Mac Newbie Me
June 27th, 2009 by I am boon
Today, I started using a Mac as my main development unit, as a result of forgetting to bring my Dell power adapter. It didn’t take long for @rodgersn to setup his old white macbook with Textmate, Quicksilver and Xampp to get me up and running (about an hour or so).
One of the main changes for me was the use of my thumb (for the apple key) instead of my left pinky. I do a lot of alt-, shift-, ctrl- combinations to highlight, navigate, and select large and specific portions of text like words, lines, and sections of concatenated strings. I also use the HOME and END keys a lot on my PC, and I’m having to re-learn that a bit on a Macbook (Apple-left and Apple-right).
What I am experiencing, I believe, is a interaction paradigm originally set up by Apple, and probably borrowed by Windows since Windows 95, that has carried on until now. I am unsure whether which is better, but there are certainly differences in the way the two keyboard paradigms work, to achieve almost similar effects.
The keyboard layout also feels very different, but is probably a matter of adjusting. While the keyboard layout is quite consistent across all the Mac platforms, there are probably more dramatic variations between PC brands. However, I’ve used many PC keyboards in my life and I’ve not really had any problems with that - even with my logitech wireless keyboard that had an odd layout for the home-end-delete-pgup-pgdn “island” section.
The only thing is that it is now a double effort - getting used to a new keyboard layout AND fitting that into a Mac paradigm. The plus side is that I’ve always loved the tactile feedback of the Macbook keyboards.
I like that Apple makes it harder to shut down applications unlike Windows (x at the top left of window). You have to either go to the menubar or hit APPLE-Q. It’s a bit confusing but I guess that’s the price you pay to “get it” - you don’t want to shut down applications by mistake all the time - a good way to maintain consistency in the states of the system. I’m just not sure how a Mac handles the resource management for “minimized” applications, but it feels like they’ve done a good job of it.
The battery life for the white Macbook is fairly decent. A lot better than my Dell XPS1330. The screen, I guess is a combination of the rendering engine and the monitor itself. The XPS has a kind of glossy glare, and the font is sharp and crisp, while everything on a Mac sort of looks polished and seamless, very well integrated together (graphics/interface/rendering system). I have yet to see windows that are half-rendered, patches of square black boxes, etc on a Mac.
I can see why many designers take so well to this. It’s a piece of aesthetic perfection - a comforting reminder, tool and environment that bodes well with the cognitive effort of producing creative artefacts that are at least on par with the status quo.
That being said, I still feel there’s a strong element of satisficing about Windows platforms. People get by with it. And that’s really all they need.
But for now, I’m taking a step in another direction for the sake of curiousity, albeit a lighthearted one.