this message was on my screen this morning. i actually get it a lot. i have no idea where it comes from. i never log out overnight, i just shut the lid. in the morning i open the lid, type my password, and get this message.
it suggests that sometime over night macbook decided it was going to log out. the only thing that stops it is the "clear private data" dialog box that firefox throws up when it quits.
this is strange because i do not want the macbook to log out overnight. and its annoying because i lose all my firefox tabs when it closes.
i'm not sure what to do about it. but it sure is annoying!
i'm still annoyed by the lack of window focus when cmd-tab changing to firefox and thunderbird.
13 December 2007
no wakeup this morning
opened the lid on macbook, the password dialog came up, but the password field wasn't automatically highlighted and the window wasn't selected, so i had to mouse over and click on the password field before typing the password. its the little things that bug me.
strangely, after typing the password and hitting enter, the screen flashed briefly, showing the application i had been using last (iphoto, why is everthing called i-this or i-that? i'm surprised mail isn't called imail and safari isn't called i-surf or i-browse...) then it went blank.
just blank - it was on, the brightness controls were working, the volumne controls were also working, but nothing was displayed. i tried a zillion keys on the keyboard and played with the mouse for a bit but it just made unhappy bonging sounds at me. i even tried the power key (though i didn't hold it down.)
i thought macs weren't supposed to freeze!
in reality, it didn't freeze, as a last resort i closed the clamshell and waited then i reopened it and everything was fine after that, it was just an oddball fluke. for a brand new computer thought it seems to have a lot of these oddball flukes.
another thing i've noticed is sometimes it takes just positively forever to shut the computer down. i usually quit everything on my own before i do a shut down, to be sure for myself that i've saved everything. but it has taken minutes to shut this thing down even after everything was quit. it gets out of the finder quickly, but i'm left staring at a blank sea-green background of nothingness for a long time (minutes!) before the ubiquitous spinny "please wait" icon appears in the middle bottom. then that takes a few minutes to finish shutting down. and when i say a few minutes i'm talking 10-15 minutes total. on a brand new macbook with nothing running. this actually hasn't happened in a little while (and i don't often have any reason to shut the thing down anyway, the sleep is so effective i almost always just close the lid and walk away) but what is up with that?
still haven't found an answer to sending photos from iphoto using thunderbird. you also can't copy and paste photos into thunderbird, also very annoying. my buddy from work looked it up and found on an apple support forum that you actually can't fix this. i still plan to take it in to the genius bar and ask them.
chances are greater than 50/50 that i'l be returning this thing before january 8. its just not as good as i had hoped.
strangely, after typing the password and hitting enter, the screen flashed briefly, showing the application i had been using last (iphoto, why is everthing called i-this or i-that? i'm surprised mail isn't called imail and safari isn't called i-surf or i-browse...) then it went blank.
just blank - it was on, the brightness controls were working, the volumne controls were also working, but nothing was displayed. i tried a zillion keys on the keyboard and played with the mouse for a bit but it just made unhappy bonging sounds at me. i even tried the power key (though i didn't hold it down.)
i thought macs weren't supposed to freeze!
in reality, it didn't freeze, as a last resort i closed the clamshell and waited then i reopened it and everything was fine after that, it was just an oddball fluke. for a brand new computer thought it seems to have a lot of these oddball flukes.
another thing i've noticed is sometimes it takes just positively forever to shut the computer down. i usually quit everything on my own before i do a shut down, to be sure for myself that i've saved everything. but it has taken minutes to shut this thing down even after everything was quit. it gets out of the finder quickly, but i'm left staring at a blank sea-green background of nothingness for a long time (minutes!) before the ubiquitous spinny "please wait" icon appears in the middle bottom. then that takes a few minutes to finish shutting down. and when i say a few minutes i'm talking 10-15 minutes total. on a brand new macbook with nothing running. this actually hasn't happened in a little while (and i don't often have any reason to shut the thing down anyway, the sleep is so effective i almost always just close the lid and walk away) but what is up with that?
still haven't found an answer to sending photos from iphoto using thunderbird. you also can't copy and paste photos into thunderbird, also very annoying. my buddy from work looked it up and found on an apple support forum that you actually can't fix this. i still plan to take it in to the genius bar and ask them.
chances are greater than 50/50 that i'l be returning this thing before january 8. its just not as good as i had hoped.
