MetaCatholic

Another little update on switching operating systems, for those who are curious, and those who are pondering the same move.

The first lesson: there’s no such thing as a perfect computer system, whatever enthusiasts tell you. The second lesson is that (whisper who dares) Windows and OS X are not as far apart as you might think. It’s more than a big-endian and little-endian dispute, but far nearer that than to the Arian controversy, despite the religious intensity of the battle. Lesson number three is that the oft-touted word “intuitive” often (but not always) means “what I’m used to”.

One downside story first. I couldn’t for the life of me work out why the Notes feature of Mail wasn’t working. I trawled the various discussions and support sites, and clearly quite a few other people had had or were having the same problem. Most were writing this off as a bug. Then I stumbled across one site that had the answer. The Marker Felt font needed to be enabled. Many of us jaded long-time users of any system are prone to turn fonts and font sets on and off as needed. I’d moved this particular font into a group that was disabled. But it is hardly elegant to make a feature depend on a particular non-system font, and throw up no warning dialogue. One thing that definitely does seem to be a bug (and not a faux bug like the notes one) is the failure of iCal to purge old events according to the settings. I had to get rid of mine by purging them on the Palm TX and then syncing.

On the major upside, I thought it was time to put into action something I’d quite wanted to do for some time. I copied part of Jesus of Nazareth to the Mac (using the excellent Handbrake) and then edited about 25 minutes of the passion sequence down to just over four in iMovie. Then I overlaid Wonderwall from my iTunes library, and exported it as a QuickTime movie, for use as an unusual meditation piece in an informal evening service. (I’d love to show you, but I think I’d be violating all sorts of copyright.) The various importing and rendering times were tedious, but I could get on with other stuff. The actual work was relatively brief. The final product may have been rough and ready (and I really undertook it as a learning experience) but I managed it without any reference to any manual or guide, and just be trying things out. In this case, it was fairly intuitive – once I realised that the Mac’s default option to make something happen is drag one thing over another.

The saga continues.