Bonjour le Mac

Mrs McSwitchenstein, on her nth Mac (currently a 24" iMac), has the monochrome laser printer; I'm lucky enough to have some super-duper crazy extravagant color photo printer thing. Most of the time this arrangement has worked because on the odd occasion we've required the other's printer for some unusual need we can just email files between us and be done with it. We invoice each other for consumables, reprints are half price, all good.

By contrast, tonight the incredible happened. Mrs McS wanted to print a color Word document but due to a recent change of infrastructure on the Mr McS side of things, ol' Switchy hasn't got himself Microsoft Office-enabled yet so couldn't deliver the goods. I still have no copy of Office so can't print my wife's .DOC files.

Hey, though, we're both on Macs... right? This should be the most straightforward thing ever... right? 

I figured I'd start at System Preferences, then... mmm... perhaps "Print and Fax". I see my printer but it says "Printer Sharing is turned off" and offers a button "Sharing". I click the button, ah-ha turn Printer Sharing "on", and the hardest bit... well the hardest bit was working out what to do next with the dialog box. No "Close" button. No "OK". No "Apply". No "Done". It was almost disbelief that even that extra click had been made unnecessary.

Running to the back of the house to Mrs McS's Mac, then, to the next step of tonight's adventure---and obviously the story concludes with the inevitable automatic discovery of the color printer, a complete automatic installation of the driver software, all the printing options appearing, and seconds later superb color prints coming from the Canon in my office all the way from the back of the house.

I talked to Mrs McSwitchenstein about Bonjour, Apple's service discovery technology based on zeroconf. She was très impressionée.

You're Welcome

So to all you who now have cheaper, faster, sexier, more powerful Mac laptops available to you: you're welcome. They were just waiting for me to buy the last of the old line.

Rats.

Zero Sum Game

So I'm just getting comfortable with the Mac now. Readers of the previous post pointed me to numerous resources to help out, like this one, but in fact the best way forward turned out in fact to be following the overwhelming consensus and ditching Firefox. I'm now a happy(-ish) Safari user, enjoying the speed and Apple-ishness but missing my Google Browser Sync and all my extensions and wotnot. Ho hum. I imported bookmarks, turned on password saving, and I guess I'll suck it up.

And in other news I'm gradually shuffling around old Windows data from one drive to another, re-formatting from NTFS as I go, like some huge file-based game of Traffic. I'm getting there, and digital nirvana awaits. Already the photos have their primary home on the Mac, and I'm even gradually getting to grips with Aperture 2, despite its best attempts to elude me in its unique and inscrutable way. I'm getting there!

Gosh, and oh yes the Midi interface is great: I plugged the Mac into the digital piano for the first time last night. Worked first time, of course, and straightaway I had GarageBand transcribing everything I played. Damn thing is unforgiving timewise, though, and insults me repeatedly by pretending that every bar I play has a semiquaver rest at the beginning of it. Gack! I suppose I'm rusty, but right here is my incentive to practice again.

The title of this post, though, in combination with the above great leaps forward, augurs a sad ending. Just as I snuggle into Mac nirvana, Mrs McSwitchenstein is cast into Mac purgatory with an unfortunate accidental iPhone-toilet encounter. You don't need details, I'm sure. One step forward, one step back.

Modifier Key Madness

First of all, thanks to Micah in his comment for informing me that the green "plus" button is called "Zoom", and thanks particularly for his agreeing with me that the thing is pretty hopeless. I note tacit agreement from Apple in that it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut. Coincidence? I think not. But anyway, let's talk about modifier keys. You're going to think I'm nitpicking but remember this: I produce, in my job, primarily text. Email, PowerPoint, Wiki pages, Excel, code (yes, tragically in reverse order of volume of output). I use my keyboard a lot and for hours and hours every day. I've also decades of muscle memory invested in how it works. I have already this week spent literally hours perfecting emails. I edit text for a living. I expected change moving to a Mac, of course, but not total bifurcation. And certainly not trifurcation! This is so messed up! For instance, checkit:

• in Firefox, Command-left-arrow navigates back in the browser history when the focus is iny rich text edit window in Blogger. In the "Edit Html" textbox of Blogger, though, it means "home" (start-of-line). And in the Gmail compose window it does nothing. In a Safari multi-line text editor it means "home" (start-of-line). In SubEthaEdit the same.
• in Safari and SubEthaEdit, Control-right-arrow means "word-right". In Firefox it does nothing.
• in a Firefox text area, page-up and page-down move a page up and page down in the text area (yay). In SubEthaEdit, nothing. In Safari, they scroll the page up and down independent of the text area!

C'mon! I mean, seriously. Is this Firefox = FAIL or am I missing some grand unified theory of Apple Mac modifier keys? I shudder to think what would happen if I open up the lid of the laptop and add the "Fn" key to the mix. This is a big mess. And don't get me started on "Home" and "End". Ugh. Right now I'm editing this post afraid that I'll accidentally press Command-left-arrow meaning word-left but being taken to mean "back" in the browser, losing what I wrote. In other news, I watched a whole series of tutorials on Aperture 2 last night. It looks promising. And everybody's recommending Quicksilver so I feel sure that it will change my life. Stay tuned.