10 December 2007
change the default email app? NOT!
ok. i followed the instructions on how to change your macintosh default email app. no problem. launch the built-in mail program, go to preferences/general and change the default email program in the drop down. all good.
except it doesn't really work. fine, it works for mailto links in my web browser. but how often do you use those? i'm a big user of the "mail document" command under the file menu. i use it in windows extensively when i send spreadsheets or documents or pdfs straight from word or excel or my pdf reader, or even straight from windows explorer by right-clicking and choosing "send to email recipient."
but on the macbook, the mail document command in the preview pdf viewer application, from which i've tried to send various documents only to have them appear in the macintosh "Mail.app" and NOT in thunderbird.
this really sucks! i remember when microsoft made it hard to change default applications it was annoying. now its really easy in windows to change your browser and change your default mail program. when i click a link or send a file from an application or the windows explorer it pops up right in thunderbird or firefox perfectly ready and no problem.
so far i have not been able to figure out what is up with the macintosh on this issue. it seems so straightforward, but "JUST DOESN'T WORK." i don't see any webpages talking about this problem or any workarounds.
i'm going to try changing it back to mail, saving and quitting everything, then changing it back to thunderbird.
mailto links work fine. just the "send document" from preview inexplicably launches 'mail' instead of my selected default email app, 'thunderbird.'
i'm just so surprised at all of these little annoying things that just don't work the way they're expected.
if anyone knows what's wrong please share it with me! i'd like to get this fixed.
except it doesn't really work. fine, it works for mailto links in my web browser. but how often do you use those? i'm a big user of the "mail document" command under the file menu. i use it in windows extensively when i send spreadsheets or documents or pdfs straight from word or excel or my pdf reader, or even straight from windows explorer by right-clicking and choosing "send to email recipient."
but on the macbook, the mail document command in the preview pdf viewer application, from which i've tried to send various documents only to have them appear in the macintosh "Mail.app" and NOT in thunderbird.
this really sucks! i remember when microsoft made it hard to change default applications it was annoying. now its really easy in windows to change your browser and change your default mail program. when i click a link or send a file from an application or the windows explorer it pops up right in thunderbird or firefox perfectly ready and no problem.
so far i have not been able to figure out what is up with the macintosh on this issue. it seems so straightforward, but "JUST DOESN'T WORK." i don't see any webpages talking about this problem or any workarounds.
i'm going to try changing it back to mail, saving and quitting everything, then changing it back to thunderbird.
mailto links work fine. just the "send document" from preview inexplicably launches 'mail' instead of my selected default email app, 'thunderbird.'
i'm just so surprised at all of these little annoying things that just don't work the way they're expected.
if anyone knows what's wrong please share it with me! i'd like to get this fixed.
08 December 2007
trackpad
ok i'm starting to dig the trackpad.
i love the two finger scroll feature.
i love the two-finger right-click. (it works a bit funny, maybe my ham hand detector is set too high).
some folks have complained about the lack of middle click. i never used middle-click (in tabbed browsing opens a new tab with the clicked link) on my thinkpad but frequently used it on my office pc. so i don't miss it.
very happy with track pad and getting happier. (i didn't originally know about the two-finger feature! thanks to rob for pointing it out, it makes a BIG difference.)
please point out anything i'm writing about that is due to my own ignorance. i've got lots of ignorance!
thanks - g
i love the two finger scroll feature.
i love the two-finger right-click. (it works a bit funny, maybe my ham hand detector is set too high).
some folks have complained about the lack of middle click. i never used middle-click (in tabbed browsing opens a new tab with the clicked link) on my thinkpad but frequently used it on my office pc. so i don't miss it.
