More Thoughts On Switching To The Mac

Well I’ve had the MacBook Pro for a couple of weeks now and wanted to update my previous comments about switching to the Mac. This is probably gonna be a long post but I’ve been meaning to write for a while ... also the blog comment notification system wasn’t working but I think it’s working now.

First of all I want to say that there’s no question in my mind that switching was/is the right thing to do. I just can’t say enough about how much I’m enjoying using this computer. There’s just something intangible about it … at the risk of sounding corny, it just feels like this thing has been put together with care and class and it’s just absolutely beautiful to look at (the OS that is, although the laptop itself is quite easy on the eyes as well). I would say the difference between using the Mac and using Windows XP (haven’t tried Vista yet) as being the difference between flying first class and flying coach. You get to the same place eventaully, but the experience is sooo much nicer. It’s just unfortunate that first class is so much more freakin’ expensive … but if you can get a free upgrade using your miles or something, it’s nice. Not that that last part is really part of the analogy.

OK, first of all, some specific things that I've really liked.

I’ve done the right thing and switched from Entourage to Mail.app/iCal/Address Book. Entourage was a hog and just slowed everything down. It was trying to be Outlook but wasn’t cutting it. Yuck.

Mail.app took a while to import all my email from Entourage but now that it’s all in there, it’s working much snappier than Entourage ever did. There’s some delay in opening mail folders … but not as bad. (Outlook had no such delays by the way. Sigh … believe me, the Mail/iCal/Addressbook combo is still not Outlook, but at least it’s not trying to be and failing, like Entourage).

The smart mailboxes feature is very cool. Before, I had unread mail in folders scattered everywhere, which I was planning to respond to “someday” … but now with one mailbox that collects all my “Unread Mail,” I’ve been answering emails from months ago (I know … why bother, but I’m OCD that way).

Address Book and iCal work decently for what they do. I will say though that syncing with the Treo is not a straightforward experience. Currently I’m using something called “Missing Sync” which is better than the Hotsync Manager default, but even so it doesn’t sync really the way it should. It’s close enough though.

One annoying thing is that the Entourage calendar is still starting up in the background somehow … I can’t turn it off. I uncheck the Entourage database in the “Login Items” in TinkerTool so that it shouldn't start up again, but it just puts another copy of itself there. Anyway what this means is that I’m still getting my calendar notifications from there, on top of the ones I’m getting from iCal. Looks like I’ll probably just have to completely uninstall Entourage to get this to stop happening …

Other things I’m liking are Adium for IM (except for AIM file transfers, which do not seem to work on there), DragThing, Journler (free journaling software), SuperDuper for backups (why don’t they have this for Windows?? Nero BackItUp was crapadelic), and little things like how advanced screen capture is built in to the OS (maybe vista has this now though).

And on top of all that, Parallels is still utterly amazing … I wasn’t able to find a suitable substitute for MS Money (Quicken on the Mac sucks, as do all the other programs IMHO … plus I just have too much data in MS Money to properly export) … so I just run it in Windows – works like it always does. Nice. And it runs in a window on my Mac OS screen, too.

An offshoot of that is that originally I had planned to have Mac OS on half of my hard drive, and Windows on the other half – so 100GB for each. However, after using the Mac for a week, it became clear that there was not going to be as much of a need for Windows as I’d originally thought … so I redid the Boot Camp partitioning so that Windows is only using 25GB now. Of course that meant reinstalling Windows AGGGGGGGGAAAAIINNNN … for the 25432nd time in the past 4 years … AAAGGGHHH!!!!

OK. Now onto some things that have taken some getting used to.

I find the antialiasing to not be as crisp as with Windows Cleartype. It looks a little fuzzy to me, even with it on “light” … I mean it’s not bad, but when I look at Windows XP, the text just looks crisper.