Bye Bye PC

The Switch is pretty much complete. The Dell sits dejected and silent (finally!) in the corner of the room and the MacBook Pro reigns supreme hooked up to the many silvery and slick peripherals which have outclassed but been subservient to the Dell for years. Everything's in place for the final transition of photos, videos, documents and music... not just putting my first foot firmly in Macland but removing my second from PCland. Here we go. It's been surprisingly difficult to get to this point, what with juggling things around between internal and external storage, and between drive formats and applications and wotnot. I think I've abandoned Picasa at least temporarily while I give Aperture a shot, but even with that switch I wanted to make sure that the way back was still in place if I needed it. It's only in the migration become apparent how much I'm actually invested in Picasa. But anyway, here I am. I've installed Caffeine, SubEthaEdit and iSlayer iStat. Firefox, obviously, and Aperture 2. Keyboard shortcuts are still causing me trouble and I'd love to get faster at doing things. Finder looks like I accidentally installed the Large Print version for the visually impaired, and I'm still waiting for Office 2008 since---very tellingly, I believe---the Microsoft Store on Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus is out of stock. Makes you wonder. By the way, Roomba turned up safe and sound. I think he was feeling a little threatened and neglected. You know how they are. TiVo was the same when we got Roomba.

Lost: One Roomba

Oh crap, we've lost Roomba. I'm serious. Has anyone seen Roomba?

My SBOD innocence lost

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.

All the way from Shanghai, Canada

I never did post the story of the advent of the Mac. For years I've been a wannabe Switchy McSwitchenstein and for all that time I've been rather pathetically buying Mac accessories and gadgets but never Macs; at least not Macs for me. Since my very first iPod in 2002 I think I've bought

• 6 Apple keyboards
• 5 more iPods
• 2 iPhones
• 3 Airport Expresses
• 2 Apple TVs
• 1 23" Apple Cinema Display
• 1 24" iMac for my wife

so you can imagine that after so many years of staunch self-control (oh yes, that's what I've called it) my purchase of an actual Apple computer, for me, was a watershed moment. And yes, of course as soon as I placed my order I wanted it here now! So here the trouble starts. Go to store.apple.com and you'll see that next-day delivery is available on the MacBook Pro. Click on it, configure it and put it in your cart, however, and you'll find that the best on offer is three business days. May as well say "eternity" but I curse under my breath, pay the $18 and go for this "expedited" shipping. Three days later, of course, the thing hasn't even shipped yet because it's still being "configured". I call up 1-800-MY-APPLE, probably the thousandth person just that morning moaning that they want their new shiny toy now and why can't they have it now and you promised it now and so on. She's great, though: friendly and understanding. She explains that the custom builds take a bit longer to ship but once it ships it'll get here right away... and as a good faith gesture she'll credit me the $18 I paid for the expedited shipping. So you're going to zero out the $18 charge but still ship it expedited? Oh yes, it'll ship expedited just as soon as it's ready. OK, let's do that. Shame I have to wait but what can I do? Fast forward a few days and through hundreds of hopeful refreshes of my Order Status page, and we get finally to that magic email saying that my order has shipped. Yippee! But wait, fedex.com says that the shipment missed the deadline and is now in limbo waiting through the weekend and gosh what does that mean for my new laptop? Monday comes and goes. No update on fedex.com beyond "Shipment exception: pickup deadline missed". Tuesday arrives and the same shipment status on fedex.com. I call FedEx but their international shipment desk has closed for the day and could I call back tomorrow? Aargh! On Wednesday, fedex.com shows that whatever post-weekend parcel enema they administer has been successful at flushing my laptop out of the warehouse in China... but wait, what's that? It's due to arrive 11 days hence? Hoo boy. I call 1-800-MY-APPLE again. What's up with this? A next-day order, downgraded to a 3-day order, with a good faith refund of shipping fees, now downgraded to slow-boat-from-China delivery? The rep explains what a long way my laptop has got to travel. It's coming all the way from "Shanghai, Canada", sir. Oh, and how would I like a full credit on that copy of VMWare that I bought? Sigh. Later that day an automated email arrives from Apple asking me to fill in a satisfaction survey about my purchase and interactions with the call center folks. I fill it in honestly, and point out that goddammit don't they realize how frustrating this is? Perhaps paradoxically, but especially for someone who's been waiting five years putting off buying a Mac! The next day two things arrive: (a) my laptop; and (b) a voicemail from some Apple dude asking me to call him regarding my feedback on the survey. I didn't call back yet. I've been too busy enjoying my new toy...

