APRIL 2007 JOURNAL ENTRIES

A New Country. A New Life.

 

Switching: First Thoughts [Thursday, April 26, 2007]

 

Switching: First Thoughts [Thursday, April 26, 2007 @ 1:01 pm]

 

I was supposed to update this website and blog (if you are on livejournal) by the time I received my new notebook. Unfortunately, Mac OSX is killing me. It is so much different from good old Windows and so far I haven't seen any good reason why people say Mac OSX is better. Silly learning curve.

The first order of business was of course to get my documents, pictures and music from my external hard drive onto the notebook. When I plugged in my external HDD it was able to see the 4 different partitions and see the files stored except for one which would have to be where the music and documents where on. My brother's Windows desktop could see those files and folders so in the end I just left the external HDD connected to the PC and transferred the files to the Mac via the network.

Then came the monumental task of importing the files. I've spent more time importing my music and pictures into iTunes and iPhoto than I would have in Windows. Actually, in Windows, you really didn't have to import them. Winamp could just be pointed to the music directory and Picasa (program of choice for photo management on Windows which is not available on the Mac just yet) automatically uploads any images on the drive. I would assume there would be an automated way of doing this is Mac OSX but I was not able to find it.

Oh, and at least there is a plugin for iPhoto which allows photos to be uploaded to your Picasa account which is of course convenient.

Coverflow in iTunes is quite amusing though but triggers a mild case of OCD in me. Now I have to get album art for everything.

It's a bit harder to find freeware versions of similar programs I used to use in Windows. Most of the applications available on Mac OSX are not free. I guess if you could afford to shell out enough dough to purchase a Mac system, you would not have any problem purchasing more software which would do the same things a free program would do on Windows.

With a little luck and skill in searchiing, I was able to find some free programs like NeoOffice, Gimp, and others. I needed a WYSIWYG HTML editor and found one and within 10 minutes of using it, it crashed on me. So far a number of applications I have installed have crashed on me but thankfully not fatal crashes which in Windows would have needed a restart or worse, would have resulted in a BSOD. The option to force an application to close has worked good enough.


VLC is another application which is quite buggy. It would open even when I try to open something else but at least it has worked properly when I watch downloaded TV shows with the .avi extension and most likely encoded with DivX or Xvid. This is of course the reason I downloaded it as Quicktime is unable to play those files.

As for the speed of the OS, I have nothing much to say about it since right now I feel it works as fast as Windows working optimally like my old desktop at home. Finder's search is miles apart from Windows XP's own search capabilities. Finder takes seconds and finds what you need, XP takes forever and usually does not show you what you are looking for.

Hardware-wise though, the Macbook Pro shines. The design is so lovely. No part of it feels flimsy. The keyboard just feels right and is awesome to type into. The display is also very crisp and works well with movies.

The touchpad is ok as I am still getting used to it as I haven't used one before. I am really missing the right click button but thankfully the Mac has a way to do right clicks. A right click is done by placing two fingers on the touchpad and then clicking the touchpad button. Scrolling however is superb as simply dragging two fingers along the touchpad would allow you to scroll. I always hated horizontal scrolling but now with the Macbook Pro, horrendous horizontal scrolling is now a thing of the past. These may be old news for people who have used Mac systems before but for a new switcher they are amazing.

Sadly, I don't have a copy of Windows XP yet as I'd love to test this baby out with BootCamp and a couple of games.  On the plus side though, this forces me to put up with OSX and eventually learn this operating system in and out.

Maybe this is just the years of experience and familiarity with Windows speaking and given a week or two more, Mac OSX would start to grow on me. I hope this is the case or else I'd be installing Windows XP on a larger partition.

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