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.

Reassuringly expensive

In the UK they used to have adverts for Stella Artois, with the strapline "reassuringly expensive". Yes, Stella is £1.80 a pint, or whatever it was back then, but that's good pricey not bad pricey. That was the proposition as I understood it, anyway.

Apple have a similar gig (if you'll excuse the pun) going with memory prices. Take the 4Gb I just put in the home MacBook Pro this weekend: Apple price, a cool $600; Crucial price, $105.

Feeling reassured?

A sense of perspective

If you work with me, you may well have come across my "searchmonger" series of presentations on mobile search. What you may not know is that (a) most of the data is laid out in a treemap; and (b) I got the specific idea of using that visualization technique from using spacemonger, a piece of software for Windows which helps you comprehend where all your disk space is going.

Well of course now I've switched to Mac I'm going to need a new spacemonger---and to my joy, I found today Grand Perspective, which doesn't quite use cushion treemaps to do the business... but kinda looks as if it does.

Nonetheless: yay Grand Perspective!

I could fix this shit on Windows

At the moment I'm suffering from this crazy problem, both on my home and my work Mac. It's pretty annoying: I download a ".doc" file with Safari, and I end up with a ".doc.dot". I download a ".ppt" file and it gets saved as ".ppt.pot". Grr!

And while the linked thread gives some hints and clues which I might follow up on (I already installed 12.0.1, by the way: no difference), it just reminds me that I'm this new world where there's no regedit, no HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT, no regmon and filemon and procmon... where are my Mac Sysinternals? I feel rather powerless without them.

Twins

So wow, I actually just Switched at work as well. I'm right now using my work MacBook Pro as a palmrest as I type this blog entry on my home MacBook Pro. Crazy. I'm so far up on Maslow's hierarchy of computing needs right now that I can barely see the ground any more. Get me oxygen!

I guess that after I switched to Safari at home I must have become used to the real (Cocoa) edit control keyboard shortcuts in most Mac software. And then having left behind the confusing FrankenMac Windows-ized Firefox 2 (Carbon) ones, staying on Windows at work was just too much... well, work. So here I am. With twins.

I'm starting to get productive on Mac in some ways. Exposé: I finally see what Mac users have been raving about all this time. Spaces: I'm gingerly getting used to it. TextWrangler seems like a decent text editor and Twitterific is good fun. I only used iMovie once so far but it did make editing and uploading a video to YouTube amazingly easy. Seriously impressively so, in fact.

I'm a keyboard guy, though, and so in some ways the Mac is disappointing. How do I assign global keyboard shortcuts to things, so---for instance---whatever I'm doing I can press Apple-Shift-T to bring up a terminal window? How do I pull down and explore menus with just the keyboard? Is there a way to navigate dialogs and messageboxes without a pointing device? This stuff eludes me so far.

I also had brief inner panic earlier today when I realized I don't really have within reach an actual physical functioning Windows machine. Everything I've learned over nearly 20 years of programming Windows and knowing the internals of the OS I'm using: suddenly no practical use whatsoever. All of a sudden I'm a platform expatriot with new mannerisms to learn and a new culture to absorb.

As an actual expatriot, though, living a very real 5,000 miles from where I grew up, I think I can make it. With stereo MacBook Pros, like an Apple-esque Jean-Michelle Jarre with a hand on each keyboard, I think I might like it here.