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Update on the PC to Mac move

Week 2 of the move from the old Dell machine to the iMac. Things are getting better and while I’m not a power user yet, I’m quite comfortable already. My biggest disappointment was the awful look of the Palm Desktop on the Mac OS and I knew that I had to give it up. I installed Missing Sync and was able to synch my Zire 72s with Apple’s address book and iCal almost on the first try (had to cancel a couple of old conduits still trying to talk to the Palm Desktop). Turns out that now that my data is all gathered in iCal, I quite like the look and feel of it and that’s a big step towards feeling comfortable on the iMac.

Unfortunately, I’m still unable to sync via Bluetooth so I have to use the USB cable. Not a huge deal, but it’s annoying. I’m tempted to buy a Bluetooth mouse just to do something with Bluetooth! I bought a Mac because I had been convinced that networks and communication between devices were much easier to set up than on a PC and I have to say that it hasn’t been my experience yet.

The iPod/iTunes move went quite smoothly, thanks to my LaCie external drive where all my music was stored. The songs I had bought on iTunes all made their way back into the iMac without problems.

It’s still too early for me to be able to tell if the platform is such a huge advantage over Windows XP, which was quite stable on my old Dell. I guess it will be more apparent when I start playing with video editing and other more complex tasks which were so frustrating on the PC.

Overall, I’m happy about the move but a few things bug me:

-Firefox seems a lot more unstable on the Mac. It « hung » 4 or 5 times in the last 10 days when I visited sites with interactive applications (Flash or other). That had never happened on the PC. What’s up with that? Is Safari more stable?

-I can see why the hand-holding and the integration between the various applications can be convenient, but it can become quite frustrating. When I plug in my digital camera, iPhoto pops up and seems to be my only choice of accessing the content on the camera (unless I buy a card reader). It starts building up a bunch of folders for me and makes extra copies of photos in a different location. Isn’t that taking a bit too much space on the hard drive? What if I have my own filing system? To keep doing things my own way, I have to take the time to disable the automatic features of iPhoto.

Also, if you want to use the integrated e-mail function from iPhoto (which is cool because it makes reducing the size of the pictures quick and easy), your options are limited to using Mail, Eudora and AOL. I’m using Thunderbird… so that’s a lost feature for me. (If there’s a solution to that, let me know.)

-The design of the iMac is beautiful and sleek, but why on earth would you put the USB ports in the back? If you want to plug in something, you have to get up from your chair, walk around the desk, hold the screen to keep it from tilting while you push in the USB cable. It would have been much smarter to put those USB ports on the side of the unit. And why are the two USB ports on the keyboard only USB 1.1 and not USB 2.0 ?

-One of the weirdest things to get used to for an old-time PC user is the changing menus at the top of the screen. I have a 20″ screen. When I’m working on a window that’s located at the bottom right of the screen, I have to go all the way back up to the top left of the screen to access the menus (I don’t know all the keyboard shortcuts yet). You also have to remember to highlight the window whose menu you want to access. Small stuff, but it takes some getting used to.

Still to come:

-Setting up a wireless network for the printer.
-Installing my screenwriting software, which, I hear, has a few bugs on the Mac OS.
-Finding a good, free FTP application for the Mac and getting it to work.
-Move my blog to WordPresss.