Using a Mac, [a bit over] a week later
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Not pro- or con- Finder, but I rename files in Finder the same way I do in Windows Explorer: I click once on the filename until it's highlighted, wait a second, and then click again and it becomes editable. I'm pretty sure that my keyboard has a # over the 3 key like normal US keyboards, but like others here I'm on a PC at work and my Mac is at home so I can't verify.
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I've been using Mac for ages - I love OSX, but would agree that the "It just works" thing isn't always the case. There are some pretty strange/non-obvious things which you need to do on the Mac. To change the filename in finder: select the file to change, and then press 'Enter'. Quick to use when you know it's there, but intuitive? Hell no. And don't get me started on the hundreds of hidden characters - on my (Finnish) keyboard, the {} | $ and many more are all hidden behind the alt key, and not marked on the keyboard at all. You get used to it after maybe 5 years, and it's always fun to alt through all the keyboard characters to see what's there. •Ω鮆µıœπ About a year ago, Apple started taunting us with the mysteriously moving taskbar on dual-monitor machines. No word of warning, it just suddenly started moving between screens - took a few weeks to figure out the mouse moves for it. Thanks, Apple. I would really really love it if I could cmd+tab to a specific application window rather than just an application - something you can do in Windows and Linux but not Mac. Although you can keyboard through all the terminal windows, which is nice. (Cmd + arrow keys, only works on Terminal). And I really hate the 'natural scrolling crap' which they forced on us - like 99% of Mac users, I switch it off first thing. Love my , but not blind to the strange/questionable OSX design decisions.
SpoonLord wrote: I would really really love it if I could cmd+tab to a specific application window rather than just an application - something you can do in Windows and Linux but not Mac. Although you can keyboard through all the terminal windows, which is nice. (Cmd + arrow keys, only works on Terminal). Cmd-~ cycles through windows within the current application - I'd been using OSX for years before I know this one. The thing that I really don't like is that Neither Cmd- nor Cmd-~ will visit a minimized window - you to do some dance with cmd-tabbing to the app and down arrow while still holding down Cmd to find a minimized window.
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Don't often post here, but seeing this, I just had to say something. I used Windows devices until a few years ago, until I found Linux. That's all I've used since, except for maintaining enough knowledge to fix other peoples Windows computers. As for something on topic..
Quote:
bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple
I'm not a fan of their philosophy or OS design, and how oversimplified everything seems. The first impression I got, helping someone install a new version of OSX, was that it seemed fairly familiar to some of my Linux installs. It's all a matter of getting used to, I suppose. However, I don't see how anybody could use these things for production. To each his own.
When I talk to people who don't even know what source code is, I open an editor window and say "This is what we go through every time you find a bug!"
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Interesting timing for this thread. I just got done reading it and, as usual, I can see there's a great deal of division over whether the things are any good or not. So here's my 2-cents. I have been watching Apple technology (from afar) for a lot of years now. A month or two back I bought a late 2009 MacBook 2nd hand off eBay to prove to myself once-and-for-all how lousy the things are; it only set me back about $400 (after I put the SSD drive in it) so at least I could speak from experience with these Apple devotees I run into all the time. Anyway, I added the machine to my lab thinking that it would only get occasional use and eventually wind up gathering dust in a drawer or be resold on eBay. Instead I found myself picking the thing up more and more often. I find that, when not doing development work or something, that I prefer its simplicity. The fact that it integrates so nicely with my iPad and iPhone is probably of no small consideration as well but the thing just has the feel of being a swiss watch compared with a Timex. The presentation is just that nice. No, I'm not going to abandon the Windows platform and "switch" to Mac. There's no way that could happen without me ripping the guts out of my professional knowledge and retool to a new platform. The thing I do see, though, is that when I go away on vacation or just want to go sit on the beach, relax, and do a bunch of non work related things (books, photography ... anything not development related) that this is the box that's going to go with me. I liked the thing so well that I bought a new MacBook Pro for myself and am going to give the 2009 to my wife. She doesn't use the laptop she has very much (Windows 7) because she can't use it well with her i-Devices. She's not a "techie" like me but sure has taken to those things. I think the big trouble is that when people have been using Windows (particularly us developers) you look at everything through developer's eyes so you constantly compare the Mac to a Windows box. Of course things are not going to work the way you expect them to! The Apple platform (at least as I see it) was not intended to be attractive to the developers among us. It was intended to be attractive to people who want to focus on other things like photography, education or whatever. It's hard to explain but as I said to one of my Apple devotee friends after using it for awhile I finally "get it". Again, I won't stop developing my Windows products or using my Windows equipment I've invested in but I finally
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Interesting timing for this thread. About a month or so ago I purchased a 2nd-hand MacBook (2009) to prove to myself how much I would hate it. The opposite happened. I liked it enough to go out and buy a new MacBook Pro and give the 2009 to my wife. Nice machine. Integrates really well with my other i-Devices. Replace my Windows equipment it does not, but I see now why people like 'em.