very happy with track pad and getting happier. (i didn't originally know about the two-finger feature! thanks to rob for pointing it out, it makes a BIG difference.)
please point out anything i'm writing about that is due to my own ignorance. i've got lots of ignorance!
thanks - g
the keyboard
ok so this is probably mostly just an "i'll get used to it eventually" kind of thing but what is up with the zillion modifier keys and the bizzaro key combinations? we've got shift, fn, control, option/alt, and command modifier keys. to check email in thunderbird is shift-command-t. what was wrong with command-m? oh i see, that minimizes the active window, with no way to bring it back without using the mouse. that's useful. NOT!
i'd expect cmd shift M would bring it back. nope.
i'm also not keen on the way windows maximize and resize. how come only the lower righthand corner is a resizing corner? maybe this will just take getting used to also, but what if my window is all the way on the right and i want to expand it to the left a little? i have to drag the whole window from the top to the left then grab the lower right hand corner and drag that to the right.
there is probably an extension or whatever they're called these days that lets you resize windows properly using just the keyboard. i have one on my work pc, its got a full sized keyboard so it works better that way, but on my thinkpad i often maximize a window to work with it and then restore it to window-size when i want to work with something else. if i want to work with two windows i'll size them appropriately so they share screen real estate. this is more difficult on the mac.
but even worse are tall those darn modifier keys! they are all jammed right next to each other too! why have two cmd keys? why have two alt/option keys? i find myself reaching for cmd-tab a lot, then (because of the foreground issue) reaching for cmd-` to switch among windows and accidentally activating the media pc mode, which makes me wait until it loads and i have to quit it. cmd-esc. boo hoo.
also the confusion among alt/option, control, and command. i want to move back a word in a sentence- the key is option-arrow. i want to delete the previous word, option-delete. no problems there. its just that option is tiny and sandwiched between the larger command and the same sized control keys. i don't know how many times i've intended to alt-arrow but instead cmd-arrow'd instead and changed the webpage i was on.
seriously, these keys aren't used efficiently. you don't need four modifier keys! especially not all jammed in right next to each other like that. two per side would make tons more sense if you really wanted four of 'em. or alternatively make the ones you use more often bigger, and consolidate the functionality.
in terminal i'm often using the control key. but outside of terminal control moves around from workspace to workspace and thats all i've figured out that it does. completely useless. get rid of it. make a new key double wide called control/alt/option and have it do all those functions since there's nary an overlap. use the fn key to switch among desktops. fn-arrow does nothing!
this is simply poor design. the engineers at apple decided to take the easy way out of this one, rather than fix all the different things that might have used these various keys in their various incarnations they just added the keys.
now there are four modifier keys and you only really need two or three. it definitely saved production time but was for darn sure not the "right" way to do this. its not clean, its not tight, its not elegant. go ahead and argue with me, but you know its true. this could've been done well and they slacked. i'm bummed about that.
that and the darn function keys up top. many of them share functionality, like volume or brightness or whatever. i would've rather that they add four new keys up top to handle these always necessary functions (you always want instant access to them) rather than taking over the whole function key row and requiring a modifier to hit those keys.
bah.
i still love the bright screen though. yummy on the eyes. i got yelled at by my friend because i put on a pale sea-green background that matches my windows xp thinkpad background. i find it soothing and not distracting. she almost barfed on me and it was the first thing she wanted to change when she got her mitts on my macbook.
i will get bored of it eventually. not yet though.
cheers!
i'd expect cmd shift M would bring it back. nope.
i'm also not keen on the way windows maximize and resize. how come only the lower righthand corner is a resizing corner? maybe this will just take getting used to also, but what if my window is all the way on the right and i want to expand it to the left a little? i have to drag the whole window from the top to the left then grab the lower right hand corner and drag that to the right.
there is probably an extension or whatever they're called these days that lets you resize windows properly using just the keyboard. i have one on my work pc, its got a full sized keyboard so it works better that way, but on my thinkpad i often maximize a window to work with it and then restore it to window-size when i want to work with something else. if i want to work with two windows i'll size them appropriately so they share screen real estate. this is more difficult on the mac.
