Mac OS X
I finally sucked it up and bought a Mac. I knew about how smooth the system was, but in all my years have never had one as my primary machine. I ordered a refurbished Mac mini Core Duo 1.66 with 512MB and a Combo drive. Certainly not a powerhouse but I decided that if I wind up loving it, I’ll order a more substantial box and relegate this one to media center duty.
Within the first hour of use (not including all the OS upgrades), I was using all up and running with a Bluetooth wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse. I also had my Nokia 6682’s contacts synchronized with Address Book via Bluetooth. iTunes was playing my music library, Front Row was playing DVD’s (from across the room with the Apple Remote) and I was surfing the web with Firefox.
The out-of-the-box experience is first rate. Nothing else out there compares. Windows has a lot of good hardware support but as of Windows XP MCE 2005, it still didn’t play DVD’s without a third-party coded installed. And Bluetooth? Good luck!
There are things I haven’t adjusted to yet. Avidly using, supporting and administering every version of Windows from 3.0 forms some pretty strong habits.
- The mouse acceleration curves are just wrong and you can’t adjust them. Things like MouseFix are out there, but leaving this parameter off of the Mouse control panel widget is just inexcusable.
- The side buttons on the Mighty Mouse are so hard to press, they might as well not exist. Other than that, the thing is fantastic.
- Checkboxes and buttons don’t get focus. For a keyboad-centric user like myself, this is a big deal. The typical username/login/remember combination of just about every website now requires me to go touch the mouse. Suck. This isn’t in every browser, though. Safari and Firefox behave this way, but Camino (which uses what looks like the native checkbox widget) allows focus. Go figure.
- The keyboard is nice, but dammit, can’t they make an ergonomic one?
If anyone has advice for these gripes, I’m all ears.
on May 7th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Welcome to the right side of the force. Congratulations!
I highly recommend getting Parallels so you can run other os’ on top of OS X, like other *nix and Windows, when you have to. I found myself not resenting Windows as much when I’m not forced to use it. Also, don’t forget to use expose, F9-F11.
on May 8th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Another suggestion… Get the duck! Adium (Trillian for Macs), http://www.adiumx.com/
on May 14th, 2007 at 9:54 am
> Checkboxes and buttons don’t get focus.
You can fix this.
Go to “about:config” in Firefox, the accessibility.tabfocus property regulates this. Straight from the knowledge base, accessibility.tabfocus:
Determines which web page elements can gain focus when [Tab] key is pressed. 1: Text field form controls only 2: All form controls except text fields 3: All form controls 4: Hyperlinks and hyperlinked images 7 (default): All form controls and hyperlinks
on May 29th, 2007 at 3:51 am
Just to defend MCE 2005 a bit, since I think it’s actually a very good product that was years ahead of it’s time.
The fact that MCE doesn’t come with a mpeg-2 decoder out of the box is a little annoying, however MCE is not meant to be bought stand-alone, it’s an OEM OS only, since microsoft only wanted vendors of PCs to put systems together. That said, this has been corrected in Vista apparently.
Also my MS Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse works right of the box with MCE. Never had any issues with it.
Btw, Unbuntu is the next O/S that I’m going to be playing with next …
on June 2nd, 2007 at 1:36 am
As for not being able to cylce through the checkbox and button controls with the TAB key, there is a setting in the “System Preferences –> Keyboard and Mouse –> Keyboard Shortcuts” to enable tabbing through “All controls”. But this did not help with HTML Select boxes in web pages.
http://lifehacker.com/photogallery/Lifehacker-Top-10-Mac-OS-X-Tweaks/1884254
on June 3rd, 2007 at 10:52 pm
Cool… Welcome to the Mac side :-)
I am very happy with my Core 2 Duo iMac. I use Parallel Desktop for work stuff, and use Mac OS X for the rest of it. This is my second Mac.
on August 26th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Does anyone know of anything (preferably OSS so I can see/modify a working IOKit HCI driver) that will aloow me to set multiple speed/accelleration curves for DIFFERENT MICE (including Bluetooth)?
Preferably by drawing them, or inputing them directly WITH the mouse somehow (hence my request about source code, as I’m quite sure nothing exists that does all this.. I’m not familiar with IOKit or HCI programming, and don’t know all the ins and outs of the hierarchy (such as whether USB and Bluetooth mice work off the same HCI driver at an abstract level, which could be patched, or whether seperate drivers for trackpads, USB, and Bluetooth would have to be written.. And how you would make a Bluetooth adapter that would sit “above” the vendor drivers (Logitech, etc)
As you can see, code would be nice.. Suppose I’ll have to subscribe to the Bluetooth-dev list..
Jim
j(first letter of my name)s(+ letter s)witte@(+ last name@ at sign)indiana.(ubiquitous dot sign)edu(eudcation extension)
This should be a properly formed ‘address with hair..” Just remove all the comments…