Windows to Mac: First Impressions and a few tips

I posted this in OT over at bh and got silence and a shrug or two. So I brought it here where it really belongs. Just about all of this is covered in the Mac Switcher's Guide sticky, but I'd like to share some of my first impressions...

About 3 years ago, I picked up a Mac Mini and was so impressed with it, I planned to ditch windows altogether "someday". That day has arrived and I've bumped into a few things during the switch and I would like to share them. As with any opinion-based work, YMMV.

** Purchase AppleCare? I would say yes. It's worth it for the lappie. You have a year to come up with the extra money so you can postpone the cost, but the Applecare starts from the date you bought your machine, not the date you bought Applecare. I haven't purchased mine yet but I plan to do it before my 365 days are up.

** Pay Apple to transfer settings. Again, I would say yes. For $99, you get one-on-one tech support. Their people are pretty good. No, they don't know how to use sed | awk | grep to parse your log files for intrusion detection, but that isn't why you bought a Mac now is it? I elected to do it myself but I may still shell out the $99 later for the 1 on 1 year training subscription. This is a big YMMV issue because not every metro area has an Apple store or a Best Buy with an Apple store.

** Pay $10 to $15 a month for dot mac? At first I thought this was a rookie sucker thing like AOL or some other subscription based thing. There are several reasons why I'm happy I bought it. First of all, the integration with Macos is seamless. And by seamless, I don't mean I only had to spend a couple of hours figuring it out. I mean everything associated with dot mac is one click away. I have my personal web site transferred from a unix host over to dot mac but I'm not announcing it until I work out whether I'm satisfied with their approach or want to go back to editing php scripts. Then there is backup. Every night. Every time. Works great. It backs up important files and settings to dot mac. I don't have all my important files over there yet but it won't take long. My calendar is on ical and dot mac but I haven't yet decided to dump the palm desktop in favor of ical. Yet. My contacts are on dot mac which means if I am caught somewhere without my pda, I can log into dot mac from a "library computer" and most of what was on my pda is all there.

** Buy memory or hard drives from Apple? HECK NO. Go to http://www.crucial.com and download and run the memory configurator. Apple wanted $850 to take my macbook to 4 gig. Crucial wants $113. Not even a millisecond wasted on that decision. Apple told me a flat out NO to upgrade the RAM on my old G4 mini. Finally, they came around and agreed to install it under my AppleCare but I'd already gotten the upgrade from crucial for $59. Apple wanted $100 and I'm not sure if it was for 512 or a gig. I got a gig for $59. Then there's hard drive. Once again, they see you comin'. Get your hdd somewhere else unless you are feeling generous.

** Buy a time capsule? This one is touchy. You can get a 1 TB time capsule that includes a 802.11n access point for $500. You can get a 1TB WD drive and a network file server that speaks usb for a lot less. But here's the thing. The time machine software in Leopard refuses to talk to anything but local usb, local firewire, or networked time capsules. No buffalo linkstation spoken here. This one will require more thought.

** Register M$ Office? Are you kidding? This one went to trash in one of the first 10 clicks on my new machines. I'm not knocking M$. Office is a fine product and well worth it if you decide to buy it. I just get pissed any time somebody leaves file associations pointing to crippleware or shareware in my way. And that's just the case with M$ Office that comes with Leopard. You can get neooffice for free and it's just as good for everyday use.

** Purchase iWork? Yes. For me, keynote is worth the price of entry. I'm not (yet) that excited about pages or numbers over neooffice , but keynote is a very nice presentation builder. And guess what? No proprietary viewer required. Just export to Flash format, quicktime or even powerpoint.

** use iphoto? Yes. However, this one comes with a "dead end" warning. Don't let iphoto import directly from your digicam. Everything goes into a proprietary database, not separate jpg files. It's better to copy the camera files to a network drive, then let iphoto import them. I may change my mind later, but right now with a 26 gigabyte iphoto libaray that can't be backed up to a single dvd I think I'd rather have the jpg files along in parallel with the iphoto database. In hindsight, I could have made separate iphoto databases for each year, but switching iphoto to a different database is not as straightforward as file-open would be.

