An apple a day
A pandemic has been spreading lately around Telligent: buyamacitis. First it started with Jason, then it infected Rob, spread to Scott, and then quickly spread out to Jose, David, Jayme, and myself. Ben was already a Mac owner, as well as several other converts in the services department and Telligent’s sister companies. Now, the majority of the product team are Mac users. Most of the others have gone the route of getting the MacBook Pro. However, I primarily use my desktop, so investing in a laptop to make the switch wouldn’t make much sense. So I decided to get a Mac Pro instead. The iMac doesn’t really offer much extendability in terms of hardware or adding good
The main enabler for all of this has got to be VMware Fusion. Its "Unity" feature, which allows you to window Windows applications natively in OS X along side Mac applications. With this, it provides a much more natural feeling, instead of it looking like a virtual machine.
Overall, I am truly enjoying the Mac so far. I used to have an old TiBook (Titanium Powerbook G4 400mhz) back like 2000-2003. It was basically in the OS X 10.0 and 10.1 timeframe. I believe 10.2 came out while I owned it, but I didn’t upgrade. So I’m familiar with OS X, just kind of rusty.
Some bits of the Mac are truly an awesome experience: Quicksilver, iPhoto 08, iMovie 08, Fusion (as previously mentioned).
Some things could use some work. I had to buy a Quicktime extension to support my digital camcorder. Also, my camcorder was crashing iMovie because I had deleted a few movies through the filesystem instead of the camcorder’s built in UI (it had old metadata lying around). Overall, something as simple and also unobvious as this should be handled internally. Windows did.
Still searching for a few things to complete my Mac experience. Namely, haven’t found an RSS reader that quite compares to FeedDemon. NetNewsWire, which is also offered through Newsgator, is close, but not quite the same. My main gripe is no easy "mark post read, or mark it unread" button, no easy "flag this post" button (can hit the F key).
One nice thing with the community of software around the Mac is there really is a good amount of cheap, high quality software for the Mac. There are a lot of quality programs for the Mac that are just in the $10-20 range to register. I could totally get behind that. It is the perfect price range for ideals like the Codding Horror "Support Your Favorite Software Vendor". For Windows, there is tons of software, but the crap to quality ratio is far lower, and in general, will cost more than what I’ve seen with the Mac.
While I am enjoying my Mac, I do feel a bit dirty using one. I despite the "Mac vs PC" holy wars, since in reality, there will never be a winner and it is just a pointless debate. Perhaps my opinion is summed up best with this YouTube video, entitled "I Hate the Smugness of Apple".
The keyboard command you are looking for are Shift-Command-L. Just try it a few times and it will become muscle memory.
The smugness of Apple? I just don’t get why this myth is perpetuated. Apple has led customer satisfaction rankings for quite a long time.
Anonymous
28 Dec 07 at 4:21am
Actually, just using F for flagging worked fine. I ended up going with NewsFire. I decided I liked it a little bit more.
Apple itself has great customer service, I definitely had a great experience at the Apple store.
Their ads, while comical, can also come across as smug. In fact, I think they use the smugness to be comical.
You can also find it in the community at times. "We don’t need to defrag, that is a Windows thing… we don’t need AV, that is a Windows thing… we don’t have crashes, that is a Windows thing".
Even the network icon for the PCs on my network looks like a PC’s BSOD.
ken
28 Dec 07 at 9:08pm