mac was... the finder. yes Finder is actually a program in mac, and its basically ur good ol' Explorer in windows. same thing, shows all your files and drives... only that finder is way cooler. Its more organised... instead of that big tree at the side bar showing all the various folders and sub, sub-sub etc folders... in the finder its much neater with less clutter. They dont list out ALL the folders on ur comp like explorer does, and instead you can select any folder you want to 'quick link' under Places.
'Quick linking' is very simple, just drag the folder onto the side bar!
What is strangely lacking though, is the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to cut and paste files. You have to drag the files instead, something which i find not so convenient. Weird that such a... basic? function is lacking. And ppl have certainly cashed in on the opportunity to develop programs to add in the function. Yes cashed-in. so far those that i've seen are all paid.
I use plenty of short cut keys and its great to see that like almost all the 'add on' applications i installed have short cut keys to make calling up the programs faster. the downside is that even till now, i cant remember all the shortcut keys... or wat those weird symbol mac uses stand for (i end up jabbing buttons here and there cos i just keep forgetting which symbol stands for what, there arent that many buttons to jab anyway...) i wish they put all the symbols on the keyboard itself, like the flowery icon for the command key... here's the apple help page for all the symbols and shortcuts...
Mac uses the command key instead of control key for just abt all the short cuts, and of cos the applications all follows suit. Personally i'm fine if either buttons, makes no difference to me (some say location of the command key is better than the control key in windows keyboards, less strain on the fingers and all, i dont feel any difference though). However this means that EVERYTIME i switch from mac to xp (to maple) or vice-versa, i need a bit of time to get used to pressing the corresponding button. Especially since i use the short cuts n each browser all the time (crtl/command + T to open new tab, + W to close tab, + no. to switch to that tab etc etc)... everytime i'll press the wrong key a few times before getting used to it. (command key becomes the windows key in xp!)
wat's great abt mac is that THE COMPUTER settles a lot of things for you. when you install a program, you just have to run the .dmg (its not .exe like in windows) files, and select which hard disk partition to install it in (basically i've got mac and bootcamp to pick from, of cos i install it in the mac). Some programs open up a window and you just drag the application to... your applications folder...! And now the even better part... uninstalling. Just drag the application icon to the trash! Easy! No uninstallers to run and all... no multiple folders to delete... easy and simple. I love this concept of mac.
The simplicity of using mac shines in many other areas, like the two finger scrolling and pinch to zoom features that is also found in the ipod/iphone and ipad. its so great that even other computer makers have copied the concept. rotating photos too... its all so simple and intuitive.
iPhotos is a great program that manages your photos, uploading... even simple photo editing. Great for managing your photos on the computer... but here is where i find simplicity being... a little too much of a good thing. To see the photos in finder you have to right click the picture in iPhoto and go to Show File... say if you want to upload the photos some somewhere not supported by iPhoto, like my blog here for example, or if you prefer say... photobucket (like me) to flickr... you wont be able to 'find' those photos to upload... you have to save the photos to some other file before you can upload them. Really really irritating... so much so for all the other convenience eh?
You can upload photos to FaceBook from iPhoto, and in doing so you so called link the album on FaceBook to the one on iPhoto. The good thing: to upload new photos to that album, just put it in that FB album in iPhoto - the program does the rest for you. The bad thing... or things... is that:
1) you can't upload the pics to an old album that is not linked with iPhoto
2) you can't 'unlink' the folders... not in an easy way anyway... you have to go thru elaborate steps like changing ur FB acct password so that iPhoto can't go on FB and all... why would you want to 'unlink' the album? read on.
