MetaCatholic

At the end of my first week with the Mac, some comments are probably in order.

I’m still being driven mad by confusing the Command and Control keys in shortcut combinations. It’s not helped by continuing to use Windows.

I’ve by and large been impressed by running Windows in a VM (I’m using Fusion). This continues to be necessary for when I need the full power of Adobe Creative Suite, and also for using Bibleworks, and MS Publisher (an application I only use under sufferance!). If I had waited to be able to get all the software I needed when I bought the Mac, I’d still be waiting. WinXP actually runs faster in this virtual machine with a mere 512Mb RAM assigned than it did on my old hardware with 1Gb of RAM. Go figure! I have had problems with the printer driver. Printing from Windows disables the Mac driver and vice versa. I have a fairly kludgy workaround for that – printing everything in the VM to PDF and then dragging it over for a hard copy as needed.

I’ve set up the VM on another virtual desktop using Spaces. This is a great feature for running two OSs side by side and switching instantly between them with a keyboard shortcut: it’s almost instantaneous. Windows users who ned to go on using Windows have nothing to fear.

I’ve surprised myself by not yet buying MS Office 2008. I’m not yet sure what my word-processing solution will be. I have been taken aback by just how good Pages is: it is far more fully-featured than I expected, and is a real pleasure to use. I have played with Word 2008 in the Apple Store, and it is very good. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the same good language support as Office 2007 for Windows does. Pages seems to do enough for general work. I’m looking at download trials of Mellel and Nisus Writer Pro to see how they might pan out for me.

The fact that there is, in some ways, so little to say about the changeover says more about how much more alike the two OSs are than the “religious” wars of their fanboys might suggest. I am not having to change my ways of working that much. My use of dragging-and-dropping, always quite heavy, is increasing. I need to remember to use Spotlight, instead of drilling down through folders (as I would have to learn to use Search on Vista). I rather miss the Start button (a much better device than is credited: you could literally start doing anything by moving the mouse to the same place on your screen).

The Dock is better than the Windows Taskbar in many ways: being able to drag a file to an application without worrying whether it’s open or needs to open is a good move. You shouldn’t need to know: it’s your computer’s problem. The lack of feedback on things like which documents are open that the taskbar gave you is a bit of a minus.

Probably the thing that I notice most, and which I really like, is the almost instantaneous waking from Sleep, which means I can get going when I want, without wondering whether I’ve got time to switch the computer on to check for something before walking out of the door.

The first week: by and large, it’s been a good one.