but even worse are tall those darn modifier keys! they are all jammed right next to each other too! why have two cmd keys? why have two alt/option keys? i find myself reaching for cmd-tab a lot, then (because of the foreground issue) reaching for cmd-` to switch among windows and accidentally activating the media pc mode, which makes me wait until it loads and i have to quit it. cmd-esc. boo hoo.
also the confusion among alt/option, control, and command. i want to move back a word in a sentence- the key is option-arrow. i want to delete the previous word, option-delete. no problems there. its just that option is tiny and sandwiched between the larger command and the same sized control keys. i don't know how many times i've intended to alt-arrow but instead cmd-arrow'd instead and changed the webpage i was on.
seriously, these keys aren't used efficiently. you don't need four modifier keys! especially not all jammed in right next to each other like that. two per side would make tons more sense if you really wanted four of 'em. or alternatively make the ones you use more often bigger, and consolidate the functionality.
in terminal i'm often using the control key. but outside of terminal control moves around from workspace to workspace and thats all i've figured out that it does. completely useless. get rid of it. make a new key double wide called control/alt/option and have it do all those functions since there's nary an overlap. use the fn key to switch among desktops. fn-arrow does nothing!
this is simply poor design. the engineers at apple decided to take the easy way out of this one, rather than fix all the different things that might have used these various keys in their various incarnations they just added the keys.
now there are four modifier keys and you only really need two or three. it definitely saved production time but was for darn sure not the "right" way to do this. its not clean, its not tight, its not elegant. go ahead and argue with me, but you know its true. this could've been done well and they slacked. i'm bummed about that.
that and the darn function keys up top. many of them share functionality, like volume or brightness or whatever. i would've rather that they add four new keys up top to handle these always necessary functions (you always want instant access to them) rather than taking over the whole function key row and requiring a modifier to hit those keys.
bah.
i still love the bright screen though. yummy on the eyes. i got yelled at by my friend because i put on a pale sea-green background that matches my windows xp thinkpad background. i find it soothing and not distracting. she almost barfed on me and it was the first thing she wanted to change when she got her mitts on my macbook.
i will get bored of it eventually. not yet though.
cheers!
getting used to my new macbook
so i just got a new macbook last week. here are the specs if you're curious:
white macbook with 1 gb ram, os x 10.5.1, 2.2ghz intel core 2 duo, 120gb hard drive.
i also got iwork with it.
i tried using mail and safari but ended up installing firefox and thunderbird within a day or two.
i'm an old school dos/windows guy since the 1980's but i've always wanted a mac - just i always thought they were too expensive compared to a similar windows pc. i no longer feel that way.
the switch has been rougher than i expected, though. here are my thoughts so far:
i'm not sure it was worth it to switch at this point in time. i have a perfectly good thinkpad running xp pro with 2gb ram and 1.7gb pentium m processor that i've had for a few years now (since 2004) and i really like it. there are a few things i hate about it: the battery life stinks, the sleep/standby/hibernate features stink (though they are far better than they once were), the screen doesn't dim enough nor brighten enough, and i'm constantly wrestling with privacy, virus, firewall, and spyware software worries and alerts.
but there are somethings i really love about it: its got a tough magnesium alloy case, a fingerprint reader that lets me log-in without a password (and it works perfectly!) the wifi connection is strong and easy to use, the keyboard/mouse/trackpad/red eraser pointing stick is awesome, easy, and efficient, basically everything works perfectly and does exactly what its supposed to. its been dropped more than a few times and no problems.
granted i've been using these winpc computers for 20ish years so i know exactly how to tweak them to get them to do just what i want, but i use firefox and thunderbird on it as my most frequently used applications. plus microsoft office and a ton of open source stuff.
that is my starting bias - i'm a windows pc expert and there are a lot of things that bug me about windows pcs. so i'm trying a macbook.
