OK, so color me a little bit disappointed that I've already experienced my first Spinning Beachball Of Death. So soon is my innocence lost; my Mac world-view (or is that MacWorld-view?) tarnished. I tried to close my trial copy of Aperture 2 last night and it SBOD'd on me. And then so did Activity Monitor, which is ironically I guess the thing you're supposed to fire up when something goes wrong. Is this how it's going to be?
Apart from that, though, things are really good so far: most of the pain is due to generic changing-computers trouble rather than Mac-trouble. I don't in principle like change; I guess that's why it's taken me so long to switch even though I've long known it's the Right Thing To Do.
Things I like:
- the silence. This thing is whisper-quiet, and even better than that it aggressively powers down my stack of four external Firewire drives to make them also shhh when they're not being used. Mrs McSwitchenstein and I have been waking up in the morning wondering what all that quiet was during the night.
- syncing the iPhone is now about ten times faster than it used to be.
- the fact that my MIDI adapter arrived from Amazon today. GarageBand here I come---now I can connect my Yamaha digital piano! The guy in the Apple Store claimed that he wasn't laughing at me when I asked if they carried MIDI cables but I didn't believe him. Yes I know it's all very 80s. I expect the Mac will laugh at me too but I don't care.
Things I'm struggling with
- no writing NTFS drives? WTF?! I have to reformat all four of these Firewire drives? And my choices are Mac OS Extended or FAT? The whole idea when buying them was that they would be computer-independent ways of storing my stuff. Bleugh.
- keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor. Is end-of-line Apple-Right-arrow or Option-Right-arrow or Control-Right-arrow? Or something else? WTF again?! And what's more, if I'm not mistaken it's different in Firefox than everything else? Suckage.
- maximizing windows. What's the technical term for the green "plus" button on the title bar? Because I tell you, clicking it right now makes my window smaller than it was. That's not "plus" in my book.
I realize, by the way, that I should be Switchy
MacSwitchenstein. Too late now.
3 comments:
So, you're giving Aperture 2.0 a go. Me too! Can I claim credit for prompting you last night? How are you finding it?
How am I finding it? I've not done much with it so far. First of all, I added all my pictures from the PC which were on a Firewire drive. It spent an entire overnight adding them and creating thumbnails, after which I discovered that it wasn't terribly happy with the drive being NTFS and hence unwritable.
I removed all those again, which is when it SBOD'd.
So now I've booted up the PC again, created a Picasa backup, made permanent some of the Picasa edits I'd done, copied all the pictures (edits and originals) to my hard drive, and just last night set Aperture off on its overnight indexing and thumbnailing process.
This week I guess I'll be finding out how it does...
The little green button is officially known as the "Zoom" button, and it politely asks the application to choose its own size. Every application can implement the zooming feature in its own special nonstandard way. Net result is that it's pretty useless.
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