Me and my Mac

I’ve had my Mac nearly a week now (since Tuesday) and I have to say I’m generally pleased with it. We had it sitting on the dining table until Friday, but of course it couldn’t stay there forever because people have to eat off that table (including me), so I ordered a computer table from Viking which arrived on Friday. So it’s now next to the old computer in the upstairs office.

I haven’t tried everything the Mac does yet – I’ve used it so far for a bit of programming and surfing the Internet (and blogging, of course). The performance is fine – 1GHz is a slower clock speed than many cheaper PC’s (you can get an Athlon now for about £500) but I haven’t noticed it. It’s also very well-designed – the mouse, which sits next to the keyboard, plugs into a USB port on the keyboard rather than having to be connected to the system unit (there isn’t one – the system is in the monitor) with a long cable.

The magazine I mentioned earlier made a big thing about the Mac’s looks, but the user interface is what stands out. Apple have really done a good job on it. There is one thing I miss about Linux though – the multiple desktop thing, so you can keep your various windows separate and have your WP on one ‘screen’, your web browsing on another, your mail on a third and your chat on a fourth. The Mac’s OS (on this version, 10.3) has a thing called Exposé, where you roll the mouse to a given point and it shrinks all the windows so they all appear at the same time. And you can use the keyboard to flick between applications, but not individual windows – you have to use the application’s window menu to get to a particular window. I’d like to have that fixed somehow, although I’m not holding my breath – the mouse and menus are integral to using the Mac (unlike Windows where you can do most things without it).

Having come from Linux, I was looking forward to going back to some of my old X11 applications. X11 is supposed to come with the system, but I couldn’t find it – the disk I read that it was on just contained translations of a “Readme” file about restoring the system. I had to download it from Apple, then get Fink and then learn how to use that. The apt-get program did not work for me – it connected to SourceForge where Fink is held, but trying to get the files only resulted in 404’s. So I had to use the Fink command-line program itself to get the sources and compile them, which obviously takes much longer than just installing binaries although it’s obviously safer.

Actually, many of the programs I used on X in Linux are actually available for the Mac’s own GUI – this includes the Mozilla suite and even GNU Emacs. This is obviously preferable to running them on X11 because X11 has its own memory overheads. But it’s still useful to have X11 around.