Some thoughts on my first weekend with MacOS X (the last time I ran a Mac, I'm not even sure what number the OS was -- I don't remember them keeping score in the late 80s or early 90s!).
- It's fast: very, very fast. Even though I only have 1 gig of RAM in my iMac, things that really matter are blazingly fast: startup, restart, sleep, resume from sleep, application launch, document browsing, Web browsing, searching (Spotlight), and I could go on. It fees like the designers optimized all their work for typical end user actions, as opposed to whatever the developers in Redmond are optimizing for (the machine? billg? security?).
- It plays well with others. I plugged my old Brother laser printer into a USB port, and Leopard happily found the driver, installed it and made the printer show up in the Printers list. Ditto for everything else I've plugged in so far. (Also nice: since the laser printer has two ports, I can now share the printer across the Mac and PC without a print server or network connection.) The only device which required me actually hunting down a driver? You guessed it: a Microsoft keyboard.
- It's a better Windows client than Windows. Without me lifting a finger, it found and presented the shared folders on my nearby Dell desktop. I still haven't figured out how to make that happen on my work Windows XP laptop.
- It's consistent. Installation, keyboard shortcuts, navigation, and just overall behavior seem very consistent across applications.
- Menus and windows. I'm not a big fan of the menu bar being fixed to the top of the screen as opposed to attached to individual windows.
- Modifier keys are in different places and do different things. The location of the modifier keys will take some getting used to (Ctrl-Windows-Alt versus Control-Option-Command).
- More later as I play some more. Still looking for the one key equivalent to opening My Computer (Windows-e), which I did all the time on Windows and found very useful.
No comments:
Post a Comment