It has been now a week with the new mac and I have learnt a few lessons (some the hard way). My observations can be split in 4 areas:
- Different paradigm
- Usability
- Built-in / external functionality
- Under the hood
File and disks operations are different than windows. My painful realisation was that when mac prompts you to overwrite a folder by one of the same name you dragged on the same location it does mean overwrite (as in delete the old folder, not put it in trash making it unrecoverable) not merging of contents
I was familiar with the notion of "dragging disk on trash to eject" (back from the days of floppy disks) but I still can't see it being intuitive. Not to mention that if ones chooses to autohide the dock (thus having no visual indicator of the trash while pondering viable options) he is left wondering how to eject a disk (exc. the Ctrl+Click option)
Usability
In Windows world right click is king. I have even heard people instructing on software usage, if you don't know how to do things right-click probably you will get a menu with the actions you need. In Macs this is equated by Ctrl + Click. Fair enough. I am questioning though that since the "right-click or equivalent gesture" is used so often, is the use of two fingers and potentially two hands superior to windows right click? I think not.
Modifier keys: Looking at my keyboard I see 5 of them:
- Fn (still don't know when to use it & what it does in any of the apps I am using)
- Ctrl
- Alt
- Shift
- Command
Built-in / external functionality
I think it is fair to expect a simple text editor built-in. To my surprise the TextEdit is anything but. Sure it can save in RTF, HTML, XML, DOC but what about old ascii text? As in for editing configuration files? To do so one needs external utilities, I go with TextWrangler for now.
Annoyed by the startup sound I opted to switch that off. Turns out that this is not possible without an external utility StartupSound.prefPane. Not sure what Apple was thinking here.
On the positive side I did really like the built-in smart corners and spaces. They make perfect sense, and can't really see why Windows have been relying on external apps for such functionality.
Under the hood
Quite a few adventures here. Starting with trying to access external hard disks in NTFS format. By default in read-only mode, not very helpful when you try to organise your photos. After few google searches and attempts write access was possible but certainly the level of the effort required was not for a novice / "my mac is very usable" user.
Similarly mounting TrueCrypt volumes was not a walk in the park (never had a problem with that in Windows). I had to identify and install the right version of macfuse to make TrueCrypt functional.
Activating PHP support for the built-in Apache was as expected, but restarting services brought another surprise: Mac OSX does not have init.d folder for initialisation scripts. Had to have google inform me that restarting Apache is a matter of: "sudo /usr/sbin/apachectl restart"
Finally - the devil is in the detail
Those observations aside I have been enjoying the new Mac (can't really tell from the above bitching right?). As the saying goes the devil is in the detail. I do love the magnetic tip charger, the illuminated keyboard, the crystal clear screen and the lightweightness of the device.
