Quote: "eh, You think OSX is the most stable operating system ever right?Well, Ive seen the grey screen that tells you to restart A LOT!"
I'd get your Mini replaced then, my G5 iMac works perfectly and even on the odd chances that I've managed to crash Finder, you can still restart it easily. From the Terminal, you can do anything (unlike Windows when Explorer dies)
Quote: "Also the dock can be annoying, its hard to tell which apps are open or not... You have to minimize an app to make it go to the dock... unlike windows and linux where its there all the time its open..."
Huh? It's obvious which apps are open - they've got a little arrow under the icon. If they aren't on the dock in when started, they're added to the right-hand side. Running apps are ALWAYS on the dock, whether they are on-screen or not, and always on cmd-tab.
Then of course there is the F9 key which is the fastest way possible to select which 'app window' you want to use, I don't think I could live without it now. F10 for singling out just that applications window, F11 to get to your icons.. ahhhh, Expose bliss!
The best thing about OSX is that the apps are not all stuck within the one window per application.
Quote: "Also the Maximize button (green) isnt really a maximize button... its a "fit to content" button, so you have to manually position windows and drag them out to make them fullscreen."
The green control is not called 'Maximise', so don't expect it to work like that. It's called Zoom - as-in zoom to fit window contents, which it does just fine, and is a complete god-send in Photoshop.
Quote: "Also my keyboard isnt recognized propely... For example the hash key gives me a backslash : / . . . And ive tried configuring it a lot!"
There is no hash key on a Mac keyboard. Alt-3 is the hash symbol.
Quote: "EDIT: also, when you click to close an app you havent actually closed it... you have to click manually at the apple bar at the top... so to close firefox you have to close the firefox window and then choose "Firefox->Quit Firefox""
That's because the close button doesn't close the application, and was never intended to. It's not called 'Close app', it's 'Close Window'.
It just sounds to me like you're really not used to the way in which Macs work at all. Get over the 'everything runs inside a window' mantra from the MS world, it doesn't apply here. You're now dealing with a proper OS, one which Vista is stealing heavily from (thank goodness)
This was typed out on my iMac G5 (upgraded to 1GB).
soapy - here are some differet views for you:
If you've used a PC for years (Windows, not Linux) then trust me, it will come as quite a shock when you move to OS X. Everything will feel 'strange' and 'in the wrong place' at first. It takes time to get used to. I honestly reckon it took me a good three weeks of solid every day use to feel comfortable on my Mac and understand what was really going on, and even now I keep finding loads of little extras.
But now I never even turn my PC on unless it's to check a forum game or something. Every piece of work I do, every graphic I create, is all on my Mac. They are Internet developers dream machines to be honest, especially as they run from a BSD core, networking is just built into them perfectly - connect to a webdav server for example, add it to your keychain and treat it like any other folder / drive (without the need for 3rd party software). Open Terminal and voila.. you can ssh directly into a remote server. Apache and PHP come installed by default (perfect for me, although I had to upgrade the version of PHP on here).
Spotlight is incredible and can find pretty much anything! From digital camera photograph comments (embedded in the images themselves) to email content, to Word documents - it can search the lot, and does it instantly. Custom saves can be stored as well (for projects for example).
I love Smart Folders, I love the Dashboard and have a range of cool widgets on it
including a neat calculator, calendar, iTunes controller, Dilbert strip of the day, BBC radio widget, latin (lorem ipsum) generator, php document search, dictionary search, etc! You can get loads of nice (and loads of useless!) dashboard widgets and they can really save some time - whack F12 and they all appear.
PDFs which are clunky horrible things on the PC (thanks to the piss poor PDF viewer available) are just a native Mac file format. Heck even screen grabs save out in PDF format! They open in an instant, and virtually all apps support them. OSX has loads built-in that takes third party apps on Windows to gain - screen grabbing for example is just a keyboard short-cut away (partial grabbing, window grabbing, full screen, etc).
There is a sense of unity between Mac applications which you don't get on the PC. iCal can notify you of appointments via Apple Mail, loads of apps can access your images stored in iPhoto - which is a superb program in its own right, and I totally love their print ordering service! Photoshop is a dream to behold and I'm quite sure is why the Mac is even still around!
I wish I could have got one of the new iMacs to be honest, with the built-in iSight and faster processor, but never mind! The way OS X works will totally throw you off to start with, and when you click around and expect it to react like Windows and it doesn't, you'll think 'huh?!', but the longer you use it, the more you realise why it works the way it does. If your Powerbook is really just for word processing then you may never use your Mac enough to appreciate it fully, which would be a shame.
Other than for testing games / TGC products, I don't really intend to turn my PC back on or upgrade it until Vista is released.
Cheers,
Rich
Exit Planet Dust