** use iweb? Yes. I'm a dreamweaver person but with my dreamweaver license tied to a dead windows box and an aversion to putting windows on my mac even inside a virtual machine I've gotta use iweb. I'll probably go out and buy dreamweaver before very long but iweb is very nice for basic editing and puts other entry level solutions like frontpage to shame.

** use power saver? Yes. But I find myself shutting it down very frequently. There's times I want my machine finishing something up and I don't want it falling asleep. I think I can set my backups to run at 1am and let the machine sleep at 3am but I haven't worked out the kinks just yet.

** games. Not something I care about, but many games say both mac and windows on the box. The purpose of this exercise was to simplify my life and games add complexity and risk they could prevent the machine from being there when I need it to do real work.

** Getting things done. This one is hard. I like windows and linux better for being able to configure absolutely everything. Macos hides settings they feel you would "never need" and for that reason, I find myself digging for workarounds. But in the end, I like the compromise that errs in favor of simplicity. If I really feel that strongly about it there's terminal or applescript to give me that absolute control I once had in Linux.

** File associations. Click a file and don't hit open with. I know windows trained you to hit open with. Avoid the temptation. Go to show info. Expand the open with "twistie". Change the association (ie xls for ms office changes to neooffice or numbers). Click "change all" This means the change applies to all xls files and not merely the one you are touching. This is very powerful. You can have a presentation you want to work on strictly in neooffice which can open and save M$ formats directly but the rest of your presentations you want to open in keynote even if they are ppt files. Very nice.

** Where did the start button go? It's a smile. It's the finder. To launch an application, launch finder and browse to applications. They are all there alphabetically. No, they aren't shortcuts. You launch applications by clicking on them directly. For those you've just gotta have in one click, you can drag them to the dock. Break the habit of trying to make the dock into a start button and you will be much happier.

** What are "must have" dashboard widgets? istat pro. a weather viewer and a stock ticker are nice to have. A daily bible verse can be had at christnotes.org. I use the new revised standard version. For me rpncalc is a must have and replaces that anemic calculator widget thing that comes on your mac that is actually less useful than the calculator was on the palm iii, or even windows 2.11. Yep, it's that bad.

** How do I shut down? Go to the apple in the upper left corner to shut down, log out, sleep etc. I was so happy the first time I told my macbook to sleep. The screen went black about 100 milliseconds after I clicked. There was none of the usual "windows is considering the feasibility of convening a legislative study session to form a committee to investigate the necessity of going to standby" along with the ever present "end now" for adobe acrobat.

** Just say no to Acrobat. The only thing from adobe on my mac will be photoshop. I can use preview to view pdf files. I might get acrobat pro, but I will not allow it to become the default application for pdf files. Ever. Why do you think there is a firefox plugin called "pdfsave"? It's because of that damnable unstable acrobat software that's why.

** Hide extensions. Turn this off. This newbie handholding makes no more sense on Macos than it did on Windows. Granted you won't be attacked by "delete my harddrive boot partition.txt.wsh" on Macos, but it is stupid let the OS hide the extension from you when it is the extension more than the icon that will let you know what should happen if you click on the thing.

** watching movies on your mac. Careful not to change that dvd region code more than 5 times or the last change will be your region forever. I'm sure you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you have to buy all your movies from ebay localized for another continent. Leave this setting alone. Other than the region code pitfall, watching dvd's on the mac is a pleasure. I spazzed out a while before I noticed pause, ff, rew were right in front of my face on function keys. If you don't have the mighty mouse and want to get the dashboard up in one keystroke without looking for the dock, hit f4.

** Palm on Macos. Install from your cd or download from palm.com. It just works. If you want to network sync via wifi, you will need to purchase missing sync.

** Ctrl-v is now command-v. Bring along your M$ of logitech cordless mouse. That mighty mouse is very nice but frustrating if you're used to two buttons. It's especially annoying when clicking the ball brings up dashboard instead of middle mouse or button two. But rest assured, you can run macos on one button. If you hook up your windows mouse, macos will listen to it and bring up extra context-based stuff, but it's not necessary except for thos of us "in transition".

