One day with a new iMac
Well, I've gone a whole day now with my new Intel iMac, and I'm still loving it. Perhaps it's because I've used several other OSs in the past (MS-DOS, Wins 95, NT 2000, XP, Solaris, HPUX, various shades of Linux etc) but it took me no time to get used to OS X.
With the trouble I had with Windows on my Dell desktop, I had decided to try out Linux again, and I was playing around with it the day before this arrived, thinking that it was good enough to use. After a few hours with the iMac, I moved the old desktop to the basement. I might use it again in a few weeks, as a file server, but right now, I'll stick to the Mac.
So the impressions I have:
1. I have to consciously think about the menu items on the menu bar - the first time I opened iPhoto and wanted to import my photos, I searched around on the top of the window rather than look to the top of the screen. I'm learning quickly though.
2. The screen is bright and clear, no dead pixels as far as I can tell, but I'm little concerned about the colour. Watching an episode of Dora the Explorer with my 3 year old, the colours looked off slightly compared to TV. But I'm not dependent on a good colour screen, and it's better than my Dell 17" LCD, which has a definite yellowish tone in comparison.
3. This is so silent. I can just about hear a faint hum if I listen hard, but when I have my external HD or Dell laptop running, I can't hear anything from the iMac. I'm used to spending half my waking life listening to fans whirring.
4. Installing apps by dragging them to Applications and uninstalling them by dragging to Trash is so natural it's pure genius. I wonder why no one thought of it before ... oh, Apple engineers did, four or more years ago. A couple of nights ago I installed Firefox on the Linux machine, and to make it accessible outside of a terminal, I had to right click the menu and type in the label and location of the app executable and its icon.
5. Speaking of right clicking, some or many of you will be surprised to hear that I haven't yet configured the Mighty Mouse for two button use. I haven't had to. I haven't even had to use Ctrl-click much.
As someone who learned programming using a text editor on a Vax mainframe, I've always used keyboard shortcuts more than the mouse. I consider every second with my hand on the mouse is half a second wasted. So I'm learning the keyboard shortcuts and finding that one button use is a perfectly natural way to work. I know I'm not typical, but I like this.
6. I'm a little pissed though, that they don't use the standard Ctrl-A. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V for select all, copy, cut and paste - well, just something else I have to bear in mind.
7. FrontRow is pretty good, but I never had any other multimedia type program to compare it too. My 3 year old loves Dora and the photo slideshow, and the cosmic screensaver, although she insists there's something wrong with the "computerer" when it switches to screensaver.
8. Java performance is tremendous - a 1.83 GHz CPU is 53% faster than a Pentium-M 2.26 GHz laptop at compiling the same code. That works out that the iMac is twice as efficient per clock cycle as the Windows laptop. With X11 and Tomcat installed, I can do all my Java development work on this.
9. Access privileges are implemented well. This is something I missed on my Windows PCs, trying to limit users' privileges usually ended up making the account unusable. I have two daughters who are not yet old enough to use a computer, but I set up a managed account just to see, and the parental controls seem pretty decent.
10.I think I found a bug last night while playing around with accounts and user switching. I've enabled root access, and an account "System Administrator" showed up in the account list on the top right. I logged into this using the root password, and it just displayed the background, no Finder running. I couldn't get a way out short of pulling the plug. That account is not present in the list now.
11. Setting up printers is a pain. I have a Netgear print server for network printing, but the iMac doesn't seem to work with it. However, the Dell laptop doesn't work with it either (although a desktop and IBM Thinkpad did at the same time as the Dell didn't). So I now have the printer attached directly to the iMac.
But the printer preference page is odd - I don't know if it's a bug, but when go to System Preferences/Print and Fax, it doesn't always show the printer that's attached ... well it does now ... I'll watch out for similar behavior.
Overall, I'm highly impressed. I only wish I'd done this much earlier in my life.
