Bye Windoze! It’s been real. It’s been fun. But it hasn’t been real fun!!!
Well, I finally joined the club. I’m a proud owner of a new Mac Book Pro, 15.4″. It’s way cool is all that I can say. Apple is up to its usual standards of sexiness in design. The illuminated keyboard is very nice, indeed, as well as the overall design.
One feature that I really like is the magnetic plug. The power input is connected by a magnet. If you accidentally trip over the cord, it will just pop right out and not sling the computer to the floor! Of course, the operating system, OS X 10.5 is pretty easy to operate. It’s taken me few false starts to figure out how to do things on Mac vs. Windows, but the learning curve is not steep at all … especially after I found out how to configure the touch pad to allow me to do a ‘right click’ instead of pressing command key. Sweet.
The touch pad is a marvel unto itself. It has different actions depending on how many fingers you use! One finger moves the mouse. Two fingers scrolls. Three fingers moved horizontally allows you to speed through pages of a book. Four fingers moved down takes all of the active windows and fits them on the screen. Moving back up, restores the last active window that you were using.
I successfully installed Lightroom and, using my keys from my Windows installation, now have a legal copy on my Mac. All with no call to Adobe. Getting the catalog and images over was a breeze and was as simple as copying the 3 Lightroom catalogs over, opening them one at time, and telling them where to find the images. It was a breeze. I’m now, almost fully moved over to Mac. I just unplugged my Maxtor One Touch 500 GB drive from my Windoze machine and plugged it into the Mac. Everything worked!
No real hiccups except one. I know that I installed Thunderbird as my e-mail client, but I cannot seem to find it. After my initial startup there were about 8 updates that needed to be done and I had to do a restart after the installs; however, when I came back up I can find no trace of Thunderbird. Bizarre. I even used the Finder and looked at ‘today’, but no joy. I couldn’t find anything! I guess that I’ll install it again. Maybe I deleted it? Hmmm, who knows. I don’t!
One thing that I will miss is being able to look at Netflix movies from my laptop … well, I can still do it from my Windows laptop, although Tony has his sights set on it. 
Not just yet, my son. Not just yet! But then again, there’s always hulu.com!
My browser of choice is FireFox, so thankfully there is a Mac version. I know where everything is. One thing that is going to take a little getting used to is having the menu bar at the top of the screen rather than on each application’s title bar. I was a bit confused by that for a few minutes, then it just kind of made sense.
Things that I miss … so far
What? No ‘Home’ key? That was one of my mainstays! Press the home key to go to the beginning of the line. Shift + Home : Highlight the entire line from end to beginning. Now I have to click and drag. Sigh …
No End key either? Whaaaaaaaa!
What’s with this crazy delete key that deletes the previous character instead of the next one?! Small potatoes.
Well, that’s about it for a first glance. Man, this is a big screen with nice, deep, dark blacks. I know that some don’t like the glossy screens, but I do. I love the contrast.
Off to try this baby out on Hulu and watch an episode of House before heading to beddy-bye land.
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13 Responses to “Paul becomes a Mac Daddy!”
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Paul, Congratulations, and you can watch Netflix movies on Mac. A recent change by Netflix.
Enjoy
Congratulations!
About the editing commands: in most applications you can use a set of keyboard shortcuts similar to the Emacs commands (a Unix text editor), so control-a goes to the beginning of line, control-f moves forward, control-b backwards, control-d deletes the next character etc.
You get delete also by pressing Fn + backspace.
Here are lists of some useful keyboard shortcuts:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343
http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~jrus/Site/System%20Bindings.html
Note that some of these commands may be overridden, for example in case you are using multiple desktops in Spaces and use the control + arrow keys for moving between them.
Your only regret will be that you didn’t do it sooner!
BTW, my wife watches Netflix streaming movies on her Mac laptop. I think you just need to install Silverlight (a MS plug in, competitor to Flash–who knows why Netflix chose to go that route.) If you go to the Netflix site you can find a page that will walk you through it.
Welcome to the light my friend, welcome to the light!
Congrats Paul!
I have the same laptop, got it at Christmas, and it is a good machine. So, now we both have D300′s and MacBook Pros, how about that!
Hey, go to Apple’s website and download a free trial of their photo app called Aperture. It’s worth a look.
Cheers!
-Rob
Paul, I would really be interested to see your reasons for converting from PC to Mac. I have been thinking of doing it for years now but haven’t had the courage. My reasons have to do with dissatisfaction with PC’s. I find PC’s to be too complex, poor SW reliability, and poor performance. I suspect that the Mac is really not going to be much different on these issues.
Hope to hear your views. It would have been good to get them before you converted and then afterward.
Bob Wong, all computers are inherently complex. Software on the very reliable, of course Photoshop is Photoshop on either platform. The real question for you is are there Windows apps that are Windows only that you can’t live without. ( I admit I don’t understand this concept, but I suppose there legacy/technical apps to which this applies). Also under the hood on a Mac you are running UNIX, which has to be the most robust OS ever.
another ‘you can watch Netflix on the mac’ comment. I’ve been doing it for several months.
http://blog.netflix.com/2008/10/opt-in-for-new-netflix-movie-player.html
Don’t even know if you have to do that opt-in any more or not.
Fn+delete does a backspace as mentioned.
Shift+Fn+Arrow Up or Arrow Down does something of an approximation of select to Home or End.
Just Fn+Arrow Up will Home and Fn+Arrown Down will go to the End
Get Quicksilver. Install it. Spend some time learning it. I can’t live without it, for starting apps, finding things, everything and anything can be run with it.
Adium is a great multi-protocol chat client. Worth getting too.
I also really like Growl for notifications (tons of Mac apps use it) and Ecto for blogging.
Excellent hints. I second Growl and Ecto.
On the photography site, LightZone may be worth a look, it complements Photoshop.
On Quicksilver – I used to have it, but at some point I noticed it wasn’t quite right for me, and started to use Butler instead.
Butler is similar, although perhaps a bit simpler in some respects. I’m extensively using it for the multiple clipboard feature and also as an application launcher.
There are a lot of such little gems in the Mac software. A useful (but at first overwhelming) site for browsing the available software is
http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/index.shtml
It was interesting that your PC licence of Lightroom worked on the Mac, I didn’t know that was possible. Many software companies require to buy a separate license for the Mac.
Sniff… bye, bye Paul…
Well, for me Mac isn’t an option. Too many programs that I use for my job are not available for Mac. And I’m not going to rund different OS’ses on my different machines. Life’s complex enough as it is.
Where the heck do you always get those perfectly fitting photos to your post?
@All: Thanks for the excellent suggestions. I have already downloaded and installed Silverlight and am now able to watch my Netflix movies on my Mac. I’ll look into those other applications, too.
@Thomas: It’s funny, when I wrote this post, I remembered this particular picture and it just seemed to fit really well.
[...] Lester became a new Mac owner/user this week. There’s many reason for switching from Windows to the Mac OS [...]
Paul, I love the photo with this post. Just hilarious. Welcome to the light side.
Congratulations. I have been very happy with my switch. Some things take some getting used to – but after awhile they feel quite natural. Be careful when copying / pasting directories because on a Mac they aren’t automatically merged like with Win – they replace!