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My First week with a Macbook

By Ryan Doom on Wednesday, December 31, 2008

My First week with a Macbook
By Ryan Doom @ 7:43 AM
1773 Views :: 10 Comments :: :: General

 

Picked up a Macbook on Craigslist to start to get in touch with this hipster coffee shop, "I use a Mac I'm so cool lifestyle."  Well, and to rock out some Ruby on Rails development and have a good excuse to do so.

I have outlined 3 days of things I have loved and hated about the Macbook.  I did this entire post, and photo editing on it, so I'm coming along.

Loving

  • Dvorak is rocking on the Mac, way better than on the PC.  Switching between qwerty and dvorak is done once not per window
  • Bash Terminal - feels great to be back in the Linux mode, and being able to edit all my httpd.conf 's again
  • Cyberduck is cool and has s3 integration
  • Believe it or not this one button mouse thing is awesome.  Two fingers scrolls, two fingers and mouse 'right clicks' / opens secondary menu.  I like it.
  • The battery life is awesome
  • Garage band
  • Google chat with video and the built in camera 
  • Spotlight is awesome for finding applications and directories you want to use.  I hear Quicksilver is great too, haven't tried it yet
  • Getting used to the dock for my applications and whats running
  • Expose and Spaces seems neat, haven't really embraced it yet.  Beats vistas new 'alt tab' that they probably threw in before shipping for some 'glitz' and something to use in the commercials.  
  • Seems to browse our window server shares just fine, I opened a Adobe Fireworks file and all went well

Hating

  • Key remapping is difficult.  I tried Doublecommand to remap my capslock key to delete, but it doesn't work very well.  Incase you haven't tried it, using your left pinky for delete on caps lock is a lot closer and easier than reaching for delete with your right pinky.  And i type a lot, and need delete a lot.
  • Still getting a grasp on file structure, moving around, copying files, etc seems to be more work.  Probably a learning curve.
  • Eclipse / Aptana are not feeling very good at the moment, i'm going to try Coda and text mate
  • Cyberduck when moving files, it keeps prompting me and I need to figure out how to get the confirm transfer stuff going
  • Getting used to the command key doing 'ctrl' key type functions, and using my thumb to access it
  • Iwork sucks
  • Having multiple firefox open and it minimized, and trying to go through multiple 'new windows' is getting hard to get used to.  But I'm sure this wi be in the love category eventually
  • I use the alt key to get up into my file menu and use shortcut keys to move through there, haven't been able to find a way to do this yet. (just found this before posting, default is ctrl fn f2 ack)
  • In Fireworks when clicking in the font picker I can't just start typing the font I have to use the mouse. Ack.
Rating
Comments
By Farhan Ahmad @ Wednesday, December 31, 2008 3:22 PM
Interesting, how long is the battery life? Have you noticed the .DS_Store files on your network yet? :)

I didn't realize you were still on Dvorak. How is that working out, especially with the command line (CTRL+C :))?

By Karl @ Wednesday, December 31, 2008 3:59 PM
In reply to the other poster's comment:

To turn off .DS_Store creation on network shares, run this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

By Farhan Ahmad @ Thursday, January 01, 2009 6:27 AM
Thanks, Karl. I wanted to point it out to Ryan because when I was playing around with OS X I didn't notice those until I was back on my Windows machine and had those files all over my network shares.

By Ryan @ Friday, January 02, 2009 1:34 AM
I have not yet noticed those, I will check it out and turn that 'feature?' off.

But the batter life has been excellent, I'm not sure what the cell is, but its far better than any of my PCs. I think I had 25% left yesterday and it had over an hour still of juice.


By the rules of chess @ Friday, April 24, 2009 5:44 PM
I’ve been seriously considering moving over to a Mac over the past week or so, but being completely honest, I haven’t much of a clue of what to get. Initially, a Macbook looked like it was giving more bang-for-buck, but with this announcement maybe that’s no longer the case. The 15″ Macbook Pro looks like a steal now.Can you give a bloke advice Paul? Do you know of any upcoming announcements concerning the Macbook?

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By Love poetry @ Friday, February 05, 2010 4:40 PM
I wanted to point it out to Ryan because when I was playing around with OS X I didn't notice those until I was back on my Windows machine and had those files all over my network shares.

By diabetes cure @ Thursday, April 15, 2010 1:34 PM
I was an Intel-Microsoft user since 1983 -- until two years ago, when I bought my first Dual G5 for video editing. After that, I never looked back and when I got a new laptop last year I got a Macbook (2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory). I'm very happy with it. It has a few glitches -- the sleep mode is a bit weird, and sometimes it is hard to wake up (gee it's like me). There was a dreadful update that Apple put out a few months ago that really messed Wifi, but they've since added another patch. The DVD drive can get a little sticky if it is a disc with a label, and of course Appple has this weird thing against two-button mice, so the trackpad has only one button.

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