My First Month with the MacBook

I made a transition in my career recently. I was getting a little narrow visioned and was losing my touch. One of the first things I had to do when I joined my new company was to buy a new laptop. I could not buy a Dell, HP or IBM laptop since they were competitors and only choices I had left were Sony and Mac ! I had never used a Mac in my entire saga of computer usage. The only little experience I had was when I played with demo models in the Apple stores.

So on the persuasion of my dear wife and my own zeal to do new things along with the new job was go buy a Apple Mac Book. The day it got delivered to my office, I was like a little kid ripping up the packaging and the unveiling of the beautiful box it came in. These guys can really do this wonderfully.

Once the machine booted, (which it did without a murmur) I was taken through a setup wizard which even took my picture ! Now that is neat ! I next proceeded to setup email and that went without a hitch. Browsing the web with Safari was no hassle. So in general things were going great in the first hour or so. Then one thing started bothering me, the touch pad would not let me tap and click. I had to use the button below it. This kind of floored me. Man ! this machine does not have tap pad only a touch pad. So i got a little upset. I went home and ranted and raved about how I had gotten cheated. My wife being the smart one in our family, casually mentioned if I had checked if this can be enabled ? 

So the next day google bought up a dozen or so websites where people had the same issue. I was like .. man this sucks. Only to find a very simple solution, By default it is turned off. Go to system prefs and turn it on. :-)

As I started using the laptop, I had started discovering small nuances and WOWs that rattled my deep fried Windows brain. I will try putting them down

1. The "delete" key is really the backspace key. To "Del" as you type or edit, you fill need to press Fn+delete. Even though I have gotten over this, it still bothers me.

2. There are no "Home" or "End" buttons. you have to rely on a combination of Ctrl+right arrow for End and Ctrl+left arrow for Home. Similarly Pg UP and Pg Dn were a funtion on Ctrl+up arrow and Ctrl+down arrow. look up http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1343 for all the key bindings.

3. I dont like iTunes.

4. When you download an executable, its usually packaged as a .dmg. A dmg is "mounted" first and then the installation can begin. Safari handles this beautifully. However it took me 30 minutes to figure out what was going on. The first thing I installed was thunerbird and spent some time getting it right.

5. I had to get a software called "StuffIt" to be able to unzip files.

6. The next major challenge I had was understanding "Finder". This is synonymous to Windows Explorer but much smarter. there is nothing much to say abt this .. only it that it still drives me a little crazy when i dont get to see my folder tree on the left hand side. You can do cool things like setting folder wise background pictures or colours. You can set the spacing of the grid in the Icon iew, You can specify the size of icons, size of text and in general useless stuff. I have to figure out how to select->hold right mouse key and drag to another folder. In the windows world, this action presents me with an option to copy or move the file(s).

7. I love the application "Preview". This is the one stop for viewing all kinds of files. I dont have to install the Adobe reader !

8. Setting up network printers is a breeze. No need to install specific driver. All this happens in the background and I can just print ! wow ! All I need to specify is the IP address or the network printer name. The next best thing .. I can print to a PDF without having a third party application like CutePDF or PrimoPDF.

9. Airport is like a dream come true. It handles Wi-Fi connections in such a painless way that you will get addicted to it. Another wow.

10. I still would like to see the date on the task bar or Menu bar as its called in the Mac World. Here is a link of how to get this done. Its not a simple click a radio button task. http://lifehacker.com/software/mac-tip/display-the-date-on-the-menubar-316029.php
OR
If you have iCal on the dock, the icon will change with the date. Just look at the icon for the date ! WOW

11. Uninstall is a breeze. just delete and you are done.

12. Adium is a great tool if you chat online. It integrates all the chat clients (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Gtalk).

13. I am still confused by the "option" key ..

14. Spotlight is godsend. It helps you search anything and everything. and no indexing that Google Desktop does all the time on windows. WOW again. http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304778

15. Now comes the interesting challenge. If you have to sync your Mac with your Windows Smartphone or PDA. What do you do ? Use SyncMate from Eltima software. The Free version works well. Its syncs up Cal, Contacts, Notes, To-dos. Very useful.

16. Clicking on the red ballon in the top left corner closes the window and not the application. Command+Q does it !

17. The photobooth is one thing you will spend tons of time on. Great entertainment tool. My kids and I have a lot of fun experimenting with this.

18. Expose is a nice .. if you master it. It can get irritating sometimes.

19. Renaming files is completely counter-intuitive. To rename a file, you have to hit Enter and then rename it. The right-click menu does not have "Rename". This is a major gotcha.

20. Highlighting a file and hitting the delete key does nothing. To delete, use Command+delete. or right click and "Move to Trash"

So there you have it .. my first month with the Macbook. I still have a long way to go .. its like a nice little toy chest. Everyday i stumble across a new feature or gotcha.

VIVIA !