MY new toy
The wife finally gave me the go ahead and I got an iMac 17" with the new dual core 2 chip and 1 gig of ram.
The monitor is beautiful, though I can see how you'd have concerns about using it if you are needing lots of desktop space. For every day use there is plenty. But because of the wide screen effect there is less on it then a standard 17" regular style monitor. But the picture is fantastic. I have to get a converter for my current LCD monitor. But once I do I'll see how they are when it's setup in dual monitor mode.
I feel like such a mac head now. But after I got it up and going it patched itself and I must say it dl'd all the patches including an OSX upgrade and when it was finished I did have to reboot it (osx upgrade) but that was it 1 reboot.
Unlike windows and your update, reboot, update, reboot typical install. This thing is damn slick. I mean I've worked on Mac's before so I'm not entirely shocked but to see it from installation to up and running is a new experience for me. Very impressive.
After that garage band was fired up and I started cutting in layers to make some funky beats. Then my wife fired up the movie maker and started playing around with the camera. Which I might add is pretty good. I was surprised at how well it adjusted to different light and focuses. The internal microphone also does a very good job of capturing sound.
Now there was some confusion. I can see how a person who'd never used one before and came from a PC world would wreck it fast. Some programs you download a .dmg file. You click on that and it installs like a typical windows app. Others though it brings up this graphic of a symbol pointing to a folder with 'A' on it. SO if you double click the symbol the app runs and leaves another folder on your desktop. Effectively you've told it to install the app on your desktop. But if you don't know that and start dragging these folders to the trash can suddenly your programs won't work.
But if you know what your doing the picture just means drag the symbol to your applications folder and it's installed. Just one bin program that runs everything no layers of installed layers for the apps. Very easy but certainly frustrating for a PC user with no Mac or even Linux experience.
Also there are other little complications. I tried to install OpenOffice from their site as they have a Mac installer. But (and this I'm sure will be fixed) when I dl'd and installed it it told me I needed X11 to run. So I googled mac x11 and tried installing it, only to have it tell me that I currently have newer software. So I googled the issues and found some help pages that were pretty much unhelpful.
But it turns out this new version of OSX 10.4.8 just came out and it's got an X11 sorta thing built into it. Anyway did some more searching and found NeoOffice which is OpenOffice installed in a Coca rapper. Dl'd it installed and no problems. But these sorta quirks are things I'm just used to from working with multiple OS's so for me no biggy. But again I can see how it would frustrate a typical PC user who's made the switch.
Now mind you it did come with a 60 day trial for MS Office so I guess most PC users would probably suck it up and go with that anyway.
Other quirks little things like the home and end buttons not working like I expect. In an office style app they do like you'd think. But in most apps, home takes you to the top of the page and end to the bottom. Now I'm obviously used to thinking beginning/end of line. So I thought it was something with my keyboard layout. So I fussed around with it and the settings didn't change.
Google again (oh and I installed Firefox -plus the standard pluggins- and Thunderbird instead of safari and mail and they installed no problems). Found some guy who has a fix for remapping them to how they work normal. But I also found out you just use the Apple and Arrow keys to move around. So knowing how that works was good enough and I didn't bother remapping keys. But the option is there.
My initial plan was to set this sucker up so I can dual boot to XP and I still might. However OSX Leopard is coming out around the corner and it's got that feature built in so I may just hold off instead of messing around with the beta way of doing it.
Gotta say Mac's kick ass. Or maybe I should say Commercially supported Linux kicks ass. Either way I've taken the blue pill and not turnning back.
The monitor is beautiful, though I can see how you'd have concerns about using it if you are needing lots of desktop space. For every day use there is plenty. But because of the wide screen effect there is less on it then a standard 17" regular style monitor. But the picture is fantastic. I have to get a converter for my current LCD monitor. But once I do I'll see how they are when it's setup in dual monitor mode.
I feel like such a mac head now. But after I got it up and going it patched itself and I must say it dl'd all the patches including an OSX upgrade and when it was finished I did have to reboot it (osx upgrade) but that was it 1 reboot.
Unlike windows and your update, reboot, update, reboot typical install. This thing is damn slick. I mean I've worked on Mac's before so I'm not entirely shocked but to see it from installation to up and running is a new experience for me. Very impressive.
After that garage band was fired up and I started cutting in layers to make some funky beats. Then my wife fired up the movie maker and started playing around with the camera. Which I might add is pretty good. I was surprised at how well it adjusted to different light and focuses. The internal microphone also does a very good job of capturing sound.
Now there was some confusion. I can see how a person who'd never used one before and came from a PC world would wreck it fast. Some programs you download a .dmg file. You click on that and it installs like a typical windows app. Others though it brings up this graphic of a symbol pointing to a folder with 'A' on it. SO if you double click the symbol the app runs and leaves another folder on your desktop. Effectively you've told it to install the app on your desktop. But if you don't know that and start dragging these folders to the trash can suddenly your programs won't work.
But if you know what your doing the picture just means drag the symbol to your applications folder and it's installed. Just one bin program that runs everything no layers of installed layers for the apps. Very easy but certainly frustrating for a PC user with no Mac or even Linux experience.
Also there are other little complications. I tried to install OpenOffice from their site as they have a Mac installer. But (and this I'm sure will be fixed) when I dl'd and installed it it told me I needed X11 to run. So I googled mac x11 and tried installing it, only to have it tell me that I currently have newer software. So I googled the issues and found some help pages that were pretty much unhelpful.
But it turns out this new version of OSX 10.4.8 just came out and it's got an X11 sorta thing built into it. Anyway did some more searching and found NeoOffice which is OpenOffice installed in a Coca rapper. Dl'd it installed and no problems. But these sorta quirks are things I'm just used to from working with multiple OS's so for me no biggy. But again I can see how it would frustrate a typical PC user who's made the switch.
Now mind you it did come with a 60 day trial for MS Office so I guess most PC users would probably suck it up and go with that anyway.
Other quirks little things like the home and end buttons not working like I expect. In an office style app they do like you'd think. But in most apps, home takes you to the top of the page and end to the bottom. Now I'm obviously used to thinking beginning/end of line. So I thought it was something with my keyboard layout. So I fussed around with it and the settings didn't change.
Google again (oh and I installed Firefox -plus the standard pluggins- and Thunderbird instead of safari and mail and they installed no problems). Found some guy who has a fix for remapping them to how they work normal. But I also found out you just use the Apple and Arrow keys to move around. So knowing how that works was good enough and I didn't bother remapping keys. But the option is there.
My initial plan was to set this sucker up so I can dual boot to XP and I still might. However OSX Leopard is coming out around the corner and it's got that feature built in so I may just hold off instead of messing around with the beta way of doing it.
Gotta say Mac's kick ass. Or maybe I should say Commercially supported Linux kicks ass. Either way I've taken the blue pill and not turnning back.
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