8.0 - Life with the Mac
8.1 - Mac-in-the-house
I'm a cross-platform fool. I have linux machines, windows machines (98, three versions of NT, and XP) and Macs. I by far prefer the Mac, even though my favorite software isn't available for it yet. The specific Macs we have are two Mac Minis, a 1.42 GHz and a 1.5 GHz unit, both with a gig of ram, wifi, bluetooth, modems, and 80 gb drives. One came with OSX Panther and the faster one came with OSX Tiger.
8.2 - And the winner is...
That'd be me. :-)
I just spent several years working with Linux. Now, Linux is not (in my opinion) for the faint of heart. Its proponents will tell you that any average person can open up a Linux desktop and just work away, same as on a Windows or a Mac, but I'm afraid it's just not so. I'm definitely what you'd call a "power user", and although I certainly don't always do the right thing first go out of the gate, eventually, I try to figure out what's going on. I have a very strong technical background and so I expect to be able to figure out what is going on. Well, let me tell you, many are the serious headaches I've gotten from trying to jump through the Linux hoop, only to find out the hoop was three feet to the left of where I jumped — or currently on fire.
Don't get me wrong. I worked through all that, and I use Linux as the basis for my server farm; Linux is serving you this page, right here, right now. I've written literally hundreds of thousands of lines of code in C, Perl and Python under Linux, much of it to enable a moderately large company to do everything from inventory management to web serving on a broadly integrated system based on Linux. I learned a lot, and it really works well. Never crashes, uptimes are months and months at a go, things are fast and clean. But I would not, under any set of circumstances, recommend Linux to anyone who wasn't prepared to hack, fight, and claw their way into understanding the OS and the software that runs on it. And we probably shouldn't discuss hardware at all, because that truly is a mess.
Windows... well, I've been using Windows forever, it seems. Starting with 3.1 and right up to XP, even including the RISC NT versions for the PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS CPUs, I've been in there. Windows has been good to me in the sense that there is a broad market for products that run under the OS, and that's kept my cats in cat food, so extreme grinchiness is innapropriate. But I have to say, even after all that time, I'm not very fond of windows.
Which brings us to the Mac. I kept hearing this little refrain, which goes: "It just works." I also heard that Apple, more specifically the exec(s) at Apple, were downright dicatorial in making sure the system worked just the way they wanted it to. The more I heard these two ideas arriving somewhat near each other, the more itchy I became to try a Mac. To make a (very) long story short, when the Mac Mini came out, my threshold of cheapness was exceeded and I bit at the hook.
I now stand before you, hook deeply embedded in my cheek, with absolutely no viable excuse for waiting other than the forlorn cry "I didn't know!" Though I should have, because about every Mac user on the planet had been trying to tell me for years, directly and in forums and news articles and so forth. So if you'd like to direct a disdainful "I told you so" my way, have at it. I deserve it.
If you've come this far and you're not a Mac owner, I'm sure you know what's coming next, and sure enough, here it is: Go get one. Don't wait. Don't worry about the price. It's worth it. Every bleeding penny. Even if you go for a big machine. Or if you want, be cautious and get a Mac Mini, the way I did (I got two, actually, one for my sweetheart... after she saw mine, my options, shall we say, were limited.) The more time you spend with it, the better you will like it. There are several odd-feeling things to get over, and in my opinion, you really should make sure you get a standard two-button USB mouse because Apple's hardware vision of a mouse is outright retarded, but believe me, after a couple of weeks, your PC is going to be gathering dust except for any software you simply can't find on the Mac and must use.
8.3 - The way the Mac fits me
I've found some software I really like, and I've described some of it in moderate detail here.
I'm a musician and the inclusion of GarageBand, a multi-track music composition program, was one of the things that motivated me to actually bite the bullet and get a Mini, though I wasn't all that sure what it would do before I actually got it. As it turns out, its very cool, and I've had a lot of fun with it.
