Fruit

Ok I did it. I"ve been whinging on for months about wanting a new mac laptop, and yesterday I finally bought one. I haven't owned a fruit-box since the Macintosh Plus (and I was jealous of those who had the super-cool external 20 Mb hard drives, which were the size of phone books). Since then it's been a long string of windows and linux boxes, including my poor ailing HP laptop which took a beating and got me through college, but as it's now missing keys, overheating and the fan makes a terrible grinding/flapping noise which was really embarrassing in class. I've been following the press and the blogs about OS X, and it's latest incarnation Tiger, but every time I sat down to work on one I couldn't figure out the GUI, so I'd just admire from afar. But when it came down to spend some serious money on a new laptop I really wanted it to be a mac.

So how's 'The Switch?' my geekier friends may be asking..

I got to say, I like it. In fact I love it. It took a few hours to retrain my hands, but now that I've been running this thing since about noon yesterday almost nothing feels odd or out of place. It's certainly easier to pickup than windows > linux. The secret is in the built in mega-search tool Spotlight, and a little 3rd party app called Quicksilver. Quicksilver is simply the best thing to come along to laptop computing since wifi. The website doesn't do it justice. It's a search tool/launcher that learns how you use your machine. For example, I'm writing this blog, but say I want iTunes open, all i have to do is hit 4 keys and iTunes is open. No mouse hunting, or drilling down application menus. Just four keys. And it works with all the stuff on my machine. Apps, documents, commands, whatever. It's simply brilliant and I haven't even begun to use it's capabilities yet. It does more than I can even comprehend at the moment, but if you have a mac, get quicksilver right now. You'll be amazed.

So. I'll pause on the mac-fanatic tip for a moment and post some photos that have been piling up.