Now That I’ve Gone iMac…
Going almost cold turkey away from Windows Vista to OS X has been a bit of a shock. I’ve had a Mac Mini for a few years, but the Mac OS isn’t as intuitive as I thought it would be and I couldn’t make the commitment fully. Now that I’ve bitten the bullet (so to speak) and purchased the 27-inch iMac, I’ve forced myself to take the plunge.
Oddly, I’d have to say that the Windows OS is friendlier to new users. For example, once you’ve been hand-held through the prompts to install a new application, Windows also points out the new program to you, telling you that you’ve got something new installed and then leads you to accessing it. With the iMac, I had no idea how to even install an application. However, once I understood the relatively basic paradigm (but initially completely unintuitive) method of dragging the newly downloaded file to the Application folder, the Mac OS method clearly blows Windows right out of the water. Drag, drop, you’re done. Don’t want the program anymore? Drag it to the Trash. No uninstall. No registry entries to clean up (at least that I can tell so far).
With familiarity comes comfort, so I’ve immediately installed some familiar applications to ease the transition:
- OpenOffice — I’ve heard NeoOffice is great, too, but I’m already used to OpenOffice
- VLC Media Player — better than Quicktime, and it plays MPGs
- Chrome — for everyday browsing
- Firefox — for those rare times Chrome or Safari have problems with a website
- Thunderbird
- Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes — not familiar per se, but makes the iTunes library transition easier. Plus some of these scripts are really cool and powerful, and make iTunes significantly better than is remotely possible in Windows.
- Skype — required for Friday night gaming!
Everything I’ve read indicates that Adium (IM), Growl (event notification), TextMate (text editor), and QuickSilver (launcher) are almost required apps, so I’ll be checking those out in the upcoming week or so.
Ohhhh, so close. You couldn’t wait another 25 days and make it a full year between blog posts?
Or does this mean Ramblings may becoming active again?
The install thing got me when I converted, but I’ve been a happy MacUser for over three years now. Though I was unable to completely give up XP, especially since some work realted sites (when I still had a job) required IE to access them. Plus there’s a couple of programs I just haven’t gotten around to finding the Mac equivelant of. Luckily, you can run XP on a Mac through Boot Camp (which I do rarely) and through Paralells (which I do not as rarely.) You can also run DOS (yes, I have DOS on my Mac) as well as Linux and Unix (ok I haven’t tried Unix, but BSD is a varient of Unix, right?)