Appleworks is also included. This is a suite of tools that include spreadsheet, database, drawing, painting, presentation and word processing functionality. I've used the spreadsheet extensively, and found it to be only moderately reliable — it has crashed on me several times and it has a tendency to foul up updates to graphs. Still, mostly it works, and it's not lost any of my data yet, so... mumble. The word processor just plain won't serve my purposes, because it won't handle Chinese and Korean (unicode) characters properly. Luckily, most other applications do, and so I just don't use the word processor. Realistically, this isn't going to be a problem for most English speakers, but I thought I'd mention it as it was a big dissapointment to me. I've not used the other applications in the suite as yet, but it is nice to know they are there.
Coming from Linux, I miss multiple desktops and the clean interface setups they encourage, but OSX's "expose'" feature pretty well allows you to manage large numbers of windows easily and so I've adapted without too much of a problem.
OSX, or the Mini, or the combination, seems to have a little trouble with multitasking. Some operations pretty well lock up the UI (you get a "spinning beachball") for several seconds at a time. I've heard that multiple CPUs reduce this problem, however I think the OS should probably be able to handle any number of concurrent tasks — effective task switching and priority control are old hat. OS9 (not Mac OS9, I'm talking about 6809/OS9 by Microware way back in the 1980's) could handle this in 64k, what's up with OSX's failure to do it in a supposedly "modern" OS, then? Still, a little patience, and things settle down. Eventually, I got numb to this and I don't think about it much, though this is an OS misfeature that eats the user's time, and so qualifies in my mind as a serious "really needs to be fixed" issue.
I really like the graphics; the Mini seems to have the right amount of graphics horsepower for a desktop machine that isn't destined for serious number crunching or gaming. I have a fairly high resolution, 32-bit display that pleases me, looks good, and upon which dragging and other OS operations are quite fast and clean. There are some really cool visual effects that are integrated into the OS; I'm not going to describe them, because if you buy one, you deserve to be as surprised as I was, and as pleased. Suffice it to say that this part of the Mini/OSX experience gets rated ten out of ten from me.
OSX offers an xwindows "compatibility layer" which appears to the user as a program running under OSX which can run some xwindows applications. I was able to find a package with an OSX 10.3-ready version of The Gimp in it, and it seems to run just fine. Which is good, because this software isn't available for the Mac as yet, and without it, I need the Gimp so I can do basic image mangling. I'd buy Photoshop, but I just can't bring myself to pay that kind of money for far less functionality than I get for about $50.00 under Windows. What I need to look into is a Windows emulator for the PPC Mac, I guess, or get an Intel Mac and get Parallels, which is more likely.
As part of the xwindows compatibility layer, there is a terminal application that I was able to con into acting properly by (a) SSH'ing to my Linux server, (B) running slogin in that shell, and (C) running all terminal applications inside that slogin shell. That's good, because...
OSX's native Terminal application (which doesn't run under the xwindows compatibility layer) may be capable of doing this, but so far, I have been unable to make it run fairly benign remote Linux applications such as Midni(te|ght) Commander, a tool I use day in and day out. I have managed to get Terminal to run in color, but it still won't handle end of line wrapping properly and I'm kind of at a loss as to what to try next. I suspect this is fixable, but am not enough of a terminal monkey to know what to do. Suggestions are most welcome.
Under Linux, installing software often requires command-line gymnastics. Because there are so many versions of Linux, and because they differ not only in release version but also in construction from distribution to distribution, installing software will often escalate from gymnastics to fireworks, swearing, searching the net for the right libraries and/or other pre-requisites which you may or may not find, and in the end, you may meet failure even after a very concerted effort. If I were forced to choose a single word for Linux installation operations (twists own arm behind back) I would definitely have to choose "Sucks."
In this area, the Mac doesn't just shine, it is like a supernova. Drag and drop, baby, drag and drop. That's all there is to it, generally. If not, you may have to click a few dialogs here and there. This is the poster child for how it should be done. Linux is the poster child for how it should not be done, and Windows, well, it varies according to the software developer which may be good or bad.