Crossing the Chasm

I realized tonight when emailing with Matt that you just have to take the hit. Rip the band-aid off. Grab the bull by the horns. Grasp the nettle. Cross the chasm. And so I switched. I'm coming at you now from the Mac, on my desk, Windows machine switched off, mouse and keyboard attached to Mac, feeling permanent. Everything remains in limbo, however. I've now got nothing to sync my iPhone to (haven't yet transferred mp3/mp4 library to Mac iTunes). Nor the iPod in the car, and similary my cameras are feeling homeless. My DVD ripping pipeline is, ahem, hosed. And everything's interdependent: I can't sync my iPhone with the Mac until I've got contacts and calendar and music transferred over properly. Meh. So switching the Windows machine off is both (a) actually a purely mechanical pre-requisite for attaching the four Firewire drives to the new Apple laptop; and (b) actually going to make me make the switch. What they call, in my sometimes depressingly managerial and buzzword-laden line of work, a "forcing function". Gulp. But no, this does feel good: "Copying 2,733 items to 'Music', 30GB of 131.77GB - About 45 minutes". It's started. And wow, the study is so quiet now. That Dell was noisier than you'd think.

Putting off the inevitable

OK, so at some stage I am genuinely going to have to work out exactly how I'm going to move over 20 years' worth of accumulated digital PC stuff to Mac-world. For now, though, I'm putting off the inevitable and just playing around with the new laptop a bit. I installed VMWare Fusion, in anticipation of needing to use the occasional Windows thingy---but also just to see what the state of the art of desktop virtualization looks like. Pretty impressive, is the answer. The thing can boot up Vista from the Boot Camp partition with no problem, and then present applications from Windows running apparently as first-class citizens on the Mac desktop. The moment I minimized a standalone Internet Explorer 7 window running on Vista and it underwent the genie effect and sat on the right hand side of the dock I felt a twinge of happy incredulity. It's like magic. Really I'm anticipating needing Windows for just one thing: Picasa. iPhoto schmiPhoto, everyone knows that Picasa is still the best consumer-grade photo management application. And that's not just the I-work-at-Google talking. I don't think I can leave it behind. So here I am, connected to my shared iTunes library on the PC, playing music and putting off the inevitable. Tomorrow I'll be figuring out how to move my iTunes library from Windows to Mac. And my photo library from Picasa on Windows XP to Picasa on Vista-on-VMWare. Maybe. I may yet be able to procrastinate another few days.

The horror! The horror!

Heh. Postin' atcha from Internet Explorer on Windows Vista on MacBook Pro. I thought I'd give it a go so I could

• see what the Bootcamp setup experience is like;
• see what the Vista setup experience is like; and
• see what Vista is like on spanky new hardware.

In order, then:

• Bootcamp setup is fairly but not completely straightforward. You'd think that the Bootcamp Setup Assistant would create a Windows-ready partition for you, but no: you have to select "Advanced Options" in the Vista install, and format as NTFS. When you've booted into Vista you're supposed to insert the Leopard CD (for the driver pack) but it's actually not totally obvious how to eject the Vista CD you've got in the drive! (and no, the eject key doesn't work). And even once you've installed the driver pack you then have to explicitly go in to Control Panel and enable Aero and Glass and all that jazz.
• Vista setup: pretty awesomely slick in actual fact. Fast, and trouble-free. Took me a while to figure out how to get on the (SSID not broadcast) wireless at home but now I am everything's tickety boo.
• Vista itself? Yeah, S'OK. Certainly looks modern and shiny (I was there at PDC in LA when they launched Windows XP... I can barely believe that was over six years ago) and I can see why people say the MacBook Pro is the best Windows laptop in the world. I'm here to Switch, though, so I'm headed back to OS X. Vista can be my vacation home or something.

Next up I expect I'll be looking at moving many years of photos, music and (crucially) metadata over here.

The trackpad is still not feeling right.

Yikes.

First Post From The Mac

So here it is. Postin' atcha from the new computer. So far:

• it certainly feels like a more refined experience than a Windows laptop. Clearly the visual experience has been put together by people with exquisite taste. What's more, the thing is pleasing viscerally but also intellectually. I'm such a snob.
• it feels like an appliance rather than a fragile concoction of technologies in the Windows world. That's a good thing. It feels no more likely to crash than my DVD player or toaster
• it still says stupidly meaningless things like "Installation Configuration 15%" or "Writing Files 47%" or "Verifying Package 32%" even during the immediate out-of-box interaction

Trackpad is troublesome. Single-button pointing device moreso. Where's the delete (not backspace) key?

OK, so apparently I'm Switchy McSwitchenstein

Before I got this one I tried

• switching - not available
• makingtheswitch - not available
• tothemacs (geddit?) - not available. tothemac was available but didn't quite do it for me
• macsimo - another winner! sadly not available

Anyway, the short story is this. My new Mac arrived today. I'm a lifelong Windows user, though Mac-admirer/fetishist. I've finally made the Switch but to be honest: right now I'm trepidacious. This blog will, I hope, be about my move from Windows to Mac. I'm concerned, but that could be the Aspergers. On the other hand, I imagine the Mac to be like TiVo: impossible fully to appreciate until you've actually lived with one. And once you have, there's no going back. That's why I'm here, $3,000 poorer. Let's see. posting from my 5-year-old Dell desktop running Windows XP SP2. Mac in box behind me.