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Don't often post here, but seeing this, I just had to say something. I used Windows devices until a few years ago, until I found Linux. That's all I've used since, except for maintaining enough knowledge to fix other peoples Windows computers. As for something on topic..
Quote:
bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple
I'm not a fan of their philosophy or OS design, and how oversimplified everything seems. The first impression I got, helping someone install a new version of OSX, was that it seemed fairly familiar to some of my Linux installs. It's all a matter of getting used to, I suppose. However, I don't see how anybody could use these things for production. To each his own.
When I talk to people who don't even know what source code is, I open an editor window and say "This is what we go through every time you find a bug!"
I'd prefer to be under a proper Linux environment, but there it is - it's either Windows or OSX where I work and that's it. Windows wasn't really usable for my work and I need to get used to OSX to help the next intake who'll need to make the same transition, so I had to more or less switch.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
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So what's the alternative? Sticking in one camp or the other, trolling "competing" forums, like Android vs iOS, PC vs Mac, C# vs Java? Does any of that behaviour actually make any sense? Perhaps as professional software developers, we should embrace new technologies and enjoy using new bits of kit or different ways of doing things.. look into them, work our their pros and cons and determine if we can make things better? Just a though :)
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
I've got nothing against using new stuff if it is genuinely new; in other words demonstrates actual progress and improvement on what has gone before. What I don't respect is the washing powder approach that so many tech companies, and Apple especially in my judgment, adopt of splashing a new label on a barely tweaked product and announcing it as a monumental breakthrough which is then snapped up by the fanboys like it was the final revelation of the actual date of the Second Coming! It's a second screen for your phone, you deluded fools, I want to scream as I turn over the tables in the Temple Apple Store! No, I'm not going to waste time on the forums you mentioned, but I'm also not going to be completely mute as Acme Incs Various dumb down the tech market yet further and turn customers into dogs with the attention span of ... SQUIRREL!
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I've got nothing against using new stuff if it is genuinely new; in other words demonstrates actual progress and improvement on what has gone before. What I don't respect is the washing powder approach that so many tech companies, and Apple especially in my judgment, adopt of splashing a new label on a barely tweaked product and announcing it as a monumental breakthrough which is then snapped up by the fanboys like it was the final revelation of the actual date of the Second Coming! It's a second screen for your phone, you deluded fools, I want to scream as I turn over the tables in the Temple Apple Store! No, I'm not going to waste time on the forums you mentioned, but I'm also not going to be completely mute as Acme Incs Various dumb down the tech market yet further and turn customers into dogs with the attention span of ... SQUIRREL!
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I've been using Mac for ages - I love OSX, but would agree that the "It just works" thing isn't always the case. There are some pretty strange/non-obvious things which you need to do on the Mac. To change the filename in finder: select the file to change, and then press 'Enter'. Quick to use when you know it's there, but intuitive? Hell no. And don't get me started on the hundreds of hidden characters - on my (Finnish) keyboard, the {} | $ and many more are all hidden behind the alt key, and not marked on the keyboard at all. You get used to it after maybe 5 years, and it's always fun to alt through all the keyboard characters to see what's there. •Ω鮆µıœπ About a year ago, Apple started taunting us with the mysteriously moving taskbar on dual-monitor machines. No word of warning, it just suddenly started moving between screens - took a few weeks to figure out the mouse moves for it. Thanks, Apple. I would really really love it if I could cmd+tab to a specific application window rather than just an application - something you can do in Windows and Linux but not Mac. Although you can keyboard through all the terminal windows, which is nice. (Cmd + arrow keys, only works on Terminal). And I really hate the 'natural scrolling crap' which they forced on us - like 99% of Mac users, I switch it off first thing. Love my , but not blind to the strange/questionable OSX design decisions.
> I would really really love it if I could cmd+tab to a specific application > window rather than just an application - something you can do in Windows > and Linux but not Mac. I love this feature on the Mac. CMD+TAB cycles you through the Applications CMD+~ cycles you through the Windows of *that* application (unless you are already cycling through applications and then it cycles backwards.) Did I mention that track-pad actually works? On Windows(or Linux) I have yet to have a track-pad that actually works. I always end up selecting/moving/deleting stuff while I am typing on Windows and Linux. I never have that problem on the Mac. And if you really can't stand OS-X buy a Macbook anyway and run windows on it. It's a better Windows laptop than most (all?) Windows laptops. I mean it was declared the "Best Performing" Windows laptop in 2013. There are some things I missed when moving over but I have forgotten what they are.
Wayne J.
