It's the little things - Part I

I never told the story of my switch to Mac at work.

After I got my MacBook Pro at home I switched on Hot Corners to activate Exposé. I soon got used to throwing the mouse pointer down to the bottom-left of the screen for what seems (to a Windows person like me) like a fancy visual kind of Alt-Tab. I soon got used to it and, hey, it's pretty useful and dare I say moreso than Alt-Tab. I was surprised that what prima facie seems like pure eye-candy is actually a genuine productivity feature.

Before long, though, muscle memory developed and I found myself at work slinging the mouse pointer down to the bottom left only to have my IBM ThinkPad stare blankly and nonplussed back at me, as if to say "and now what? You gonna click on 'Start'?". I didn't have Exposé and Hot Corners on my work laptop, didn't even have OS X come to that, and figured I needed to fix the situation. I needed a MacBook Pro at work as well, so I ordered one.

This is where it gets tricky, though. The machine that arrived the next day looked just like my home machine. The differences, I thought after a quick scan, were superficial and limited to everyday nonfunctional stuff

• home: glossy screen; work: matt screen
• home: 2.6Ghz; work: 2.4GHz
• home: standard Leopard build; work: custom Leopard build
• home: 200Gb hard drive; work: 160Gb hard drive

And so it was, until one day I accidentally executed one of the fancy new multi-touch gestures on the trackpad of my work machine. Ooo! So I guess they were kind enough to give me a Penryn machine and three-finger swipe is mine for the having. Wasn't long before I got used to lazy trackpad-based browsing using swipe for back and forwards.

You can see what's coming, though. Once again I've become sucked into depending on a feature which only works on one of my laptops. I'm seriously considering turning off the new multi-touch gestures on my work machine; I can't afford to upgrade my home one to match it.