So. It happened. I got a MacBook Pro. Here at Sportsvite, the entire engineering team (yes all three of us) has Macbook Pros. Out of sheer computer envy, I kept watching my compadres on their fancy computers and thinking to myself "Man, I sure would be more productive if I had one of those." I think that in the back of my mind I knew that was BS, and I just wanted to have the same computer as them. I am here to say that I was right, and wrong.
What's Awesome
Old Computer (Core 2 Duo 1.66Mhz, Vista Home Premium) JBoss Startup: 90s
New Computer( Core 2 Duo 2.2Mhz, OS X Leopard) JBoss Startup: 16s
Old Computer Screen: 14in, 1200x800
New Computer Screen: 15in, 1440x900
Old Computer Startup: 2-3 min
New Computer Startup: 30-60 sec
The incredibly crisp seamless performance.
This whole .dmg file, where you open it and drop it into the Applications directory and it just works? Not bad!
The giant crisp display.
The smooth, quiet keyboard.
The dock. Nice.
The non-ridiculous power cord, and the magnetic connection to the computer that it uses.
Garageband. I have no clue how it works, but it will be a part of my guitar practice sessions for a while, until I do.
Adium. The little green duck is hilarious, and it seems be a really awesome simple chat tool.
What's Not So Awesome
Well for starters, where the hell is the right mouse button? I don't know, but I wish I could find it. Don't tell me to hit apple either every time I click. That's LAME.COM. But, I can look past this - I am sure all those devoted Mac snobs out there must look at it as a sign of their greater purpose and ability. I think it's kinda lame, but I am okay with it. Fortunately, there are USB ports, into which you can plug nice mice with all the buttons. Problem solved!
Installing Apache http server. This one was a tough one. This really sucked. A lot. Like on the suckiness scale, this one had to be about a 30 out of 10. Fortunately, my friend Bob showed me DarwinPorts, which seems to be awesome. They have all these ready made packages, and you just type things like port install apache2. True to its name, it does just that! Huzzah! By the way, I also hate mod_jk2, but oh well. It all works now.
Sudo. The idea of sudo sucks. I will have to get around to do setting it up so everything is done as root like I do on my linux box at home. Sudo is lame. Sudo just means you have to type a four-letter word before you do something catastrophically stupid. I don't like Sudo.
The apparently lack of the start menu like in Windows. I don't really like that either. I know I can use finder to get to Applications, but it's just not the same as being able to just get there from my screen. Again, likely something I'll figure out.
The fact that JDK6 isn't ready yet. Come on guys! Good thing I am not doing performance engineering anymore, since all those sweet tools like jmap, jhat, jstack, and jconsole were greatly improved in JDK6.
No pgUp or pgDn by themselves. Also no home or end. This is one place where my Toshiba really shines - it's got a great and friendly keyboard.
Replacing 'control' with this 'Apple' key, but not having it in the same place as 'Control' - that sucks. maybe there is some way to reroute the keyboard. I can see this causing so many problems.
More to come later
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
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3 comments:
Congrats Kirk! That's a lovely machine.
But I have to object to your complaints. There is nothing but awesomeness here. Endless golden fields of awesomeness, as far as the eye can see. Claiming otherwise displeases Lord Jobs. It is not advisable to displease Lord Jobs.
You've probably already discovered this, but you can right-click by tapping the touchpad with two fingers. Also, you can scroll with two fingers.
As for the Start menu -- using spotlight is actually a much better way to invoke stuff. Better yet, grab Launchbar or Quicksilver.
Anyway. Congrats again!
Ramses, I should have known you would have intelligent retorts to my complaints. Spotlight seems to be awesome. Having to learn a computer while setting it up for development isn't the way to do it, because you can't really discover anything the right way. I will stumble into all sorts of poweruser stuff as I go, I am sure...I still cling to my blind allegiance to the right mouse button, and I will check out Quicksilver. Yay!
Hey Kirk - just stumbled on to your blog. Congrats on drinking the Kool Aid like the rest of us.
As your friend said, Spotlight is the way to go, but if you like the visual list there's actually a really easy way to add a "Start Menu" to your Dock (there's no need for Quicksilver anymore).
(1) Just drag the entire Apps folder right onto the dock, to the right side of that little dotted line (over by the trash can). That will create a new "Stack" (stupid name, I know) for all your applications.
(2) Right click (oops... Ctrl+Click) on the folder you just dragged to the dock. Under "Display As..." choose "Folder", and under "View Content As..." choose "List". Bingo... Start Menu in the house.
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