Just switched back to mac…a few observations

Posted on | August 21, 2009 | No Comments |

: Image by Christoph*B via Flickr

I missed and now love the attention to design detail. I have the 15inch macbook pro unibody and it just feels sexy, even when I want to be away from it draws me back
fast. plain and simple. 2.8ghz and 4gb of RAM matter…It moves too fast at times and in the end it makes doing something so easy that I don’t bother wondering if I should start a project, I just do it
spaces and exposé, so much fun sometimes I play with them just to play with them
power plug. genius, pure genius
track pad…seriously how did i survive with out insane multi-touch functionality, it’s almost too much fun to use, I feel like i”m not working
light. in weight. I keep checking my back pack when i’m out and about to make sure I didn’t forget it.
Connectivity. I love walking anywhere and finding a wifi connection where connecting to it requires no futzing…this could be the #1 best thing about this machine.
Speakers are great for such a small machine…seriously not perfect, but great for listening to podcasts and other chill out music
Downside to connectivity – It’s mysterious how this all happens and my damn new Airport is not my friend. It looks nice, should work, but fails to present mac formatted hard disks. It’s dropped it’s password once. Is not intuitive, which is why i wanted it…but I hope to fix all this one day and then I’ll love it…though right now that’s not happening
EFFING FOLDERS – I know there is a program that is supposed to make my life easier when it comes to finding folders, but haven’t had time to put it in yet. That said, why is it so hard to just save downloads to where I want to, or figure out where things went…starting to realize that “spotlight” can fix this, but still it’s taking time to get used to
Installing apps, in seconds? How? Or rather why would this take 1second on this machine and 10minutes on my pc?
Iphoto, aperture? Maybe Lightroom? I can’t figure out how I want to manage photos, and Aperture without presets is worthless to me
MAIL, sucks, or rather this claim to be able to have one thread connecting everything is BS. The calendar fails to sync with Gcal with any regularity, so I quit using it, and mail is annoying popping up all the time, I have yet to decide on a calendar/mail strategy + address book, all I would like on one machine, but if it doesn’t sync nicely with Google, forget it.
Other apps I have thought about
1. Fluid: Now I have “apps” for gmail, gcal, docs, facebook, and much more…thank you fluid
2. Skitch: Screen capture that I have not used a lot, but playing with it is amazing!!!!
3. Text wrangler – Like this, not convinced it’s great, but really starting to dig it.
4. Dropbox: Cannot live without you. You are a great tool and helped a ton with my transfer of docs from my PC
5. Pages and Numbers: Oh how I loathe you…not very user friendly, and maybe it’s my excel word brainwashing that make it hard for me to switch, but I’m not sure I can continue to use you. Why can’t you just save all things as .doc files without me having to also save a .pages version…UGH
6. itunes does work better on a mac…still want it to be an open platform, but since I’m drinking the juice it does taste nice
7. Safari with GLIMS is a bit nicer, but still not convinced…where are my plugins…though with Chrome coming on strong, I think FF will be regulated to debugging and design functionality only and Fluid, Safari, and Chrome will be my real life browsers. One more thing, why can’t I hover over links to see where they go? UGH
Love the dashboard, just wish I remembered it was there more.

Overall I’m happy…Once I figure out how to deal with my photos, I’ll be happier.

till soon, ryan

PS if your starting with a MAC this resource will save you a lot of time figuring out your keystrokes!

Comments

Latest Tweets

Plans

About

I'm Ryan, I write a blog about wine and then I try to tell others how to do it too. In the end I like to eat good, meet new people, drink good wine, and love taking photos. You can bribe me with a good Manhattan or any beer with a IBU over 100. If you want to talk to me, start with this.