real quick - the things i love about it - the wifi is even better, it picks up signals i didn't even know were there before. when you close the lid it sleeps, happily, and wakes up fast just by opening the clamshell or pushing the spacebar.
this is where its a half a dozen of one versus six of the other between the two computers: in 2004 when i bought my thinkpad i bought it to replace one that had been stolen during a burglary of my apartment. luckily i was using maximum security including whole-disk encryption so the thief could not get into any of my data, and probably had to scrap the whole hard drive when they sold it for parts on ebay, but my primary concern was that all of my data was protected, and it was. i'm so glad that i was using maximum security back then that i've always used it since, and having the fingerprint reader made that very easy - it was impossible to even access the hard drive without a valid fingerprint or password, which makes the computer much less attractive to thieves.
so i try to use maximum security on this macbook. unfortunately whole drive locking is not an option, but i've locked my data using filevault or whatever and require a password every time it wakes up from sleep. this is of course very annoying but i will not do without it after my theft experience. at one point i swore i'd never buy a macbook that didn't have a fingerprint reader, but i caved. i am still sad that it doesn't have one, its such a cheap, powerful, and easy security device for these expensive and easily transportable little machines. at least my data is safe.
continuing on - i love the sleep/hibernate on the macintosh. it works very well. its fast and really saves the battery life, which compared to my thinkpad is phenomenal. the screen has a higher resolution and that's nice-ish, but really not that important. i don't have microscopes for eyes, and while i do have 20/20 uncorrected vision the teeny-tiny text that shows up in programs like iwork's numbers i find to be on the small side. but the screen looks clearer and sharper than my thinkpad's 3 year old screen and i like the nonreflective shiny screen, i think it does make it clearer.
plus, so far nearly everything i've tried to do with this mac has worked perfectly the first time i tried to do it. that's been nice.
some of the hugest annoyances i found were the dialog boxes. i'm a huge fan of using the keyboard as much as possible. i hate mouses and i especially had track pads. i much prefer an actual mouse when one is required and for dialog boxes or little things i got very accustomed to the thinkpad eraser pointer. it keeps your fingers on the home keys so you don't have to go searching for the mouse when you need to click on something. i type pretty fast and switch between kind of a surfing mode, where i'm using the trackpad primarily and mostly reading and scrolling and clicking, and a writing/editing/working mode, where i'm using the keyboard extensively and typing, doing math, etc. and my hands are exclusively on the keyboard. reading email for me is more of a typing thing because i like to reply and so my fingers stay on the home keys mostly. websurfing is mostly mouse based.
so these dialog boxes when i first encountered them, required using the mouse to click on them when sending an email message using- just drove me nuts! whats the point of using a keyboard shortcut to send a message when you need to confirm the action by using the mouse? i eventually found out both how to turn off confirmation of keyboard shortcuts and how to turn on "full keyboard access" which by default only lets you tab to text boxes in dialogs. this has got to be the DUMBEST THING EVER. i had to ask my mac expert friend in san francisco how to do this, and phew i was gonna chuck this think under a garbage truck in frustration until i got that sorted out.
another really annoying thing is when you switch applications using CMD-TAB the top window is often not activated. in fact, no window is activated by default, so while the application is ready you've still got to get a window to focus. i'm not sure if this is a bug in mozilla apps (i've seen it mostly in firefox and thunderbird, my two most used apps) but gosh is it annoying!
just now i flipped from this firefox window to my thunderbird window. i got there and the mail window was dimmed and not accepting keyboard input. i had to use CMD-` to activate it before i could navigate with the keyboard. holy freaking toledo! THIS IS EASILY THE SECOND DUMBEST THING EVER. but again i'm not sure if its a mac os x problem or a thunderbird/firefox/mozilla problem.
continuing on - i tried to connect my mac to a friends to share some music and pictures. she was running an older version, 10.3 or something, on a G4 12" - gosh what a lovely small awesome machine! i am so jealous of its small size and elegance that i am no longer happy with this monsterous brute of a white machine. well i guess the jury is still out on that but this macbook is in fact larger than my thinkpad and far larger than her 12" g4.
