Blogging Roller

I picked up my new PowerBook on Wednesday. I bought one of the new 15" models with 1.5Ghz processor, 1.25GB RAM, and Apple Care. Apple provides a great out-of-box experience - everything is attractive, even the packaging, and well designed and everything just works - right off the bat. I was happy to find lots of cool software pre-installed, including, to my surprise, both vim and JDK 1.4.2. The system comes loaded up with cool Apple software including iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and GarageBand as well as 3rd party programs like the OmniWriter outliner and the Visio-like Omni Graffle diagrammer. Within an hour I had established a WIFI connection, mounted shared folders from my Windows box, and ssh'ed into my Gentoo Linux server. Very cool! I'm gushing now. Sorry about that. I haven't bought an off-the-shelf computer in about ten years and I've never bought a laptop. Normally, I build my own machines from el cheapo components, crappy cases, and noisy fans. This is a very different experience than that.

After getting comfortable with the UI and some of the pre-installed software, I started to download some of the same software that I use on Windows: Firefox 0.8, Thunderbird 0.3, Eclipse 3.0M8, Microsoft's Remote Desktop client, and Palm Desktop. I spent a short time with each of these applications; here are some nutshell reviews. Firefox seems functional, but I prefer the built-in browser Safari. Thunderbird also seems to work, but I could not figure out how to import my existing Thunderbird mail files from my Windows-box, so I guess I'm stuck with the built-in Mail.App. Eclipse 3.0 works, but the new M8 look-and-feel looks especially crummy on Mac OSX. Remove Desktop works well. Palm Desktop works well, but I only downloaded it so that I can get the Conduit Manager necessary to iSync my PalmOS-based PDA. Perhaps I need to try using IDEA instead of Eclipse and Microsoft Office/Entourage instead of Mail.App, but I'm not in the mood to spend more money right now. Plus, I missed the $249 IDEA sale by one day.

Last night, I tried some of the multi-media software. I plugged my digital camera into the USB port and iPhoto popped up. It imported my photos and I tried doing some rotations, cropping, and enhancements. It seems to provide more than adequate thumbnailing and photo management/organization features. I hooked up my digital camcorder and imported some video footage with iMovie but I haven't tried to compose a video yet or burn a DVD. iPhoto is no Photoshop and iMovie seems pretty rudimentary, but I didn't have to set any preferences or install any drivers to get my camera and camcoder hooked up. That has not been my experience with my home-built Windows and Linux machines.

That's all for now. I'll be blogging my Mac experiences as I go and I've sarted a new category just for that: /Main/General/MacOS.