Oooohhhh right, now I get it.
So my mac mini arrived last week. Three seperate boxes, one for the mini, one for the wireless mighty mouse and another for the wireless keyboard. What made me laugh was the fact that Joyce, arguably the smallest person in the world was carrying them to give to me. This stuff is actually completely tiny, it's really incredible. So much so, that I'm not actually sure what I'm going to be doing with the rest of the real estate of my desk, the bottom of my desk is also looking pretty barren, so I'm thinking there's going to be a trip to Ikea to get a table to put my stereo, thus freeing up enough space to get myself an A1 drawing board, as I see that coming in handy a lot in the coming year.
It took a total of 12 minutes from the second I connected all the wires to the second i was surfing the net and talking to Bonsai online. The machine picked up the mouse, keyboard and wireless router in seconds and I was actually up and running in no time at all.
So what is my initial reactions to OSX now that I've played around on it for more than 30 minutes? There is genuinely a hell of a lot to like. Things that as a windows user I came to accept because that was the norm. That all changed last year when I got into Ubuntu and realised that there was actually a different way. The problem I faced with Ubuntu however was the lack of sophisticated software aimed directly at the operating system and the lack of hardware drivers for a lot of my peripherals. Obviously this isn't the case here.
One of the greatest things for me however is the lack of having to shut down my computer every day. I put it to sleep and that's pretty much it. Loading it up again takes a total of 3 seconds and I'm up and running again. The quiet nature of the machine is an incredible selling point to me, since my previous machine, although a work horse in it's own right was fucking load as you like. So this was a breath of fresh air.
Then there's how it all clicks together. All downloads go into the downloads folder which I can access. Hardly anything is actually on my desktop anymore (save for my blue shuffle icon, which I love btw). Installing a programme requires me to move the downloaded programme into the applications folder. I've got several funky ways to see my documents and applications in that is slightly less archaic than the traditional drop down menu and the list goes on.
Reading through that last paragraph you'd think that I had absolutely no negative comments about the system. Unfortunately you'd be wrong about that. However as that's another post in and of itself I've had to split it up a bit.
Well, I'm glad you're liking it. You basically have the same set-up that I have.
Have you tried dragging and dropping a text selection? That's my favourite thing.
Welcome aboard Khaled! :)
Once you get tired if spinning pinwheels and lack of fullscreen, just remember that you can always install ubuntu or Windows on it.
I jest, I jest.
But seriously, while I love the hardware (and I'm actually sorta in the market for it), there are just some things about the OS that are ugh. I can't wait to hear your thoughts on:
* The dock
* Window buttons plus minus and "close"
Not that you have to defend your purchase, as I said I'm in the market myself :)
Joen, you're completely right about the dock. You'll love my solution for it. I just got rid of it. It really has no place here to be honest. There are some nice ideas behind it, like the new stacks in leopard, however the implementation is just not very elegant IMHO, which is very unbecoming of Apple really. Thankfully they've got some great tools that actually more than make up for that, which if you eventually come down this road, you'll also find invaluable like me.
Getting rid of it can work, most definately. It won't pop in while you're working on something.
However, it's also the main place where you can see what apps are running currently. I suppose that's a smaller thing as you could just "alt tab" to see those apps... but are there other alternatives I've missed?
Currently I'm still trying to decide which works for me better, spotlight or quicksilver. cmd+space (for spotlight), alt+space (for quicksilver) give me a host of things I can do instantly that is oh so much faster and more intuative that using the dock or the menu bar on windows. launching applications is pretty easy. Sometimes when I'm not feeling keyboard active then the dock is good old lazy proof (so I've hidden it on the left hand side, since the mouse is usually on the right hand side due to scrolling etc) and I've made it small. Like you said however knowning what you're running is as easy as alt-tab. Comes up with big chunky iconsso it's clear what I want.
Having the F-keys acting as hotkeys for itunes, spaces, expose, widgets and eject is absolutely perfect for me as well. if i can do away with two mouse buttons (which imho is not a very clever idea from a user's pov) i've decided to move that minimalism to the next step and get rid of the 'dock' style of getting to applications.
Joen, what is your great concern with knowing what apps you're running? Why does that even matter?
If I need an app to be running then I run it, quite often for weeks at a time.
You do seem to be up and running in minutes - it's slightly bewildering as a new windows box takes lonnnnng.
About the dock: I quicky put it on the left side and it seems to be fine over there.
Joen: "close" is actually quite handy and reasonably quickly it becomes intuitive. "Plus" works ok too - only in Safari I'd like it to either take up all the space on the screen (minus the dock) or at least a bit more padding. Right now it just scrunches up right to the sides of the website.