but anyway the firewire connection did not work. her mac couldn't read mine and mine couldn't read hers. we tried target disk modes, repartitioning, and all sorts of nonsense but were never successful. we ended up using an external firewire drive to transfer stuff but shiz-nits that was annoying. i thought for sure that this was gonna be one of those things that "just works." maybe my mac karma isn't really there yet.
today i signed on to ichat for the first time. i'm now on aim and gtalk. lovely. i need yim, too, so i had to install another app for that. seems like its working okay but how nice would it be to just have them all in one place? yeah i know some kinda yabber jabber thing gets it done but i want it to "just work."
don't get me wrong, i'm not afraid of terminal. i popped a console screen open when my macbook started to slow down inexplicably when switching apps to run 'top' and see where my resources were going. this is before i discovered activity monitor - basically a colorful 'top' command very similar to the windows process explorer or task manager or whatever they call it. i dig the activity monitor! i like the pie chart showing who is eating my ram. since i've only got a gig and 460mb is active (235 of it in firefox, i'm also running google earth which has about 40mb live and more than a gig swapped out, thunderbird the same, itunes the same, in fact it seems like every app has a gig swapped out.) but i came to the quick conclusion that 1gb isn't really enough ram for this puppy. that is probably why i was getting spinny swirly color kaleidescope circles whenever i switched among biggish apps. i was still surprised to see it lugging so much, this behaviour only happens on my xp box when i really push it. and i often really push it, so maybe i'm just more familiar with how far i can push it -- it just didn't feel like i was pushing this mac all that far. here's what i'm running:
firefox
thunderbird
google earth
itunes
system preferences (i didn't even realize that was still running)
activity monitor
yahoo messenger
spotlight (i barely know what this is but so far its very cool)
ichat
finder
numbers
dashboard client
system profiler (what is this?)
dock
terminal
loginwindow
quicktime player (i gotta remember to quit things i guess)
preview (same)
atsserver (??)
systemuiserver (i can guess)
mdworker
ichatagent
calculator (love! the rpn mode so cool! needs financial functions though)
etc etc.
really not that much stuff if you ask me.
maybe having that extra gig of ram on my pc just really helps that much. i've ordered more memory from crucial to address this problem.
ok so another issue, i was using firefox to view some videos in wmv format and it just didn't work. workaround- save them to desktop and double click. use the flip4mac wmv player. works fine. but why not save these files properly? ANNOYING!
photo booth just crashed. no reason given. i had the camera open in ichat and that seemed to screw things up. i'm just really surprised at all these small things that go wrong, i had this image in my mind of stuff that just worked, and worked right the first time, and worked the way you expected it to.
and this harsh dose of reality has kicked in. the only thing i really miss is the error messages that actually provide helpful information. these ones are incredibly cryptic and confusing. i have no idea why this stuff is crashing or not working, and apparently neither does macbook.
we'll see if as i get better at using this thing if these problems kind of go away or if maybe i'll get used to them and i won't notice them so much.
though i do think that is kind of weak, and that's why i started this blog- so that i could remember my first impressions without them being clouded by familiarity and workarounds.
so i plan to put up everything that bugs me about my new mac here.
and since i bought it after 31-oct i can return it up until 8-jan without penalty. and i very well might do that, unless i really really like it so much more than my windows xp thinkpad.
more soon! cheers.
- g
white macbook with 1 gb ram, os x 10.5.1, 2.2ghz intel core 2 duo, 120gb hard drive.
i also got iwork with it.
i tried using mail and safari but ended up installing firefox and thunderbird within a day or two.
i'm an old school dos/windows guy since the 1980's but i've always wanted a mac - just i always thought they were too expensive compared to a similar windows pc. i no longer feel that way.
