Apple iBook. On Second Thoughts.

It’s officialy a month ago since I bought my 12″ Apple iBook. Coming from a WinTel world I must admit, it has been an overall positive experience. But there also have been some quirks I haven’t got used to.

So here’s a short list of things I hate or love about my Mac:

• Dashboard is overrated. I’ve looked at it maybe 3 times. The concept of widgets is OK, but it’s on the edge of geekiness a.k.a. ‘who’s using it?’.
• No Delete-button. There’s only ‘Backspace’. Why? As with the rest of OS X, it’s too keyboard centric, meaning I have to use Command+… everytime I want to get something done. Like switching applications. The dock, despite it’s coolness does NOT replace the Windows taskbar. I’ve got to hand it to Windows, where I’ll be operating my mouse all day and occasionally using the keyboard.
• Killing applications. I still do not fathom the concept of killing all windows and still have the application running in the background. Please tell me why I want a memory hogging app running in the background without an apparant GUI?
• Microsoft should learn about this installer alternative of ‘packages’. Installation is just a matter of dragging a package to your ‘Applications folder’. That’s it. No questions asked. It’s there. Use it.
• The same with de-installation. Just drag it to the bin and you’re set. It’s gone. (Apart from some deep-hidden settings that you did not get away, even with using ‘regedit’ on Win. In fact it brings back the good ‘ol DOS days, drag’n'drop this time. :-))
• Exposé rules! Besides patent-issues, this could make Windows great. For all you MS people, imagine this: Just press one button and see every app running as a thumbnail and seeing what it is doing at the moment. Imagine having several Mediaplayer windows open and seeing them playing all at the same time, while checking your downloads progress. (Again: Why not a mouse-button somewhere in the GUI?)
• As for default browsers. Safari RSS is not all that. So I’m sticking with Firefox + extensions. I could not imagine living without.
• It is when I switch to my Dell that I sorely miss the trackpad with scrolling capability. Trackpads have been around for ages, why didn’t they come up with the idea of using two fingers to scroll a page before? It is like the scrollwheel on a mouse. Once used to it you can’t live without.
• Standby = Standby (or Sleep as it is called on a Mac). Meaning, whenever I close the lid of my iBook it does what I want. Namely, go to sleep (or standby) in a moments notice. And here’s the big part. Whenever I decide to open the lid, the OS springs back to life, sub-second.
  (In fact I just did it just now. Just for fun. :-))
  I noticed this, while waiting in vain for my Dell to come back to life from a standby. It never did… and it’s not exemplary for this Dell. Be it hardware or OS, it’s not working on Wintel.

So here it is. My list of quirks after one month of Mac.

(Added: trackpad with scroll)
(Added: sleep/standby)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 5th, 2005 at 12:53 am and is filed under Apple, Hardware, Utilities, ThinkLemon, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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2 Responses to “Apple iBook. On Second Thoughts.”

1. Arjan Terol Says:
   November 19th, 2005 at 2:57 pm

   Killing applications. I still do not fathom the concept of killing all windows and still have the application running in the background. Please tell me why I want a memory hogging app running in the background without an apparant GUI?
   ? Don’t know what you actualy mean cause All proccesing power is transferd to the program you use, all other programs are put to sleep. Only the core system is using proccesing power.

   You can check programs runing in the background under your user account > Startup items. Checkoff programs you don’t use often.

   Kill programs instandly! Use Cunning Fox

2. Caspar Says:
   November 19th, 2005 at 7:52 pm

   Hi Arjan, I wasn’t talking about processing power but memory. Take, for instance, firefox 1.0. I’m not sure if this holds true on a Mac, but on Windows it tends to eat up memory. At some point it may even take up as much as 200+ Megabytes. Only releasing it when closing the application.

   Normally this wouldn’t be so much of a problem with on-board memory these days. But when you want to do some work in Photoshop you definitely want those 200MB back.

   On Windows you shut down the application by clicking on the red cross. But in OS X when you click the red cross you shut down the application window, not the application itself. Therefore the memory used is not released (I assume). Eventually leading to a slow system.

   BTW: That tool you mentioned looks quite nice.

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