I completely forgot to blog on Monday that i received my iMac - despite feverously watching the online tracking (which made no indication that it was due that day) and even a phone call to TNT to say that it was in the depot about 5 minutes from where i work and ask when could i expect it - only to be told that it had arrived early and that it wasn’t scheduled for delivery that day……ONLY THEN for me to get back to the office after lunch with an email from reception to say there was a box arrived for me!
Anyhow, it looks great - in the store they look good, on your own desk at home they look even better. It’s the 20″ model (no sign of a blackening screen as some reports are saying) - I bought it with 1gb of RAM and bought another 1gb seperately (Apple were charging £90 for 1gb whilst i bought it for £25!!). I have one of the old style keyboards on a Mac Mini at work but i much prefer the new one - i use a laptop keyboard all day so the new design keyboard is pretty similar to using that.
After a quick IM with Sean C I installed a raft of his suggested software. I’m now solely using Google Apps so i don’t need any word processor/spreadsheet stuff but i’ll keep the trial of iWork ‘08 for the time being if i need it but it will probably be uninstalled. I’m using Spanning Sync to synchronise my Google Calendar(s) with iCal which works great. VMware Fusion flys along but the one piece of Windows Software I need to run - an RC Helicopter Simulator doesn’t run under a VM so it was time to install Boot Camp and Vista. That’s a pretty polished install, make the driver disk, partition the existing volume and install Windows…I ended up doing it twice (reverting to a single partition) because I stupidly made it 15gb in size and only ended up with 4gb of space after installing Windows!!! Vista looks really great on it, once the drivers were installed and a new performance analysis run Aero was enabled….but i’m still looking forward to Leopard!
All in all it’s been great - i’ve moved my iTunes library over to it, I did have some initial frustrations - like the equivalent of the HOME/END keys but i’ve figured that out now using the COMMAND and left/right arrows. COMMAND+Q to close an application as the X in the top bar doesn’t do that???? So why when i click X does the icon in the dock still have an arrow underneath it??? The minus obviously minimises it as it goes to the right of the doc but what is the X doing as it starts a new session when you click on the icon again….? The only thing now i need to know is how to switch users fast? Am i stuck with logging out and letting my other half log in? Can we switch without having to shut down all our apps? Surely I’m missing something…
September 14th, 2007 at 2:43 am
There’s differences between Windows and Mac that you’re clearly finding
Closing the last open window in an app won’t quit the app - you need to hit cmd+Q to quit. It’s just the way Mac apps work.
Some other useful keyboard shortcuts:
Others are the same as Window - cmd+S for save, cmd+O for open, cmd+P for print, etc.
cmd+W will close a window. cmd+alt+W closes all open windows in the current app. cmd+H hides the app - click the icon in the dock to bring it back (or use cmd+TAB or cmd+shift+TAB). Set up keys for Expose in System Preferences - you’ll love it
You can turn on fast user switching in the Users preference pane in System Prefs. Think it’s on the login options bit on there. That’ll give you a list of users near the Spotlight icon in the top right - select the user to switch to and you can login as them (with a very swanky animation) without having to log out.
Any other questions, ask away
Welcome to Macintosh!
September 14th, 2007 at 6:20 am
Congrats on the iMac. I just recently switched as of about 3 weeks ago. Coming from a win32 world, it’s a huge shift in how you think. I was stumped that it wasn’t harder to install programs. I was expecting the standard setup, click next, click advanced, choose directory, click next, click next kinda deal. Little did I know that most programs install by dragging the icon to your Applications folder.
Tips I’ve found out so far:
Make an applications folder in your user directory. OSX will recognize it as an application folder and if you ever want to reset your make to factory fresh settings, delete that folder.
Use QuickSilver, it’s great as an app launcher, but has even more functionality beyond that.
Find out about MacPorts. Easiest way to install unix utilities for development.
iTerm is a great replacement for terminal. It supports tabbed terminal sessions.
If you want to have a program start up whenever you login, ctrl-click the icon and select ‘open at login’. Silly me was trying to look for startup folders and such.