My name is Zachary Cohn, and I am now a Mac user.
So in Part 1 of this series, I was talking about how I felt after I ordered my new Macbook Pro, but hadn’t received it yet. It arrived Saturday night, but I didn’t get a chance to open the box until Sunday.
If there’s one thing Apple focuses on (this shouldn’t be a surprise), it’s the experience. Even just opening the box was impressive.
Once I got it out of the box, I scanned through the manual, then opened it up. Within 2 minutes, everything was configured and I was staring at that the desktop.
Aaaand then I didn’t really know what to do from there. I decided to start moving through the System Preferences. I figured the best way to get familiar with a new OS was to see what I could change!
So after an hour or two of tinkering, I have the dock set up to hide on the left, maximizing my screen real estate. I’ve learned about the different multi-touch options, and best of all… discovered the keyboard shortcuts window! This is something I never thought about, but it’s astounding how obvious it is once you see it. Windows doesn’t have a global keyboard shortcuts menu… you just have to figure them out as you go. Windows key + M minimizes, Windows key + E opens Windows Explorer… there’s no way anyone could find a list of all of those in windows anywhere. But on the Mac, there’s just a huge list. So I’ve been learning those, and it’s been pretty sweet.
Installing programs was weird. People say it’s easier than on Windows, but I would argue the whole process is a bit less intuitive. I needed a friend to explain to me that you download a .dmg, then you can drag and drop it to the applications folder, then you have to unmount it to get rid of the icon. On windows, you can just double click on the file
you downloaded and hit next-next-next until it’s set up. I won’t say I don’t like this method, I just don’t think it’s necessarily better.
So far, I’ve downloaded and installed Firefox, VLC, and Flash. The first two were fine, I had some trouble getting Flash to work. It installed fine, but Youtube videos wouldn’t work. I tried a few times and eventually it worked… so whatever. *shrug*
The biggest thing I’ve noticed so far is that IT IS FAST. Part of this is definitely the fact that it’s a new computer with a fresh OS, and another big part is that it’s using a solid state drive. But either way, it wakes up from sleep before I can finish opening the screen, and all applications pretty much load instantly.
I think the best way to describe the colors on the screen would be “vibrant.” Even looking just at individual icons, it’s very impressive.
I think those are most of my initial impressions. All I’ve done on it so far are dick around with some settings and watch an episode of Dexter though. I’m planning on migrating some old files tonight, and if I can get that done maybe make use of what’s running under the hood. I found this project on HN a week or two ago, and I want to try it out.
The only other thing I want at this point would be one of these babies…
That’s a lot of screen real estate I’m sure I could find ways to fill.
I converted about 5 years ago after dreaming about owning a mac for years prior to that. I am a true believer in all things mac.
I would recommend trying out Google Chrome for your browser. I have found that firefox and safari have brain farts sometimes, but Chrome is great. If something does mess up in Chrome it just kills that one page and lets you decide what do to.
Keep up the blogging too.
Later.
I would also recommend Chrome; its OS X version is, quite honestly, the best of the bunch.
Regarding Safari, I normally wouldn’t recommend it. Despite having a fantastic backend, the frontend does a metric ****-ton of hard drive i/o that just bogs the entire system down. However, it may be a different experience for you as you’re running on a solid state drive. I say give Safari a go.
Firefox has an extremely accurate rendering, but it is very slow compared to other browsers and leaks memory like there’s no tomorrow.
Chrome is where its at! I have been using it for some time now. Although I am a super mac fan-boy I switched over for the above reasons. Plus it allows me to sync my enter web existence to multiple machines in a second by just enabling the feature in Chrome. Handy when you use a different computer and want to remember what you searched that morning.
No list of keyboard shortcuts on Windows? I beg to differ. I know it exists in Win7, and probably Vista.
Start>Help and Support
Search for keyboard shortcuts, click the first link. Contained therein is an absolutely massive categorized list of shortcuts.