You may have read my previous post (I’ve become a Mac OS X Leopard fan - way better than Windows) and I’m happy to report that my iMac at work is still running smoothly. Seconds to start up, doesn’t slow down even running multiple applications.
It’s been so good that I got TWO more iMacs for home! …maybe this is becoming a problem
As I do a fair amount of .NET ASP development as well as php, I will need to install Windows on the iMac at some point and I’ll probably use the Parallels application to allow me to run both OS X and Windows at the same time. In fact the Bootcamp provided by Apple to run Windows was a bit of a letdown as I discovered I had to choose my OS at startup and needed to reboot to switch. Not good.
Now I’ve been using the iMac for a while, here are some of my recommended applications.
1. Dreamweaver …way quicker than on a PC and in my opinion still the best web development tool
2. CSSEdit …one of the best looking and featured CSS editors there is
3. iMovie and iDVD …it took me no time to use these apps to import movies from the camcorder and put them on DVD.
4. Remote Desktop Connection… The quickest way to connect to remote Windows machines
5. Skype … great on the Mac. Fully integrated with the inbuilt camera and microphone
The not so good…
OK, so I’ll admit it, there are a few things I don’t like:
1. Lack of a decent messenger client with ICQ. I’ve tried ICQ, PSI and others but nothing seems to be quite right and why doesn’t iChat support more transport protocols?
2. The ’squeeze’ buttons at the side of the mighty mouse are far too sensitive making all my windows visible without me intending it
ummm… that’s it.
I’m sorry Bill but I purchased an Apple iMac last week and I’m converted. But it’s ok, I’m still using a PC at home… for now.
I now see why there are heated debates between the two religions - Mac OS X and Windows. Being a PC user, I never really “got” the Mac thing and the last time I used a Mac in anger was 1991.
However, last year I started to become really frustrated with Windows. How after a fresh install, it would get slower each month as the registry grew. Also, how it would decide an urgent update was required and stop me working for 20 minutes while it installed. Or when everything would freeze as the anti-virus decided to do a weekly scan. Or perhaps it was the 15 minutes I’d have to wait for it to boot when I switched my PC on at work each morning.
So, last week I got a gorgeous iMac with a huge 24″ screen in brushed aluminium running OS X and became a Macophile.
Day 1 was all “ah’s” and “ooh’s” as I revelled in the beauty of OS X Leopard. I was amazed that everything just worked - networks, printers, even Windows file systems were detected by my iMac and worked faultlessly first time.
Day 2 I discovered the Dashboard and played with the Dock. Features like Spaces made Windows look so out of date - a simple squeeze of my mighty mouse’s side and all open windows were visible. No longer would I spend ages looking through layers of windows looking for that elusive application.
Then I plugged in an external drive and turned on the Time Machine. Wow. I certainly can’t say I’ve ever been excited by backing up files before but Time Machine is incredible. Every hour it incremently and silently backs up my files. If I ever need to recover something, I simply launch the Time machine interface and move back through time to locate it. Being OS X Leopard of course, it does this in real style with all backups moving back in time to a space vortex in the distance.
I love the little things like how I can create, preview and edit PDFs - something not possible in Windows without extra software. Same for image editing, all in-built within Leopard. In Leopard, you can preview files in the finder without opening the documents - even Microsoft Word documents can be previewed on the iMac without opening the file. How come you can’t do this on Windows?!
Startup and shutdown of OS X Leopard can be measured in seconds rather than minutes and performance so far has been excellent. We do some fairly intensive graphic processing in the office and a colleague was having problems rendering an image on his NEW high spec PC. It was taking him 24 minutes to process the file. We performed the same operation on the iMac in 3 minutes.
Of course it’s early days but I’m definitely hooked and I will write again in a few weeks to tell you all how I’m getting on.