new mac user... impressed

[mikemc]

For the first time in about 10 years, I've touched a Mac. I'm looking into the new iBook with OSX for when I start law school this fall, and spent days at the big stores trying to find one to hold/touch/feel and play with... Needless to say, none of the big stores carry Mac's anymore..

I finally found a Mac store just outside of Muskegon (The Mac Exchange in Spring Lake, for any West Michiganders out there -- shameless plug for a good man..) where the owner agreed to walk me through OSX a little and let me play with one of the older ibooks (the funky colors, with a handle) to get the feel of the keyboard, but he didn't have one of the new ibooks for me to play with. So I went down there for about 30 minutes yesterday.

I wanted a new box for 2 reasons, one to provide me a nice interface for writing papers and doing research, where I am a user of the nice technology, the other is to allow me to continue to play with development when I want to, and OSX's BSD roots definitly gives me that... I'm not a huge fan of MS, and preferred not to get a windows box, although the Sony PCG-R505DL laptop is very nice...

He fired up a console window for me, and I was suprised to see all my old friends on the command line... :)

I was suprised again when he launched Windows 98 in a window on OSX... extremely impressing, but I'm already starting to think "geez, what a waste..."

I wasn't impressed with the mousepad on the ibook I got to play with. It felt like soft rubber, and was hard to move my finger across... also wasn't very responsive on the screen... I'm hoping this is just his ibook, maybe being old, doing this, and not the way they come out of the factory.

In any case, I'm very impressed... I did want to ask though, are there things in OSX or on Mac's that you, as Mac users, feel are inferior to the Windows counterpart ?

Thanks,
Mike

[griffman]

iBooks: We have a 2001 model dual USB iBook, and I have no complaints about the trackpad. It doesn't feel rubbery, and the finger glide motion is smooth. I never used an old iBook as a comparison, though.

Inferior: What's Windows? ;-)

Seriously, when I use the Windows box at the office, about the only thing I miss when I go back to the Mac is the ability to do nearly everything on the keyboard. The Mac is trying to get there, but you still have to use the mouse quite a bit.

-rob.

[mikemc]

I did notice when he was showing OSX, and was trying to get to a command line, he had to go through a lot of clicking... I was expecting something like windows CTRL-ESC, (R)un, "command" to get to a command line... is that what you're referring to ?

Thanks,
Mike

[xchanyazy]

I've found a great way to reduce mousing is to just leave programs open, and then command-tab through them whenever I want to use them. You can use command-n in almost all programs to get a new window. Not the same as being able to type the program you want to open (although with open -a in the terminal...), but works well in reducing mouse usage.

I think this tip was from griffman's OS X guidebook, which you can get off the main site. I'd definitly suggest taking a look through that, even if you're already pretty good with OS X - lot's of neat stuff on the inside.

<random>Going to law school... at U of M?</random>

[mikemc]

That sounds like a winner... what about suspend modes for the ibook? Does it suspend to memory or suspend to disk? I have a Dell that I sold to my brother, he's picking it up just before school starts, and on that I could suspend to disk, so even if the battery died, it would still recover fine.

Also, with BSD being the underlying OS for OSX, I would assume that it uses some sort of journaling file system to protect the system incase of power outage, am I right on this ?

<random reply>Actually, Cooley in Lansing... All the other schools are on the other side of the state from me... Are you familiar with the area ? </random reply>

Later,
Mike

[macubergeek]

xchanyazy just go into Applications>Utilties and drag the Terminal app into the dock at the bottom of your screen for easy access. You might also try a sharware terminal GLterm, it's faster.

[xchanyazy]

Mike,
I believe as of now, the suspended state is stored in memory, if I understand the question right.

I've heard of Cooley, but my familiarity with Lansing is strictly on a "we went there for school field trips when I was younger" basis. I tend to stay near I-94, rather than 96.

macubergeek -
Is it really faster? I saw that on versiontracker a while ago, and thought it was kind of weird that someone had used openGL for a terminal. I'll have to give it a try.

Still like to keep it open instead of quitting, in case my dock freezes or I'm too lazy to use the mouse.

[Mikey-San]

You can navigate the menu bar and the Dock via the Keyboard if you enable "full keyboard access" in the Keyboard preference pane. Also, you can then navigate toolbars and all on-screen UI widgets.

Ah, journaling.

Yes.

In a shell, you can type:

sudo diskutil enableJournal /

Bing. :-)

What do I miss?

Well, I have a custom boot screen [www.mikey-san.net/mirth/trinkets/ice.dmg.gz], but I don't see it a lot because I only reboot for system updates. I miss that from Windows. ;-)

I guess I really don't miss anything when I go from a Winbox back to my Titanium. Heh.

[macubergeek]

iTerm is also pretty cool...it allows you to do tabbed term windows...open one window and do cmd T and you have as many terms within a term as you want. get it on versiontracker.