Ask Dr Plokta

Switching (Part 1)

About seven weeks ago, I bought a Macintosh Powerbook G4 1GHz. By adding a Superdrive DVD writer, Apple had finally come up with the perfect laptop, doing everything I might want a laptop or desktop machine to do. So, as a Microsoft Windows user since version 1.0 (I say "user", but 1.0 was in fact completely useless for anything more advanced than playing Othello), I've been having something of a learning experience in switching over.

I don't regret it. The Mac really is more stable and more fun to use, with a generally better feel. I've had exactly one kernel panic, and that was due to Alcatel's dodgy OS X drivers for their Speedtouch ADSL adaptor, which don't like the adaptor to be unplugged. I've since purchased a D-Link DSL-300g+ standalone ADSL modem and a D-Link DI-614+ wireless router, and now the Powerbook and my PC can both talk to the Internet, and the Powerbook is using its built in Airport card for wireless networking.

What's taking longest to get used to is the editing keys. Things like Ctrl+Home to go to the top of a document, Ctrl-Shift-End to select to the end of a document, Ctrl-Right to move one word to the right, and so on, are hard-wired into my motor cortex, and they're all different on the Mac. It's not helped by the Powerbook having a slightly abbreviated keyboard that doesn't even have a Del key, and needs the Fn key to be pressed to access Home, End, Pg Up and Pg Dn.

There are various problems with OS X (I've never even booted into Classic, and have no intention of ever trying to learn how to use it). The Dock is not as bad as some people say, but it's not perfect. It's trying to do too much at once. I can cope with the idea of mixing together running and non-running programs, and OS X's memory management really does seem to be good enough to make it work, at least with 512MB of RAM. But the trash can doesn't really belong on the Dock, and the magnification is tremendously disconcerting. You can turn the magnification off, of course, but the icons for minimised documents are too small to actually see what the document is, unless you're doing a demo and deliberately using documents with 300-point type.

Its font handling is not as good as it might be. It's supposed to cope with Windows Truetype fonts, but it seems very fussy about them. It also seems that it needs a reboot, or at least a logout and login, before it recognises new fonts, which is rather against the spirit of OS X.

It doesn't have a perfect web browser. Safari has superb bookmark handling, but isn't finished, and its rendering has some rough edges to be smoothed out. Chimera has appallingly bad bookmark handling, and doesn't look quite as good, but is more polished in most other respects. They should both reach final versions some time this year, and I have high hopes. Internet Explorer is the one to try if the others don't work, because it's the most widely supported by web sites, but it is slower and doesn't feel as good as Safari and Chimera.

To be continued in Part 2...

Posted by mikeplokta at January 19, 2003 05:54 PM | TrackBack