Thursday, November 16, 2006

Making the Switch

After many months of contemplating and one returned order, I'm now a Mac person for good. Last night night, I picked up a new MacBook.












So far, I'm thrilled with it. It's sexy and quiet (unlike the mini that I bought earlier and ended up returning because it sounded like a jet engine). Even though I only had the mini a couple days, it was enough to get me hooked on OS X Tiger. It really is a thing of beauty. I was intimidated by Macs for a long time, but the more time I've spent in the business of user interfaces, the more I've come to appreciate the elegance and the detail put into the UI. There are a lot of good ideas in the UI that are transferable to the avionics world.

A couple of surprises so far: I'm very impressed with the quality of the speakers. Usually laptop speakers entirely suck, but these are pretty good. Obviously don't fill out the low end, but from mid-range up, they sound great. I also found what could be the coolest text editor, in the form of TextMate. I'm just using the trial for now, and really most of the text editor use I have is at work. Anyone know of an equivalently awesome editor for Windows?

While I love the UI in general, I do have a couple gripes. There's the standard one about the lack of a two buttons on the touchpad. Having to press Ctrl seems a little odd to get to the right click stuff. Although, they did do the two-finger scrolling right. I also wish the home and end keys worked like they do in Windows, where you can press Ctrl-Home to go to the beginning of the line or Ctrl-End to go to the end of the line. I saw on a forum where a mac snob asked contemptuously, "who uses that feature anyway?" I do! But, all in all, it's awesome.

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