3) if you are running out of space on ur hard disk and want to delete some old photos, but leave them on FB... you'll need to unlink the album otherwise once u delete the photo on iPhoto (and thus ur comp), the photo will be gone on FB too. (hence the elaborate procedures others have come up with to unlink the albums)
if you want to upload the photos to an old album (and don't want to link that old album to iPhoto), you can either upload it directly to FB using ur browser after 1st copying out the file to a temporary location else where (use right click, show file to view the file in finder).... OR upload it to any linked album, than go to the FB page and manually move the photos to the album of choice.
linking old albums to iPhoto takes some work too, since there isnt a feature to do this in iPhoto. You can create an album from iPhoto, than move ALL the photos from the old album into the new, linked album...
is this linked album feature good or bad? its up to the individual to decide i guess. i do appreciate the convenience... esp since i know organising photos is a dreadfully tiresome job. However the trouble i have to take to upload photos to facebook, since i do not wish to link all my albums, leaves me with much to be desired. didn’t see any updates on iPhoto in the OS X Lion update... darn, i was hoping they'd come up with a better solution for this (especially for uploading photos to other places that's not supported by iPhoto!) even to upload photos it twitter is a bit of a chore... i paid for twitexport to add that feature on to iPhoto >< abt 6.5SGD sighz.
one thing i feel is a little messy is the applications folder. say u have tons of apps installed... you'll have to go through the whole list to find the app you want (if you cannot remember the name to call it up using quick sliver or my preferred Alfred). sure, this problem is present in windows too, and mac is actually better in that you see a big icon, rather than a small icon in windows... but i welcome the idea of the iphone/ipod/ipad style launchpad arriving in mac. Love how you can group apps of similar functions together... i wonder what would happen to the desktop tho? no more dumping of random files onto my desktop? hey is the desktop even there in Lion? >< gotta read up more... can't wait for it to come though!
ah... while mac OS supports 2 button mouse... it doesn’t support all the extra buttons like back and forward buttons. which is really dumb... you need an application (once again, its paid) like steer mouse for that... which i bought too... its not really cheap, but it’s a really simple but great program that lets u customise all ur mouse buttons, change ur mouse movement speed etc... you can try it free for 14 days, so give it a try if you are used to the using mouse with like 4 or even more buttons. i'm always used to pressing the back and forward buttons on my mouse rather than using the on screen buttons so the app is impt to me.
i think that control freaks will need a bit of time getting used to the mac. you need to let go of that control and stop worrying about where your photos are being saved, or which folder ur applications are going into... or whether that simple procedure of dragging the program icon to the trash can is a clean uninstall... at least those were some of the worries i had in the beginning.
what i loved best about mac was all the things i could customise and play around with. i don't know why, but somehow i just didn’t do it much, or at all, when i used my windows lappy. maybe it was cos i was excited at getting a brand new mac? perhaps its cos of all the convenience and intuitive features of mac itself that spurred me to make the lappy even more 'me'. or perhaps it was the mac app store... either way, i searched for apps both on google and the app store that would make things even more convenient and user friendly... or simply for apps to fill the gaps missing in the OS. Customizing the dock and the icons in the dock probably gave me the greatest satisfaction of all. sure that can be done on windows too, but in xp and vista that i used, the application icon in the taskbar was so puny u barely know what it looks like... unlike in the dock where its big, and visible at all times.
oh yes... the dock was another thing i loved abt the mac. SO MANY dock applications... i swear there's a lot more than in for vista (tried searching once, didn’t find much interesting stuff). i've loaded my dock with all sorts of stuff like a scientific calculator with more features than the originally give one... weather report (ok, i forgot if that was there originally), word counter (this article contains like 2.5k words as of the previous paragraph ><), screenshot grabber, itunes controller, sticky notes, mac status (like the memory usage, temperatures etc), currency converter... etc... so much things to play ard with indeed.
game compatibility is probably still the greatest bane for macs... well at least for a mapler like me. apart from that... well the mac pretty much comes with most essential programs already... the only thing i had to spend big money on (more than 20 bucks per program) was... microsoft office. i didn’t get mac's iWork cos... comments have said that msoft office was still more complete in terms of functionality, and since i'm only getting one of them i picked office (3 user license, which is all well cos i've convinced my dad to get a mac for his own use... nah, it wasn’t really me, it was my mac that convinced him). I need to get a photoshop for mac too. haven gotten it yet though... waiting for my dad to buy it when he gets his mac (and he in turn, is waiting for Lion to be out)
hmm ok, that's all the stuff i can think of right now, and blogger keeps saying that auto-save failed. is it cos i've wrote too much? ><
till next time!
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