March 14, 2005
The world of the Powerbook!
What can I say, it's truly an awesome machine!
After almost two weeks of constant use I've really started to settle into the daily use of such a well integrated machine.
The hardware itself looks gorgeous, with it's shiny metal casing and keyboard, rather than black plastic. The screen is great, very clear and crisp, and since I've got the 17" there's lots of real estate to play with.
The operating system itself is a developers dream, at the base a Unix system, with a sexy and functional desktop on top of it.
The operating system is really well integrated with the hardware, for some reason it even reminded me of the olden days when I owned an Amiga :)
Over the past few weeks I've really enjoyed finally being able to take advantage of things like suspend/resume that works in an instant (finally!), automatic wireless networking that chooses my preferred network depending on where I am, and bluetooth configuration wizard that makes it easy to connect devices like an external mouse, phone, etc. These things took me ages to get working right under Linux.
OSX includes a lot of cool applications, and I also bought iWork which included Apple's new Pages software and Keynote which are great, but there's also a lot of non-tangible features & gizmos included that just give you those butterflies in the stomach when you see them.
Everyone has probably seen the Apple dock and it's magnifying effect when you move the mouse over an icon, but there's also the genie shrinking effect when you minimize an application - and, if you press the shift key while minimizing or maximizing it does it in "slow motion". Try it out while playing some quicktime video :)
Expose rocks the planet, with it's animated window resizing when searching for a particular application (try out the shift trick above as well for slo-mo expose! :) ). Also look for the fast user switching effect, where you're entire desktop rotates into the new user's desktop like a rotating cube. :)
Whats also been amazing are some of the applications out there that are totally amazing. One that's really impressed me is Quicksilver, which lets you do an blindingly fast incremental search for applications, files, data and more.
For more GUI gobsmacking I also installed Growl and Synergy which provide a popup style notification system, transparent and context sensitive.
Torsten has also put up a list of applications that we've come across over the past few weeks and installed as well. Adium, SubEthaEdit, DragonBurn, iPodderX, Virtual PC, Transmit, and more.
Well, there's much more to write about, but for now, time to return back to the Powerbook :)
Posted by crafterm at March 14, 2005 11:36 AM | TrackBack