** shazam, wowie, zoom, yippee! It never was about all those visual effects. Sure it's cool to see pond ripples scatter when you drop a widget on your dashboard but come on. I want all my mips pointed at reducing my tax payment or making sure my term paper is properly spell-checked. If you like eye-candy, Leopard has every bit as much as Vista but please don't let it distract you from what the machine is for in the fist place.

There was a comparison of Vista vs OSX done back when Vista was beta and before Leopard. Both have gotten better since then, but it's handy to see everything side by side, especially for the windows user going to Leopard.

 

Thanks for your first impressions, r0k!

And of course, welcome back to NBR!

 

I like your screenshots... they make Vista look much nicer than OS X.

 

Glad you got the Macbook, and I'm glad you enjoy it too!

I agree, it's kind "disgraceful" to install Microsoft Office into my Macbook, however, I do use it a lot and for all my assignments in school, so even though there are other alternatives (using that new Google word program, ect.), I prefer just to use Microsoft Office. At least Apple's made it look a lot nicer!

 

Cool man, good pics.

 

I can't take credit for the pics. They are from the review site that compared Vista with OSX (probably Panther). I could care less how bland and ugly the boot screen is if my machine is ready when I need it. I just had to download 341 megabytes worth of Leopard updates to bring 3 of our macs up to 10.5.2. Each machine finished downloading and rebooting reasonably fast. I was happy with the overall process.

I did notice that the boot screen is plain white with a little progress spinner but I didn't care how ugly it was as long as the machines came back up where I left off. They did.

I might get around to purchasing and installing M$ office. I'm kind of cautious because when I was at the Apple store, I tried to use one of their macbook pro's to do some research on parental controls and apple remote desktop. It offered to download a pdf file and each attempt to download the pdf was met with some bullcrap M$ error. They explained that the M$ office software had somehow inserted itself into the file association for pdf. Sure enough, the error that popped up was asking for some M$ related file. Not something I'm wanting to bring to my mac experience and neooffice and iwork cover my document needs rather nicely right now.

 

Thanks r0k.

Your 1st impressions are very similar to mine. Why are you paying that much for .mac? I paid $79 for the year - aprox $7/month.

I didn't know that about iPhoto; I may have to do the same thing.

 

Few things...

Replacing the HDD in a Mac Mini... PITA and it voids your warranty...

As far as iPhoto, you CAN view the jpeps. Just expose the files by right clicking and selecting view package contents. I ended up making a shortcut to it.
I'm kinda with you on the new TimeCapsule. However, USB sucks compared to having a N or gigabit ethernet connection. 1GB NAS drives are cheaper than time capsule and the N wireless routers are pretty cheap as well.

But as far as Office... the new one is amazing. But then again, I can't use Open Office / NeoOffice at work since it has poor compatibility with Office, and the last thing I want to do is loose a contract due to a rendering error between the two. And once you start using 2008, you will never again want to look at the horrid POS NeoOffice :-D

iWork is a pretty nice app suite, though I have yet to try the new version. I did like Keynote a lot. I used it in a few presentations. I think mainly its the different templates that make it so nice. A breath of fresh air compared to the old powerpoint temps.

iWeb is pretty slick, but the lack of being able to create your own custom template kinda kills it for me. That and I'm a pretty experience web app developer, I generally avoid WYSIWYG, but it is a very nice app. I use it for my personal note taking thing right now (exporting them out to our company blog).

The .Mac thing needs to be better. Hands down it's way too much money for what it is. Sure, its nice, but it's so expensive. Give us 100gb for that price and more web services support and I'd be more interested. For now, I'll stick to FTP'ing my backups. Though, I should probably use an automator script for all that..

BTW, since I've had MS Office 2k8 installed, I've run into 0 issues using PDF's. I still use the standard viewer to view pdf's. They work fine here.

 

command and spacebar are your friends.