MacBook Pro/Day 2 - Another View

Ok, Since Rama started blogging about his MacBook Pro experience. I guess I should too. Here's some initial impressions, in no particular order. Flipping Latch Button - By far the most annoying thing. I'm almost ready to do a web search to see who's got the best way to open one of these suckers. My technique has evolved into holding the back of the 'puter with one hand, while shoving a finger in the latch. But there has got to be a better way. What? Me change? - Instead of taking this as opportunity to change how I work, I have found that I've spent much of my time trying to make things the way they are on my Solaris and Windows boxes. Pitched Safari, in favor of Firefox. And with it comes Thunderbird for email. I've found Fink for all my favorite Open Source wares. Fink is much like Blastwave which I have a love/hate relationship with. XEmacs, how does thou window? - XEmacs is what led me to Fink in the first place. After I used FinkCommander to install XEmacs, I eagerly opened a Terminal to start the sucker up, only to see it fire up in TTY mode, not Windowed. DOH! After reading a few FAQs I realized I had to fire up XDarwin - as well as install XUser.app, to get X Windows back. Its pretty - I am impressed with the fit and finish of the laptop. Definitely one of the better looking and compact laptops I've owned. And incredibly quiet. Nice. I think Rama's initial entry profiled the size differences between the Ferrari and MacBook. That was part of my motivation for giving it a try. The slightly smaller footprint works much better in the Dakine "Transit" Street bag I just switched to. APPLE - COMMAND - CONTROL - The new keyboard shortcuts take a little of getting used to. Many are the same as Windows and GNOME, but others use the APPLE/COMMAND modifier with the usual key instead of the CONTROL modifier I am used to. Oh and CONTROL is way too small. I end up hitting FN lots of times instead. The most annoying of the shortcuts is that I can't use APPLE-TAB to roll between both X11 and Darwin apps. I have to hit APPLE-TAB to get to the X Applications, then hit APPLE-` to toggle through my X11 applications. You are getting sleepy - The laptop sleep mode - and resulting wake up - is very nice. Although I didn't have huge problems with sleep on the Ferrari, the MacBook Pro is much quicker at both sleeping and waking up. Ok. That's the brain dump for now. I'm trying not to form too much of an opinion about the user interface until I get more experience with it.

(2007-01-28 16:07:39.0) Comments [2] // Permalink