I just opened my new PowerBook G4 1.67 Ghz 1GB mem, 100GB HD, OSX ...This is one righteous machine. From it's aluminum case to high res screen, the fit and finish on this product (as Mac zealots will attest) is second to none. I have been a Unix geek cloaked in Windows skin for many years now. Having recently become a Ruby convert and a conversation with Chad Fowler got me re-thinking about why I have been stuck in the Windows mud for so long.
After booting up and filling in the few screens of config information (I like the rotating entry form boxes, very cool), I was up and running in about 5 minutes, on my wireless network and downloading updates.
I am planning to document my conversion right here in the ol' blog, trials, successes, and foibles all.
First things I'm missing are:
- No start bar. I'll have to get used to a new way of navigating and creating shortcuts to my favorite applications.
- No right button. I like the pop-up menus available with the right mouse click. I use it often (for instance to pull the image link off the Apple site from above) and will have to figure out its analog on the Mac.
- The rich edit field. Is missing in Safari, so am coding this up in html by hand. I will probably download Firefox because I miss my Firefox extensions as well.
- The Dashboard. With a click I can pull up an assortment of tools, sticky notes, etc. Very useful.
- The terminal. Yes! Thankfully, I'm back in unix land.
happy holidays!
4 comments:
I am jealous!
Santa didn't bring me one, he must not like me because I don't believe in him :-(
It will be interesting to see if you can get the GSL libraries for Ruby working there...
-Francisco
To right click on the mac, do a Ctrl+click. This brings up the menus you would normally get when you right click.
I'm a recent switcher myself (didn't feel like Windows crashing on me at school) and would have loved if someone told me all the shortcuts!
Get a three-button mouse and download Firefox ASAP. Other random things that took me a while to figure out:
Use Adium for IM and Colloquy for IRC. Open Office and Eclipse run slow but are perfectly usable. Fink isn't the best package management tool ever, but it often works. Delicious Library changed the way I use my books, try it out.
Welcome back to a real O/S :-)
I was in Rails Studio with you. Nice blog. Anyway, forget about the dock - you'll want to get Quicksilver right away, if you haven't already. It is a new way to interact with the machine to launch apps and more. I can hardly use a mac without it now.
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