Day 2 - The Morning After

Well yesterday was kinda fun of course although I had a bit of a false start. I'm a read the manual kind of guy as I don't like having to invent wheels when somebody else can give me a blueprint. The printed material that came with the Mac didn't tell me an awful lot however and certainly didn't prepare me for what happened with my wireless LAN connection:

I had a joy-joy moment when the MacBook fired up and said "Hey, I can see a wireless LAN", told me the SSID, and asked me if I wanted to connect. All I needed to do was enter a password.

"Password?"

"Yeah, you know, password?"

"You mean the passphrase that generated the WEP key?"

"No."

"How about the WEP key itself?"

"No."

"The password for my broadband connection?"

"No."

"Hell, how about the PIN for my Visa card?"

In the end I gave up and told it I'd deal with it later. Everything else was a doddle. I even got it on to my home network and the Internet simply by connecting it to my router/modem with a cable. But could I get it to use the wireless?

In the end I discovered that my brother-in-law (BiL) was online and it turned out that it did want the WEP key but that I had to tell it to use a WEP key (as opposed to a WEP Password) before it would work. Thus it is now working fine and I owe BiL even more beer than I did before.


So, first impressions?

Well I'm not going to rattle on about what it looks like or any of the other things you can see on the front page of the Apple website. As it happens I think the shiny white colour makes it look like a piece of bathroom furniture and the chunky icons in the Dock (the equivalent of the Windows task bar) reminds me of Rayman on the Playstation, but that's not why I bought it.

There are some nice things on here. Some interesting looking software and some nice 'ways of working'. Hitting the F9 key for example makes all open windows shrink and arrange themselves as 'tiles' so you can select the one you want from those you have open. Yes, I know that Windows does 'tile' but the difference with the MacBook is that the shrunken windows are 'images' and when you choose one, they all go back to full size with that one on top; much more convenient than the Windows way of doing things. The 'down side' however is that I 'stumbled' across that little gem while reading deep in the help files. I was kind of anticipating that this thing would have an option for Mac virgins to click so it would give us a gentle intro. It doesn't. It has lots of things to play with but it pretty much expects us to know what to do with them and why we should want to.

The keyboard layout is also throwing me a bit. I'm missing the 'delete key' (the MacBook only has a 'backspace'; no 'delete' key), and having to think about it and look at the keyboard anytime I want something other than QWERTY. I'll get used to that of course but I reckon it could be quite confusing if one were to be switching between Mac and PC on a regular basis. That is something that I will be doing for the next few weeks. Maybe I'll feel differently in a week or two but for now I anticipate that it will be confusing.

I also felt that the touchpad was unresponsive but a quick visit to the settings page and sliding the response speed up to it's maximum soon solved that.

Some of the differences in the GUI are throwing me too and at this point I feel OS X is NO MORE intuitive than Windows. For example in the top right of WIndows windows you have buttons to shrink, maximise and close the window but they are not obvious what they mean; you have to discover it. On the Mac you have red, amber and green buttons at the top LEFT that do pretty much the same thing but again, there is nothing to tell you this. Furthermore, the red button doesn't always close the application. It closes the window, but the app stays open in the Dock. To close the app completely you have to use the close option from the file menu; but that's only with SOME apps.

I also seems to be without an FTP program and SSH client although I have a sneaky feeling that they are actually on here and that I just can't find them. I've seen a suggestion that 'Finder' can do FTP downloads but not uploads. I'm having trouble finding out. I had a look into what programs might be available for things like SSH, FTP, spreadsheets, etc and there seem to be loads available. I haven't yet found a decent resource for information about them though (without pestering BiL).

So where does this leave me?

Well after writing this this I'll have to switch back to the PC to do some 'proper work'. I am sure that I will manage to switch to the Mac but it's probably going to take a couple of weeks to sort out the various issues. I'm thinking that I might do a 30 mile trip to the nearest major bookshop as I reckon I need a book or two to help me get into this. I've looked at Amazon but it's hard to tell the difference between the ones that start with, and don't get much beyond, "this is the screen, this is the keyboard" and those that dive straight into re-writing chunks of the operating system. Hopefully a couple of hours in a BIG bookshop will give me what I need. Finding a decent online forum would help too.

Obviously it is VERY early days yet. I will master this thing and there is evidence to suggest that it will be more convenient and reliable than a Windows PC when I have.

Even at this very early stage however I can say with a fair degree of certainty that a MacBook is NOT a solution for technophobia. My friend Aitch is watching with keen interest because as somebody with a number of failed attempts to get to grips with a Windows PC behind him, he was hoping that the acquisition of a MacBook might provide a solution. It won't. Whatever else the MacBook and OS X have going for them, they are not the easy option. Having said that I haven't seen anything to indicate that they will be any harder to get to grips with, and I've seen plenty to suggest that they are a damned site more reliable.

Watch this space.