Well, its been exactly one week since I first got my MacBook Pro (the standard 2GHz model), and I thought I’d share some thoughts from a new Mac user.
- Macs are cool. From the way they look (both externally, and on the screen) to the way they work, Macs satisfy a lot of the need for something cool that a lot of tech people have, myself included.
- Macs are just slightly different enough to give you a few hangups. This is to be expected, of course, since its an entirely different platform, but there are some things that are slightly different and they really throw me off, particularly in the typing department. The biggest one of these is the Home/End difference. On Windows, the Home and End keys take you to the beginning and end of the current line, respectively. On the Mac, the Home and End keys take you to the beginning and end of the entire document (and the crazy,crazy combination Command Left/Right takes you to the start and end of the line). I’ve tried both the properties change you can make and the program DoubleCommand which will remap these to what I’m more familiar with, but it doesn’t work for some reason. Probably because I’m using Synergy and a Dell keyboard on my Windows box.
- iCal needs an upgrade. iCal seems like an great program, and I really want to use it, but the fact that it can’t publish and subscribe to the same Calendar, and the fact that SSL support is broken are deal breakers.
- I can’t use Safari. Why?. For the most part, I’ve attempted to make a concious effort to give the default mac way of doing things a try before I don’t do them anymore, but for some reason I can’t bring myself to use Safari, and I can’t figure out why. I constantly go back to Firefox. It may have been the fact that tabbed browsing wasn’t enabled by default, but I’ve fixed that and still haven’t been satisfied.
- Mail.app is very good. I’ve switched from Thunderbird to Mail.app and not looked back.
Anyway, those are some initial thoughts… Can’t wait to see what week 2 brings.