the switch has been rougher than i expected, though. here are my thoughts so far:
i'm not sure it was worth it to switch at this point in time. i have a perfectly good thinkpad running xp pro with 2gb ram and 1.7gb pentium m processor that i've had for a few years now (since 2004) and i really like it. there are a few things i hate about it: the battery life stinks, the sleep/standby/hibernate features stink (though they are far better than they once were), the screen doesn't dim enough nor brighten enough, and i'm constantly wrestling with privacy, virus, firewall, and spyware software worries and alerts.
but there are somethings i really love about it: its got a tough magnesium alloy case, a fingerprint reader that lets me log-in without a password (and it works perfectly!) the wifi connection is strong and easy to use, the keyboard/mouse/trackpad/red eraser pointing stick is awesome, easy, and efficient, basically everything works perfectly and does exactly what its supposed to. its been dropped more than a few times and no problems.
granted i've been using these winpc computers for 20ish years so i know exactly how to tweak them to get them to do just what i want, but i use firefox and thunderbird on it as my most frequently used applications. plus microsoft office and a ton of open source stuff.
that is my starting bias - i'm a windows pc expert and there are a lot of things that bug me about windows pcs. so i'm trying a macbook.
real quick - the things i love about it - the wifi is even better, it picks up signals i didn't even know were there before. when you close the lid it sleeps, happily, and wakes up fast just by opening the clamshell or pushing the spacebar.
this is where its a half a dozen of one versus six of the other between the two computers: in 2004 when i bought my thinkpad i bought it to replace one that had been stolen during a burglary of my apartment. luckily i was using maximum security including whole-disk encryption so the thief could not get into any of my data, and probably had to scrap the whole hard drive when they sold it for parts on ebay, but my primary concern was that all of my data was protected, and it was. i'm so glad that i was using maximum security back then that i've always used it since, and having the fingerprint reader made that very easy - it was impossible to even access the hard drive without a valid fingerprint or password, which makes the computer much less attractive to thieves.
so i try to use maximum security on this macbook. unfortunately whole drive locking is not an option, but i've locked my data using filevault or whatever and require a password every time it wakes up from sleep. this is of course very annoying but i will not do without it after my theft experience. at one point i swore i'd never buy a macbook that didn't have a fingerprint reader, but i caved. i am still sad that it doesn't have one, its such a cheap, powerful, and easy security device for these expensive and easily transportable little machines. at least my data is safe.
continuing on - i love the sleep/hibernate on the macintosh. it works very well. its fast and really saves the battery life, which compared to my thinkpad is phenomenal. the screen has a higher resolution and that's nice-ish, but really not that important. i don't have microscopes for eyes, and while i do have 20/20 uncorrected vision the teeny-tiny text that shows up in programs like iwork's numbers i find to be on the small side. but the screen looks clearer and sharper than my thinkpad's 3 year old screen and i like the nonreflective shiny screen, i think it does make it clearer.
plus, so far nearly everything i've tried to do with this mac has worked perfectly the first time i tried to do it. that's been nice.
some of the hugest annoyances i found were the dialog boxes. i'm a huge fan of using the keyboard as much as possible. i hate mouses and i especially had track pads. i much prefer an actual mouse when one is required and for dialog boxes or little things i got very accustomed to the thinkpad eraser pointer. it keeps your fingers on the home keys so you don't have to go searching for the mouse when you need to click on something. i type pretty fast and switch between kind of a surfing mode, where i'm using the trackpad primarily and mostly reading and scrolling and clicking, and a writing/editing/working mode, where i'm using the keyboard extensively and typing, doing math, etc. and my hands are exclusively on the keyboard. reading email for me is more of a typing thing because i like to reply and so my fingers stay on the home keys mostly. websurfing is mostly mouse based.
so these dialog boxes when i first encountered them, required using the mouse to click on them when sending an email message using
another really annoying thing is when you switch applications using CMD-TAB the top window is often not activated. in fact, no window is activated by default, so while the application is ready you've still got to get a window to focus. i'm not sure if this is a bug in mozilla apps (i've seen it mostly in firefox and thunderbird, my two most used apps) but gosh is it annoying!