And now for a bit of OSX UI weirdness. OSX puts the menubar — for everything — at the top of the display; the menubar completely changes content and functionality based upon what window is in focus. If you have clicked on Finder, then Finder's menu is up there. If you've clicked into a spreadsheet window, then you see spreadsheet menus up there. I'm of mixed mind about this. On the one hand, the constant top-of-display placement makes you go further than you need to for almost any imaginable window to get to the menu for it; that's inconvenient, uses time and energy that could be better spent, and initially very annoying. It also constantly changes what the user sees in the same place which is a formal UI no-no if you subscribe to such things (I don't, frankly, but there are lots of what I call "user interface nazis" that do.) So that's some heavy downside, when taken all together. However, this approach also allows applications to be started that don't (yet) have a window open, and I do like that. You can switch between applications using Apple-TAB, and that's how you reactivate a menu that doesn't have a window at the moment. Overall, I'd just say this is a wash — it's different, but it is very usable.
Something that actually works very poorly in OSX 10.3 is window activation / mouse focus. If a window is not currently in focus, then clicking on a button (such as OK in a dialog) may not work. It just activates the window. You have to click again to make the button actually function. I think this is a serious OS bug; if a dialog pops up asking me to choose between A or B, then it should definitely not take the focus from wherever it is (I may be typing in another window, so that could cause serious problems) but if I point at the darned button and click, it should do whatever is indicated by that action, not just activate the window. Grumble.
These are very minor issues overall, and my conclusion is that Mac OSX 10.3.9 hits a home run. 10.4 (Tiger) has some improvements, but hasn't really solved the issues I bring up here. After watching my sweetheart run it for a few months, I choked up the $100 for it, and I'm glad I did.
8.4 - Alas, all is not roses
I suspected there had to be some kind of a serious down side, though. Eventually. And there was! I bought my first Mac Mini 31 days prior to the release of Tiger. Apple, in their infinite wisdom, allowed anyone who had bought a Mac (any model) up to thirty days prior to the release of Tiger to get a free upgrade. The rest of us were to pony up a hundred bucks.
Now, it's not like I couldn't drag a hundred bucks out of the cookie jar, but a hundred bucks isn't meaningless to me, either, and I'm afraid I landed pretty hard on the "irritated" side of the coin after the announcement. Adding $100 to the Mini's price is a pretty substantial cost increase, if you think about it. This feeling was somewhat multiplied by one of the major announced features of Tiger: desktop widgets.
Desktop widgets, thought I? They bought the Konfabulator people? How cool is that? Well, no. They didn't buy them. They pulled a Microsoft and essentially, although admittedly not completely, duplicated the functionality of the Konfabulator product. Thereby giving a developer who had diligently supported them with a fabulous and reasonably priced product, a really good lubricant-free reaming. As a developer myself, I thought this was nothing less than apalling. Legal? Sure. But that's about all you can say for it.
I've only had one bad application software experience with my Mac. I bought Newsfire, an RSS feed reader, based on positive reviews I found on various sites on the net. Once purchased, I found it to be rather utilitarian, but it did work. Then, one day, the Newsfire Oracle spoke to me via the Holy Dialog, saying: A New Update Is Available! We Highly Recommend You Update. So... what do I know? Everything else that has said that has proceeded to give me good stuff, so I clicked the button. Newsfire installed its new self, and subsequently refused to show any feed content. I wrote the developer, who briskly informed me that "NewsFire 1.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4. This is stated on the website." Now, ignoring the issue that the program told me to update and I wasn't anywhere near the website, I wrote back saying, "So how do I get the old version that I paid for back and working?" I never got an answer. I wrote twice more, not having all that much faith in email, and still didn't get an answer. So if you're considering an RSS handling program, I'd suggest you skip Newsfire, based on the above experiences. I should note that once I bit the bullet and upgraded to 10.4, Newsfire began working again, but I don't consider this a solution to the problem, which is that 10.3 users are out of luck.
8.5 - Just do it.
I sum up as I began: If you've been fence-sitting, go ahead, the experience is fine. The Mac, like any computer, provides a huge, broad, deep experience that will take you many months to wrap your head around. But it will also let you get started right away, and it surely won't irritate you as much as anything else out there (e.g. Windows and Linux.) It's pretty, it's functional, it's inexpensive (if you buy a mini) and it is very, very powerful. Get a two-button USB mouse, but consider the Apple keyboard, it's a nice design and makes sure that you don't lose any USB ports in the process of attaching your keyboard and mouse. Thank you for taking the time to read this; I hope it was, or will be, useful to you.
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