It (sort of) just works!

A lot of my geek buddies have been switching to the Mac over the last 18 months or so, and with the new FBT year rolling around, I thought I'd get a half-price PowerBook 15-inch with all the bells and whistles to join in the fun. For those of you not in Australia (shame on you), there is a tax law here that allows anyone to buy a laptop each year with pre-tax dollars. This is a great deal (since our top tax rate is almost 50 percent) and is very popular as you might imagine.

Anyway, I'm showing my age by saying it's 19 years since I last had a Mac, so I knew things would have changed quite a bit in the meantime. I've been reading 'Mac OS X The Missing Manual' while waiting for my machine to arrive so I already had some of the keyboard shortcuts down before I had the box open. Which brings me to the first of my observations about the oft-repeated cries of "It just works" by the MacCult members...don't get me wrong, this little baby is a beautiful thing, but in the interests of full disclosure, I thought I'd jot down my notes on the switching experience...

Getting the machine delivered was something Apple found quite challenging. I ordered the PowerBook, MS Office, iWork, .mac and Logic Express, and they got off to a bad start by shipping the software individually so that a couple of times when the courier's arrival at my house found nobody at home, they went away until we called them and could commit to waiting at home for a full day before they'd deliver. Not so bad for a single delivery, but when the order is part-shipped in four separate trips, this gets a bit old. Of course the software was no use without the machine, which didn't turn up at all. Problem was, the online order status page showed it as having been shipped many days ago. Several calls to the courier and Apple finally led to the discovery that the courier had returned it to Apple because the exterior box was slightly damaged in transit. Still no drama, except that Apple seemed to not have a process to keep it moving. I had to call them multiple times to get multiple people to find the box and ship it to me after testing that the machine was OK. Very annoying.

The machine arrived last Friday and with sweaty palms I fired it up. The warm, welcoming and soothing setup process came to a shuddering halt at the wireless network setup screen. No matter what I did, I could not get it to connect to my network. Now I know my 128-bit WEP key off by heart, so this should not be hard. Eventually I gave up in disgust and told it I didn't have a network at all. When I got into the OS proper, I found I had extra options, including to change its default WEP key size of 40 bits to the 128 I needed. Up and running immediately, but obviously unimpressed with the unnecessary dumbing down of the setup program.

A little later on, I cracked open my iWork 05 disc and stuck it in. Lo and behold, the machine refused to install the software because a later version was already installed on the machine. So I go hunting and find a trial version of iWork, which I start and am annoyed to find there is no 'enter the serial number from your boxed copy you just brought home from the store and I'll start working for you' option. So I drag the application to the trash, since that's what book said was all that was needed to uninstall an application. No dice. A call to a Mac buddy and a little Spotlight magic later and I find a couple of files in the /Library/Receipts folder, which has something to do with the auto-update feature for the software. Killing off the files and now I can install my software. This is software I bought with the machine, you realise. And the machine won't let me install it. This is not what I call 'It just works'

The rest of my installs go pretty much according to plan (after Office downloads the 50Mb of updates needed to actually get it to run properly). The only other disappointment was the Logic Express has not had the latest UI goodness like the rest of the apps that sport the Apple logo. They've done the box up nice, but the app must be one of those 'carbonised' ones they talk about.

Of course, before I could really start using the apps, I had to sort out the accessibility options. Being a visually impaired person, one of the things that tipped me to considering the Mac was the built in accessibility features, particularly the new VoiceOver software that speaks the UI to you as you use the machine. Annoying as all get out to anyone standing nearby, but pretty darn useful for me. In fact, as I type this, it's reading each word as I go. Overall, the software is good, and I can save the money I'd normally have to spend getting set up with specialist software, so I'm happy about that. It's got a few minor issues like jumping around a little crazily when the screen is magnified and the focus shifts, and not reading full paragraphs of text in Safari if they contain a (gasp!) hyperlink, but not too bad at all.

Things really started to crank when I got my head around expose, spotlight and some of the apps that come with it. iMovie is awesome in its elegance and simplicity and speed (I talk as someone who purchased Pinnacle video editing software for Windows) and iPhoto blew me away when I imported my six years worth of photos from its home in a nicely structured directory, and iPhoto turned the directory names into keywords that I can search, so 'Antonia's Wedding' instantly finds all the right pics. Awesome.

I find I'm not as productive when typing and editing text because I don't know all the keyboard shortcuts for selecting a word or a paragraph, but that will come with practice. It is true what they say that it just feels solid, and having a large number of apps open doesn't seem to have the same drag effect as it does in Windows. Now I just have to figure out how to replace all the apps I rely on like The Brain and Microsoft Money. I'm not in a great hurry as I invested in Virtual PC to ease the transition. I haven't actually used it yet, as I'm trying to just feel the vibe for now. And I must say it feels pretty gooood. I look forward to being snobbish and dismissive of my Windows colleagues very soon.