Trying to find a good software MP3 player. I have to admit that I do not understand iTunes. I’ll have to spend some time playing with it. I was using Foobar2000 on Windows and it just opened up real snappily when I wanted to hear an mp3 … now it just seems like when I double click on an MP3 file that I want to listen to, I gotta wait for iTunes to load up and it takes a while. I know you can preview an MP3 from the finder but … well it’s not the same.

Is there a good MP3 tagging program? One that can do batch tagging, batch renaming, and filename to tag conversion etc. I found a program called MediaRage but it’s not really as user friendly as what I was using on Windows (MP3TagEdit).

Also the program MP3Gain for Windows does not, in my opinion, have an acceptable substitute on the Mac. There is something called MacMP3Gain which purports to do the same thing, but it can’t roll back the changes if necessary, and you can’t just drop a file or two into it. It has to be run on an entire folder.

Actually the Mac counterparts to several Windows programs don’t seem to run as well. Even MS Word … it’s not the same. There’s a little delay when you type. Like, the letters don’t appear on the screen at the same moment you type. It’s subtle but annoying. To me that is. Like I said, I’m OCD that way. One of my documents has a large table in it, and typing absolutely crawls when I’m in there. Why?

Also. I don’t know if any of you have used a program called MindManager for Windows, but the Mac version just blows. It opens the windows files, which is cool, but it does not work in an acceptable manner. I was going to use it to organize my thoughts for this posting but I wound up using OmniOutliner instead.

I even kind of miss Windows Media Player. Quicktime sucks. There’s VLC media player which for some reason doesn’t feel as snappy as on Windows. There’s also a program called Miro that I have to try out a little more but it seemed slow.

Also still trying to find an acceptable image viewing/cataloguing program. How do you spell catalogueing? dammit.

Right now it’s coming down to Adobe Lightroom vs. iView Media Pro (now called Microsoft Expression Media). I feel like I should like Lightroom more, but actually I think I prefer the iView. Aperture isn’t going to cut it I don’t think.

And a few other little things. Why can’t the icons on the Finder desktop be placed closer together? They are just too far apart and it takes up too much room. I tried something called Path Finder to replace the Finder, and the desktop icons are closer together and there are some other snazzy features, but though the concept is nice, it just didn’t work that well … it messes up the Exposé “show desktop” thing and also is slower to open directory listing windows than the Finder.

I’m changing all my external hard drives to HFS+ … the Mac can’t write to NTFS and I didn’t see the point in converting everything to FAT32 … that seemed like it would be going back in time … the only thing has been trying to move data around to empty out the drives one at a time to do the conversions … but in the end I will have 3x300GB HFS+ drives, 1 500GB HFS+ drive, and 1 300GB NTFS drive (for old times sake and because I’m still going to use the Dell for sequencing). I’ve been using MacDrive (demo version) on Windows to access the HFS+ drives, which seems to work nicely for the most part (but not always).

Finally I miss being able to do CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up a list of the active processes and the memory/CPU each one is consuming, to force quit a process from there. I know you can do Cmd-Option-Esc on the Mac to bring up a list of active programs, but you can’t (from there) see if Firefox is doing the usual 50% CPU/400MB RAM thing. I suppose for most program crashes you’d tend to know which one it is, but sometimes the computer’s just running slowly and making that high-fan noise and then you have to go to Activity Monitor to see what’s going on. Why not just make that accessible with the Cmd-Option-Esc?

I also miss having a real Delete key to erase characters to the right of the cursor. The “Fn” and “Delete (I mean Backspace)” keys are on opposite sides of the keyboard (on the MBP that is) and it takes two hands to do the Del function. I mean, c’mon. I know you can map the “Enter” key on the right of the spacebar to something else, but why even have that key there? Anyway I’ve mapped it to CTRL.

But anyway all in all, nothing's perfect. The overall experience is still quite exquisite. I love this computer … I mean look, I just spent an hour and a half writing this post about it. That has to say something, right?

Now all I have to do is stop spending so much time installing programs and start actually doing work with it!!!

Thoughts, anyone?