The Daily Bits

I’ve had the MacBook Pro for slightly over 6 months now. I can tell you that it is the best computer I have ever had. It’s just as fast as the day I got it and very reliable. You may remember I made this post about how there were a few things that bothered me. I’ll go through those now.

• System settings: Pretty much found where everything is and learnt the “control panel” back in April.
• Keyboard shortcuts: There’s still the odd occasion when I’ll press Win + D to hide my windows and see the desktop. But for most cases I find F11 ok.
• Office: This is the only PowerPC remnant on my system. I am waiting with eager anticipation for Office 2008. Beta is due sometime in January. I tried the new iWork but there’s just no comparison between it and Office. If I didn’t have to open up and be able to deliver Office documents I would definitely be using it. I know you can, but I just want it to work.
• CS3 came out and it works at a reduced standard for some things. Photoshop is decent, but Dreamweaver is a overloaded POS. The FTP doesn’t work sometimes which is really problematic. To top it off it really just feels like a port of a Windows application. To remedy this I will be using TextWrangler from Bare Bones software. It has built in FTP with a SFTP option which is good for when I’m at school or on an open network.
• Browser: Still using Firefox as the RSBandB forums don’t display properly in Safari.
• 2GB RAM has really paid off. I am able to run Windows/Linux in VMWare or Parallels without much of a decrease in general performance. Not that I need to run it all the time but it works.
• Screenshots: I have wrote two apple script screenshot applications. Basically all they do is use the built in screencapture unix program and send the output to a folder with an incremented file name. They get the job done but I was unable to add a date into the filename.

One thing that I wish I had Windows for was Messenger. It just is so much nicer on Windows. The mac version is about 2 versions behind the Windows one. It doesn’t even have support for audio clips. This was the first version where “emote stealing” was added (6.0). Adium never worked properly for me. It would drop messages and it was a paint to start group conversations. Not to say that MSN doesn’t have faults… it does.

Aside from MSN my mac experience has been great. I would highly advise anyone who wants a new computer to get one. In my mind if you just play Runescape, do school work, surf the web, and check email a mac is fine for you. This is the majority of the market out there.

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