The first 10 Days in the Macintosh Wilderness
Well, I am 10 days into my Month of Macintosh, and I have some things to report.
Renaming files in Finder is easy, but not very intuitive. Thanks to these folks for showing me the way.
Macs have some interesting screen capture options, but to execute them you need flexible fingers.
A client sent me an MS Word doument. This client likes to do very ‘fancy’ things in MS Word, such as overlaying text fields on top of images. As a result, I spent a good amount of time searching for a Mac/UNIX friendly program that would read this file correctly. Purchasing Office for Mac was not an option; I think giving Microsoft more money defeats the purpose of this game. Besides, I already have a Windows copy of Office, and I refuse to buy another one.
After trying a couple programs, I came across NeoOffice, a port of OpenOffice to the Mac’s Cocoa GUI. It rocks!
I have a lot of new keyboard shortcuts to learn. Some of the Mac shortcuts make more sense than their Windows counterparts, though. At this point, I am comfortable using COMMAND-[ and ] to go Back and Forward in Mac Firefox.
Cyberduck is a great FTP client.
I waste too much time staring at and configuring my Dashboard. iStat Pro is one hot widget!
I am enjoying my time in Macintosh world so far.
Cheers!
So what is the outcome? Are you a OS X convert now?
Oh and hey, what’s up?
There’s not much exciting happening in the Windows world these days. I might have to get one myself. (Disclaimer: I own shares of AAPL).
Jon
I am definitely not an Apple worshiper, but I do find myself using OS X more and more. I beat on it, and it hasn’t crashed on me yet, which is more than I can say for any Windows OS I’ve ever used.
Dustin, how are ya? It’s been a while - drop me a line if you get a minute.
Honestly Jon, I haven’t paid much attention to what is up with Windows lately. I guess I’m jaded because I have seen too many poor versions of Windows. I’m sure Vista has lots of memory-eating goodness though.
Wow that was strange. I just wrote an incredibly long comment but after I clicked submit my comment didn’t appear. Grrrr… well I’m not writing all that over again. Anyways, just wanted to say great blog!