just now i flipped from this firefox window to my thunderbird window. i got there and the mail window was dimmed and not accepting keyboard input. i had to use CMD-` to activate it before i could navigate with the keyboard. holy freaking toledo! THIS IS EASILY THE SECOND DUMBEST THING EVER. but again i'm not sure if its a mac os x problem or a thunderbird/firefox/mozilla problem.
continuing on - i tried to connect my mac to a friends to share some music and pictures. she was running an older version, 10.3 or something, on a G4 12" - gosh what a lovely small awesome machine! i am so jealous of its small size and elegance that i am no longer happy with this monsterous brute of a white machine. well i guess the jury is still out on that but this macbook is in fact larger than my thinkpad and far larger than her 12" g4.
but anyway the firewire connection did not work. her mac couldn't read mine and mine couldn't read hers. we tried target disk modes, repartitioning, and all sorts of nonsense but were never successful. we ended up using an external firewire drive to transfer stuff but shiz-nits that was annoying. i thought for sure that this was gonna be one of those things that "just works." maybe my mac karma isn't really there yet.
today i signed on to ichat for the first time. i'm now on aim and gtalk. lovely. i need yim, too, so i had to install another app for that. seems like its working okay but how nice would it be to just have them all in one place? yeah i know some kinda yabber jabber thing gets it done but i want it to "just work."
don't get me wrong, i'm not afraid of terminal. i popped a console screen open when my macbook started to slow down inexplicably when switching apps to run 'top' and see where my resources were going. this is before i discovered activity monitor - basically a colorful 'top' command very similar to the windows process explorer or task manager or whatever they call it. i dig the activity monitor! i like the pie chart showing who is eating my ram. since i've only got a gig and 460mb is active (235 of it in firefox, i'm also running google earth which has about 40mb live and more than a gig swapped out, thunderbird the same, itunes the same, in fact it seems like every app has a gig swapped out.) but i came to the quick conclusion that 1gb isn't really enough ram for this puppy. that is probably why i was getting spinny swirly color kaleidescope circles whenever i switched among biggish apps. i was still surprised to see it lugging so much, this behaviour only happens on my xp box when i really push it. and i often really push it, so maybe i'm just more familiar with how far i can push it -- it just didn't feel like i was pushing this mac all that far. here's what i'm running:
firefox
thunderbird
google earth
itunes
system preferences (i didn't even realize that was still running)
activity monitor
yahoo messenger
spotlight (i barely know what this is but so far its very cool)
ichat
finder
numbers
dashboard client
system profiler (what is this?)
dock
terminal
loginwindow
quicktime player (i gotta remember to quit things i guess)
preview (same)
atsserver (??)
systemuiserver (i can guess)
mdworker
ichatagent
calculator (love! the rpn mode so cool! needs financial functions though)
etc etc.
really not that much stuff if you ask me.
maybe having that extra gig of ram on my pc just really helps that much. i've ordered more memory from crucial to address this problem.
ok so another issue, i was using firefox to view some videos in wmv format and it just didn't work. workaround- save them to desktop and double click. use the flip4mac wmv player. works fine. but why not save these files properly? ANNOYING!
photo booth just crashed. no reason given. i had the camera open in ichat and that seemed to screw things up. i'm just really surprised at all these small things that go wrong, i had this image in my mind of stuff that just worked, and worked right the first time, and worked the way you expected it to.
and this harsh dose of reality has kicked in. the only thing i really miss is the error messages that actually provide helpful information. these ones are incredibly cryptic and confusing. i have no idea why this stuff is crashing or not working, and apparently neither does macbook.
we'll see if as i get better at using this thing if these problems kind of go away or if maybe i'll get used to them and i won't notice them so much.
though i do think that is kind of weak, and that's why i started this blog- so that i could remember my first impressions without them being clouded by familiarity and workarounds.
so i plan to put up everything that bugs me about my new mac here.
and since i bought it after 31-oct i can return it up until 8-jan without penalty. and i very well might do that, unless i really really like it so much more than my windows xp thinkpad.
more soon! cheers.
- g
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