Thursday, October 16, 2008
First Impressions of a Mac Air and OSX
After hearing countless colleagues extol the benefits of Macs and OSX, I decided that my next laptop would be a Mac.
My Sony Vaio has been a great workhorse - running Windows XP and carefully managed so that it was kept free from too many software addons, it has been a relatively stable environment. I tend to reboot it once a month and its suspended and resumed several times a day without incident. However it is slightly heavy (the laptop is 1.6kg however the power supply is another 500g) particularly if you carry it around all day between meetings (I certainly didn't want anything weighing more).
For me the ultimate laptop allows light weight development on the move, as well as allowing for email and presentations while on client sites. I really was interested in a MacBook Pro - however the weight was just too much for me to lug around every day, so I decided that the Mac Air might just fit the bill.
There is lots of information already written about the Mac Air, needless to say its not cheap but you do get a quality machine.
For me its definitely been a relief walking around with something so light on my back - and its not just the machine, but also the miniature power supply that goes with it.
On the usability front, the screen is small but bright - the autosensing brightness adjustment is cool but I disabled it as I found that moving my head while typing in low light conditions caused it to change brightness in a distracting way. The backlit keyboard is surprisingly useful (even though I am mostly a touch typist).
The trackpad works very well - I thought the Vaio was good, but this is excellent particularly the gesture support for scrolling and navigating forwards and backwards (annoyingly many applications, even those from apple, don't support it - thank god for multi clutch).
On the not so well, the European keyboard is not well layed out - the miniture Enter key is silly (not sure what happened to Apple design on that one), I also find the use of the four keys on the bottom left of the keyboard (Fn, Ctrl, Alt, Cmd) to be very confusing. I am never sure which key to hit to move forward by word (Alt-Left), to Delete a character (Fn-Backspace) - it seems that surely 3 keys could do the job somehow.
On the OSX front - its good, but maybe I was hoping to be amazed and I'm not. I like that its built on top of Unix - although I'm not a mega command line freak (still its nice to use it from time to time, although I wasn't expecting to have to use "shutdown -r now" when I found that one day Finder Restart refused to restart my machine). I also find the menubar and the concept of having to quit applications rather than close a window to be a little confusing. It definitely drives me crazy that you can't invoke menu items using Alt-Mnemonic Letter - in fact while many apps have good keyboard support its often an afterthought.
Spotlight is working very well for me, its my graphical command line, and its very efficient. TimeMachine is also an excellent idea - and the way it works is nicely thought out (I was impressed to notice that Araxis Merge makes use of it to allow diffs against automatic file history which is very neat).
In many apps, I often find that funny dialog boxes obscure application screens and they can't be moved around, or if you switch to another application athen then back again, any dialog windows just disappear (e.g. Add Printer). The file dialog is also quite confusing, it took me ages to spot where you create a new directory (the new folder button tucked away at the bottom), or how you know the context of a file you are saving (the drop down folder list displays your directory history in a vertical list box). I also miss miss the windows task bar with its running buttons - I think that was a more intuitive way to see what was running rather than the little dots below applications in the Dock (or if you use expose, its flashy but I don't find its little animated mini windows particularly good for switching quickly between multiple Pages documents, and Cmd-` is a little awkward).
Overall, a change is always good for the system - its not a revolutionary change that the fans predict, but its definitely a pleasant one.
My Sony Vaio has been a great workhorse - running Windows XP and carefully managed so that it was kept free from too many software addons, it has been a relatively stable environment. I tend to reboot it once a month and its suspended and resumed several times a day without incident. However it is slightly heavy (the laptop is 1.6kg however the power supply is another 500g) particularly if you carry it around all day between meetings (I certainly didn't want anything weighing more).
For me the ultimate laptop allows light weight development on the move, as well as allowing for email and presentations while on client sites. I really was interested in a MacBook Pro - however the weight was just too much for me to lug around every day, so I decided that the Mac Air might just fit the bill.
There is lots of information already written about the Mac Air, needless to say its not cheap but you do get a quality machine.
For me its definitely been a relief walking around with something so light on my back - and its not just the machine, but also the miniature power supply that goes with it.
On the usability front, the screen is small but bright - the autosensing brightness adjustment is cool but I disabled it as I found that moving my head while typing in low light conditions caused it to change brightness in a distracting way. The backlit keyboard is surprisingly useful (even though I am mostly a touch typist).
The trackpad works very well - I thought the Vaio was good, but this is excellent particularly the gesture support for scrolling and navigating forwards and backwards (annoyingly many applications, even those from apple, don't support it - thank god for multi clutch).
On the not so well, the European keyboard is not well layed out - the miniture Enter key is silly (not sure what happened to Apple design on that one), I also find the use of the four keys on the bottom left of the keyboard (Fn, Ctrl, Alt, Cmd) to be very confusing. I am never sure which key to hit to move forward by word (Alt-Left), to Delete a character (Fn-Backspace) - it seems that surely 3 keys could do the job somehow.
On the OSX front - its good, but maybe I was hoping to be amazed and I'm not. I like that its built on top of Unix - although I'm not a mega command line freak (still its nice to use it from time to time, although I wasn't expecting to have to use "shutdown -r now" when I found that one day Finder Restart refused to restart my machine). I also find the menubar and the concept of having to quit applications rather than close a window to be a little confusing. It definitely drives me crazy that you can't invoke menu items using Alt-Mnemonic Letter - in fact while many apps have good keyboard support its often an afterthought.
Spotlight is working very well for me, its my graphical command line, and its very efficient. TimeMachine is also an excellent idea - and the way it works is nicely thought out (I was impressed to notice that Araxis Merge makes use of it to allow diffs against automatic file history which is very neat).
In many apps, I often find that funny dialog boxes obscure application screens and they can't be moved around, or if you switch to another application athen then back again, any dialog windows just disappear (e.g. Add Printer). The file dialog is also quite confusing, it took me ages to spot where you create a new directory (the new folder button tucked away at the bottom), or how you know the context of a file you are saving (the drop down folder list displays your directory history in a vertical list box). I also miss miss the windows task bar with its running buttons - I think that was a more intuitive way to see what was running rather than the little dots below applications in the Dock (or if you use expose, its flashy but I don't find its little animated mini windows particularly good for switching quickly between multiple Pages documents, and Cmd-` is a little awkward).
Overall, a change is always good for the system - its not a revolutionary change that the fans predict, but its definitely a pleasant one.
Labels: Hardware, Mac, Review, Software
# posted by Tim Mackinnon @ 1:09 AM
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