What happens when you make a long-time PC worker use a Mac? First of all, all the little differences come to the fore.In computer terms, the closest that we tend to get in rivalries to match the whole Ford/Holden car spat would be between the Mac and Windows worlds. No offence intended to the Linux crowd, but Mac and PC users have been throwing spears at each other for much, much longer than people have been proselytising on all things penguin.
I'd been around Macs for some time, commented on plenty, but it struck me recently that I'd not used one in a continuous way since I was still being educated -- and that was some time ago, when, for example, a colour Mac was a wondrous thing. Hence the next four weeks, where I’ll be attempting to perform as many of my normal daily tasks on a Mac as possible.
Depending on which side of the fence you sit, I’ll either be transformed to the one true faith(tm), or left horribly, horribly scarred by the experience. A third moderate group of users tends to think that a computer is just something that you use to perform given tasks, but where’s the aggressive fun in that approach?
The Equipment: One LCD-Screen iMac. At 800MHz and 256MB of memory, I’m not expecting great things, but then again, for my needs it should be plenty.
To borrow an overused phrase from Pulp Fiction, it’s the little differences that you notice, and over my first week of working on the iMac, it’s been the smaller things that have cropped up time and time again.
First of all, there’s the matter of the default iMac mouse. Sure, it looks nice, but (and I’m going to annoy someone here, most probably the designer) it’s the worst mouse I’ve ever attempted to use. I say attempted, because to be frank the no-button-clear-monstrosity lasted all of one day before I cast it from my sight and plugged in my regular USB mouse, the Logitech MX500. Impressively, it worked right from the second I plugged it in. The no-button mouse still lurks in the background for when I might need something to crush cockroaches with.
The default keyboard’s a lot better than the mouse; the inbuilt USB ports are a nice touch, although it is taking me a lot of trial and error not to hit the control key rather than the Apple keys for shortcuts. On that subject, I’m surprised with such a visual system that I’m still using a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I’m still coming to grips with the whole disassociated taskbar as well, which means I’m leaving a lot of applications open as my Windows-centric brain tends to think that a program whose window has been closed is dead and gone.
While the iMac screen and base are great attention seeking devices – nearly everyone who passes by and sees me working stops to wiggle the screen and ask where the PC case is, I’m still struck by the urge to open it up, and possibly just to run it with the innards exposed, just because I can. I guess that’s part of PC culture that hasn’t gone over to the Mac – yet.
My first work-related task has proven a touch tricky. On the Windows platform, I tend to use the excellent Notetab for simple text editing and HTML conversion, but looking around I’m finding it hard to locate a Mac equivalent – if anyone knows of one, drop me a line.
Next week: Mac apps – how do they stack up?
Alex Kidman is ZDNet Australia’s Reviews & GameSpot editor. Want to tell him to run screaming from the Mac, or welcome him to the family? You can email him your thoughts here.
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