Once you go Mac…?
Recently, I confessed about my flirting with Mac, and right after that I got the chance to go all the way. An Art Director in the company I work for resigned, and I got (read:took) the opportunity to take over his Power Mac G5 with the Panther OS installed and 1,5 GB RAM. In short, a very competent computer.
Some more cynical people would say that it is a case of “knowing your enemy”, but that’s definitely not the way I see it, I was just very interested.
However, the things that bothered me was:
- Dialogs
- Since I’m really a keyboard shortcut freak, not being able to tab in dialogs beween “Save”, “Don’t save” and “Cancel” was really annoying.
- The keyboard
- I really like the look of the white keyboard, and it’s as nice to touch as patting a puppy, but in the long run I didn’t like typing on it. This might be because I normally use the ergonomic Microsoft Natural MultiMedia Keyboard.
- The necessary connection to a PC
- I have the need to develop things in Visual Studio.Net, and using the Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac to connect to my PC proved to be to too slow (over a 100 Mbit LAN), definitely a lot more sluggish than the equivalent Remote Desktop Connection built in to Windows XP.
It also resulted in other keyboard combinations to write characters like >, {, [ etc, which just became utterly confusing in the long run.
Why I didn’t use Virtual PC for Mac is because I already had the development environment I wanted on my PC, and that I didn’t want to compile things in an emulated environment. - Developing tools
- Except for Visual Studio.Net, I really think Macromedia HomeSite is superior to BBEdit for writing web interface code.
- Maximizing windows
- To the contrary belief that PC users have their application windows maximized just because they don’t know how to change it, I really prefer having them maximized. It helps me keep focused on the thing I’m doing for the moment, and then I just use Alt + Tab to swith to any other programs I need to work with.
- Closing of windows
- I just find it weird behavior to keep the application running when I close the last window in it.
- What’s up with the Command key (the one with the apple on it)?
- Is it really necessary to have this key? Isn’t Ctrl, Alt and others sufficient? Or is to make up for the lack of an Alt Grip key?
All in all, it didn’t suit me for developing purposes, but I would have nothing against using a Mac for entertainment purposes at home.
Now when I’m back with Windows XP, and now sporting the silver color scheme, it feels just right! 
PS. Thanks to Per Zimmerman at Gamepepper 
for helping me finding where different characters actually were on the keyboard, as well as the discussions about a real environment vs. an emulated one. DS.