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
There is an associated learning curve or relearning curve. For my first Mac I had to get training wheels, which consisted of a number of plugins to make it behave more like windows. I had a neighbor who had never used a computer who got a Mac when I did, and she didn't have a lot of the translation difficulties I had. After a month or so, I stopped using the training wheels and remembered to hit cmd+q to close programs instead of trying to just red x the window. On my next Mac I never installed the training wheels, but I did still get a copy of Windows for bootcamp. My home laptop stopped being a Windows machine shortly after Vista was my only choice. There are a lot of things that tick me off about newer OS X, but in general I can use it pretty well. For me, the biggest thing that keeps me is the overall consistency of the interface. To address a few of your niggles, depending on what you are trying to do with shutting down, you can always just hit the power button the keyboard. The OS X suspend to disk function is triggered simultaneous as the suspend to ram function, so the button doesn't really have to do the same duty as it would on a windows computer where you may need to have it set to suspend to disk so you have that functionality easily available. The screenshot capability is pretty nice and Windows had to add a tool (snipping tool) to get the same functionality. Yes, you do have to remember the shortcut, but I get it pretty quickly even if I haven't used it in a while. Your Finder issues might be related to the new version of OS X, which I haven't installed. I use two finger click and select rename or use the familiar way of selecting the name via single click and renaming it the same way I do in Windows. I'm not sure why you aren't able to cut/move things.
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Keith Barrow wrote:
Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports.
Nobody at all. Except me. I regularly use at least 7: wireless keyboard, wireless mouse (because the two I like are made by different companies), audio adapter, two MIDI keyboards, Nikon camera adapter, mp3 adapter, occasionally a thumb drive.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
Just hitting or on a file or folder in Finder actually puts you in Rename mode (equivalent to F2 in Windows), if you wonder how you execute / open it, its cmd+down.
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
"Unfortunately" I have to agree with you ... OSX is "good", but not 2/3/4 times as good as W7/8/10. And yes, I've also noticed the similarity with Unity, though I think it's the other way round: Rather Canonical being "inspired" by OSX. Actually if you try using the newer Gnome (just try Fedora and you'll know what I'm talking about) you'll see even more similar stuff. So, same as you, I've looked, I've tried, I've been pleasantly impressed with some of it, but no where has it given me any sort of "Wow! Now that makes it worth giving up food for the month!" To the contrary, those things which impressed me were more in line with ... ah! another guy's seen the light and made something similar to X. While the stuff that gives me the heebie jebbies - agh! not another one going down that path! So for the life of me, I cannot understand what the extra cost is for. For my money I'll stick with KDE thank you very much! At least if it's KDE 4, 5 (with the new Plasma engine) should never have made its way out of alpha testing phase ... it's way too buggy to have a release candidate, never mind being a "default" in the new "Bright and Early" Kubuntu! Hardware wise I agree, Apples look very nice, they tend to have decent performance, and the laptops are thin, slick and light! But only if you compare them to some manufacturers like Dell and HP ... e.g. if you want it on a diet then Samsung's Series 9 is even slimmer than the Macbook. Or even the new Dell XPS 15 compared to the MacBook Pro - 15mm instead of 16mm. As for USBs ... when you go for such slim stuff there usually isn't any space on the sides, but also correct - why all those Thunderbolts, so all my peripherals HAS to be from Apple stores too?
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Surprisingly, I'm largely over the "who moved my cheese?" phase. It's a bit of a mixed bag:
Pros
- Very stable
- Very light - went home without the beast like Dell for the first time last night and had to check I'd actually packed the machine. This is a biggie
- Some of the OS well thought through, it's pretty similar to Ubuntu's GUI TBH. Some processes are very smooth
- Bootup time, compared to win7 at least is insane
Cons
- Finder - a sort of windows file explorer-cum-search. Makes it unnecessarily difficult to perform basic tasks- can copy but not cut. Rename is insane - need to go to the "Get Info" popup and do it there, from the people who criticised MS for putting shut down in the start menu. No real sense of where you are in the file system - I want to be able to navigate a path. Sometimes I've dropped into a terminal because its easier
- Had to learn a silly amount of keyboard shortcuts - I'd want to learn most of these anyway to be fair, I know the equivalents in windows, but on for some tasks its quicker to take the hand of the mouse and use the keyboard.
- A keyboard that doesn't have a # (alt-4 on a mac) but does have a key for ± / § is not a keyboard designed for actual use. The physical keyboard is good otherwise
- Nobody, in the whole world, will need more than 2 USB ports. But thunderbolt with adapters - they need to be everywhere
I'm doing a lot of screenshot work preparing materials, this typifies my experience. No PrintScreen key, so i've had to learn the shortcut (cmd-shift-4) bad. Instead of printing the screen, I get a selection cursor to choose which area to capture good. The image is saved as a .png to my desktop bad apple, naughty apple, haughty apple - the filename defaults to a date and time, so I need to use either the terminal to move and rename, or scrabble round the UI. I really don't understand what the hype is about - it's OK as a machine, I wouldn't pay that much for one. Using for (mostly JS) dev the experience is similar to working under a *NIX - pretty good, but again I'd rather save the cash and do just that.
KeithBarrow.net[^] - It might not be very good, but at least it is free!
I know this is old by now but how are you finding it after a couple of months? btw, a couple of tips if you haven't found them yet: - To rename in Finder, select the file and hit return. - To see file path, View -> Show File Path (Once set, should become your default) - Full Screen Shot (Shift-Alt-3). You can customise the location it saves to with a couple of commands: http://osxdaily.com/2011/01/26/change-the-screenshot-save-file-location-in-mac-os-x[^] hth