Goodbye PC, hello Mac: Surprises for this PC user

For those of you just join­ing in, I bought my first Mac after 23 years of PC use. I talk about my first couple of days here and here. While the con­ver­sion is not com­plete, I wanted to share a few unex­pected items that have made a big impres­sion on me. When you see intu­itive func­tion­al­ity and stun­ning design come together on in an oper­at­ing system, it’s hard not to get excited.

Multi-​touch track­pad
Tech­nol­ogy orig­i­nally designed for the iPhone is now incor­po­rated into the Mac­Book track­pad. Multi-​touch allows you to per­form advanced mouse tech­niques on the track­pad by using mul­ti­ple fin­gers. You can right-​click, scroll, zoom, rotate, and nav­i­gate just by using the appro­pri­ate fin­gers. My favorite has been scrolling through web pages and RSS feeds with­out click­ing or plug­ging in a mouse. read more » 

Dash­board
The dash­board is a spe­cial desk­top con­tain­ing tiny pro­grams called wid­gets giving instant infor­ma­tion. There are thou­sands of wid­gets to put on your dash­board. Weather, train sched­ule, sport scores are typ­i­cal wid­gets. Dash­board works like iGoogle, but incor­po­rated into the desk­top and looks MUCH better. read more »

Spaces
Spaces is one of those things that seem superfluous at first, then genius after a few days. Spaces allows you to create mul­ti­ple desk­tops and switch between them in two clicks. This helps you orga­nize your open pro­grams by groups. I cur­rently use 4 “spaces” (desk­tops) and keep iTunes and Twhirl (a Twit­ter client) on one, email on a second, cal­en­der and address book on a third, and open doc­u­ments on the last. When new email comes in, click­ing on the mail icon “slides” you to that desk­top where mail is open. Then you can click back to the desk­top with your work. It’s sim­i­lar to the XP taskbar, but grouped in what­ever order you see fit. You can also assign pro­grams to be vis­i­ble on all win­dows, which I do with Adium, my IM client. read more »

Exposé
Exposé is a fea­ture that allows you to zoom out and see all your open win­dows as thumb­nails. This makes it easy to find win­dows that may be on top of each other or lost in the clut­ter. It also makes switch­ing between win­dows super easy. The PC rel­a­tive would be the alt-​tab func­tion, but visu­ally and you can jump to any window with two clicks rather than mul­ti­ple clicks through a list in order. read more »

Spot­light
Spot­light isn’t func­tion­ally dif­fer­ent than Microsoft’s Desk­top Search to find files, email, IM logs, etc con­tain­ing key words, but it wins mul­ti­ple points for better exe­cu­tion. I can’t tell you how many times I waited for pro­grams to open while Search con­ti­nously indexed the files. It was a huge per­for­mance drag and some­thing Microsoft itself called “bloatware”. I’ve never noticed Spot­light drag­ging per­for­mance and it also has a great visual effect when locat­ing an item on the desk­top. read more »

Appli­ca­tions
The coolest thing I noticed about appli­ca­tions in Mac is that they are con­tained within a single file. If you want the Fire­Fox appli­ca­tion, you down­load it and drag that one file into Appli­ca­tions.  If you want to delete Fire­Fox, you drag that one file into the trash. There is no “Add and Remove Programs” wizard that leaves fold­ers on your hard drive, no random files and reg­istry entries that remain after remov­ing pro­grams. Over the years I became an expert in edit­ing reg­istry set­tings and “manually” remov­ing pro­grams because I had to become one. No longer need­ing to be an expert?  Priceless. read more »

The other thing I noticed was the lack of third party pro­grams pre­loaded on the Mac. No AOL, trial ver­sion this or scaled down OEM ver­sion of some­thing else. I remem­ber remov­ing at least 10 of these pro­grams when I got my Dell. Noth­ing.  Nada. Just a fully func­tional OS and beau­ti­fully clean desktop.

Print­ing
When it came time to install my printer, I asked about the dri­vers disk and “Add printer” wizard. My Apple friends said, just plug it in. “Then what?” I asked. “Then print,” they responded. It started print­ing instantly with no setup. “No way.” 

Boot­camp*
Because some of my clients require Windows-​only VPN login, I had a choice. Keep my old PC laptop around or figure out how to sim­u­late Win­dows on my Mac.  I discovered Leopard had a fea­ture called Boot­camp. This allows you to create a space on your hard drive and install Win­dows like a stan­dard PC. When you power on it asks if you want to run Win­dows or Mac OS. Choos­ing Win­dows turns your Mac into a native Win­dows run­ning machine just like a Dell or IBM. Except faster. Apple even made a com­mer­cial about it. read more »

*I haven’t gotten this far, so I don’t know of any hic­cups or chal­lenges. If anyone has feed­back about Boot­camp, please let me know.