GlitchNYC

A few months back, I gave up linux after a 3.5 year love hate relationship, and went back to windows for a while.

It wasn’t horrible, but there were lots of things I missed. I missed the fact that I had a solid unix system underneath. I missed having SSH, SFTP, and VNC built in for remote access. I missed the ease of installing things with yum and all my beautiful, free applications.

I also had to relearn to think in terms of “this machine is vulnerable” and was careful with every file I downloaded and opened.

I have to admit, I loved the fact that dual-screen just worked. I loved that our printer at home finally functioned as it should. I loved sharing files easily with the click of a mouse.

After seeing Noel and some of the Ruby Guys at BarCampNYC2 work their magic on their macs, I started to realized that Mac combined the power of unix with a slick interface that generally just works. I could run apache, php, ruby, and mysql all locally and have a beautiful interface and my periphrasis work without endless .conf file hacking. And, watching these Mac experts fly around on their machine really piqued my interest. I’ve got the windows side of things pretty well mastered, but even still, it can be clunky to find your away around once you’ve got more than a few windows open.

So, last week, Kelly graciously accompanied me to the Mac store so I could take advantage of her student discount, and I came home with a shiny new MacBook Pro.

I haven’t been a fan of every little piece along the way (where’s the delete - not backspace - key? Where are home and end?) but I have found that most of my complaints can be tweaked and configured away, or are combination keystrokes to keep the keyboard big and simple. The more I play on this machine, the more I’m starting to love it. I’m starting to get the hang of the key commands and hot keys. I’m especially loving quicksilver, and the fact that I can almost instantly start a new application or trigger an event.

My one biggest complaint so far was the lack of an included OS X manual. If I hadn’t already known to drop an application into the applications folder to install it, where would I have learned that?

Tonight, Sara pointed me to the great documentation at apple.com/support , and I’ve been reading along and just soaking up the info. I’ve already got a few new tricks up my sleeve, and I’m especially looking forward to mastering iMovieHD and GarageBand.

I’m going to do my best to keep some notes of the things that I’ve learned and how windows and linux/unix users can make the most of their new mac, but for now, I’m just enjoying the experience.

One final question for any mac guru’s out there. I’m desperately missing my multimedia keyboard’s “play/pause” button when listening to music at work. Is there a way to set a global hotkey for itunes that works even when iTunes is hidden or behind the active window?

UPDATE: Quicksilver comes through again. I set a trigger key for “play/pause” and I can start and stop the track from any application. Just hitting the quicksilver hotkey and typing itunes->TAB->next jumps to the next song, and tons of other commands can be triggered that way. Brilliant.

I’m installing IE7 now so that I can test this final release version against the sites I run and see what gets broken (and what finally, hopefully, works).

The download was speedy, but it’s been 10 minutes and I still don’t have IE7 running on this machine. Let’s take a quick tour of where IE7, which has the potential to be one of the most frequently downloaded upgrades in computer history, sucks during the install.

First, they stop you before you even get started to make sure that your machine has a Microsoft sanctioned version of XP on it. No mention if they support 2000 or 98 here, or if the installer will turn you in if they decide you’re not legit, which according to reports of Windows Genuine Advantage false positives, happens quite a bit.

Next, even though we’ve just downloaded new software from Microsoft, we’re prompted to update it. Let’s say yes to ensure that we’re up to date.

The first thing I notice during the update is the “ripped from a mac” reflection under the arrow.

It’s been a few minutes, and that bar is still running…

Okay, that’s done.. But wait!

Now we have to get the required updates. I didn’t have a choice on these, apparently.

Once the install finally completes, you’re prompted to reboot. If you decline to reboot now, you get a stern warning. After delaying the restart you get a popup telling you to restart as soon as possible.

As if that wasn’t redundant enough, the automatic update service knows a reboot is needed, and popped up 3 times while I was writing this article.

I can understand that IE is a large install with its tentacles deep into the OS, but seriously, compare this install experience to that of Firefox, and the open source offering just blows MS away here.

They may stop a bit of the bleeding, but I seriously doubt this release will win any converts back from mozilla-ville.