11.11.08
The mac experience continues
I have been using my black Macbook quite a bit since I got it (about 70% of the time I guess). Some things I have noticed so far:
- I still don’t like taking my fingers off the home row keys to use the touchpad. Two finger scroll is nice but really it’s not that much better than the scroll area on a normal touchpad. The large touchpad is definitely much more usable than the tiny one on my PC, but I still prefer the pointing stick (except for scrolling)
- The alt-tab vs alt-` thing is driving me nuts. I still haven’t figured out the keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs in FF or Webkit.
- The menu bar system is totally messed up. Why does mail.app have to have the same menu bar for the main window as well as e-mail windows? I was using iPhoto and I had to click around until I could figure out why a menu item was disabled. Really frustrating and really bad UI.
- The whole concept of closing all the windows, but having the app still run is a mixed bag. Being able to alt-tab to apps which don’t have any windows open works sometimes, but sometimes it feels broken. At the very least, when you close the last window the app should move to the end of the alt-tab list.
- There isn’t a really good browser. Webkit is faster than firefox, but then firefox has the better featureset. Why is firefox so slow anyway? It’s plenty fast on my PC which is really slow compared to the mac.
- I miss my windows apps, namely GOM Player (kicks VLC’s butt), Picasa, Faststone image viewer, and Notepad++. It seems that lots of things which are now free on PCs still cost money on macs. Namely good image viewers and text editors.
- The 13″ widescreen is OK. It is almost the same width as the 15″ normal screen on my PC, but just not as tall. I always feel like it is not tall enough.
- Still getting used to keyboard navigation when editing text. Not as aggravating as it used to be, but still annoying.
- The anti aliasing is still bothering me.
- When Ayaan reaches up and grabs the lid of my PC, I just grab it and pull it back. When he grabs the lid of my mac I feel like it is going to snap in half.
Overall, if my PC is nearby I will use that. If my mac is around, I will use that. Not really feeling the “OMG Macs are so awesome” love yet.
Rahul Nair said,
November 12, 2008 at 3:20 am
Ctrl + Tab to switch tabs in FF. FF 3 runs fine on my MBP – check to see if you are running in PowerPC emulation mode by any chance.
Tom said,
November 14, 2008 at 9:16 pm
Navigating tabs in Webkit/Safari is command shift plus left or right. When using Safari, I use the Saft plugin (http://haoli.dnsalias.com/Saft/) – greatly improves the overall usability, in my opinion.
Alex L said,
November 17, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Sounds like the same list of grievances that I have.. I don’t like the single menu bar system, it blows chunks because it doesn’t span the entire width of two monitors. It only exists on one screen, and it would be nice if it was active on the screen of the currently selected app.
You can’t alt-tab to minimized windows… so I stopped minimizing them. I hide them now, with command + H. It’s effectively minimizing the app, but you can still alt-tab to them. Keyboard navigation just takes awhile to get used to. I’m finally used to it now, but it took me 6months…
For video, the only options are VLC or the Perian filters. Perian lets you open all sorts of files with QT. QT isn’t the plague that it is on PC, but I still prefer VLC to QT on the mac.
That said, I miss expose a lot on the PC.
My HD recently died and I went back to XPx64, only to find out software support is really shitty.. might have to move back to Vistax64.
Osman Ullah said,
November 17, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Yeah…thanks for all the comments. It’s nice to know people are reading my blog.
I am going to probably post a follow-up soon, but when I am on the PC I don’t miss my mac at all. Honestly, if you look at a top end system from Lenovo or Dell, it still costs hundreds less than a comparable mac. The only reason I am keeping the mac is for development.
Fareed Riyaz said,
January 19, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Salam Osman: I have to say, when I moved over to Mac, I never knew how much I would love it. Mac just seems to work a lot better than Windows – my computer almost never slows down or craps up. That being said, there is definitely a learning curve, and if you have someone around to help speed up that learning curve by giving you tips, that helps a lot.