Howdy, Everybody!
Things are going great with the transition. Hooking the Mac up to the network at my Day Job was a no-brainer. I had an old 5-port hub already, so all i needed was a couple of ethernet patch cables to split the wire in my office between my desktop and the new MacBook Pro. I plugged it in, and was surfing the internet within instants. I browsed the network, identified myself, and it mounted the shared directories I needed. I should probably mention that it is a peer-to-peer network with everything else running XP. I was also able to print without any problems. On my XP machine I shared my HP Deskjet, then went and found it on the Mac and I was in business.
It's amazing. We upgraded a couple of machines on our network from Windows 2000 to XP partly to make it easier to get them all to talk to each other. Here I go, plug in a Mac, and I'm cooking within five minutes, tops. It blows me away how much easier this was than if it had been an XP machine.
The Mac is multi-homed, too. I don't have to do anything at all to switch between work and home. I do manually turn Airport on and off on the laptop to save battery life, but if it is turned on, it works. When I get to work, I plug in the ethernet cable before I wake the laptop up, and it is transparent.
You're probably wondering about file compatibility. Transfering files is no problem. OS X handles PDF files natively, as far as I can see. It is far easier to create a PDF than on XP. You basically print something, and select 'save as PDF' option. This requires extra software ($$) on XP. As far as office files, I bought iWork 06 when I bought the machine, and it is supposed to open Doc files; but I haven't tested it yet. So far, I do not have an analog of Excel, but there are a couple of programs out there that claim to be competent spreadsheets that can open XLS files. I haven't gone there yet. There is also a version of Microsoft Office trial version that comes on the machine, but I haven't played with it yet - I'm trying to avoid it. File compatibilty of common types like JPG or TXT are of course no problem.
Last night I bought a Logitech VX Revolution mouse for the laptop, to use when I have a desk handy. The instructions were less than informative. For the Mac, you have to download the Logitech software - it's not on the CD. The other thing that I found odd was that there was no clue in the User's Guide or on the mouse itself as to which way to insert the battery. I looked it over carefully and could not find a polarity mark. Logitech makes the best mice out there, as far as I am concerned, so these issues were a surprise to me. The software also required a reboot, unlike most Mac software I have installed so far. But once I got to that point, it does seem to be working well.
I am still exploring the software that comes on the Mac. I really like the integration of the Address Book with other applications. The Mail program makes it really easy to select alternate email addresses if you want to send a mail to a non-default address for somebody. Other applications seem to use the Address Book, too. One of the really nifty features of the BeOS operating system was an actual data type in the file system for contacts, that was shared by any program using the system. One of my pet peeves of Windows is that there is no similar facility. This would be such a useful thing to have- no more retyping or exporting/importing contacts between different email or PIM programs; but not in Windows. The Address Book in OS X seems to be pretty close to this, with many programs able to access the data. For instance, Notebook has the capability of associating a contact with an entry in the Notebook. (Notebook is a shareware Personal Information Manager). This interoperability seems to be missing from Windows, probably due to Microsoft's desire to sell you a copy of Outlook.
I have (for the moment) settled on Safari as my browser. It's native to OS X, and so far at least, I have had no funky website problems with it, once I had downloaded and installed the Flash plug-in. It works pretty much the same as FireFox so why not use it? But I do have Firefox installed in case I come to a site that won't work in Safari.
I could go on for quite a while. Looking back, I see that I keep using phrases like 'no-brainer' and 'working well' and 'no problem'. I do have to say that this is really looking good so far. The only reason I can think of at this point why anyone would hold back with going with a Mac is if there is some program out there that doesn't have a Mac equivalent. There are a few; for instance, at my Day Job, I use the Solid Edge cad system daily, and it has no analog on the Mac. There are cad systems out there for the Mac, but the company has this investment in Solid Edge (years of data accumulation), and so far as I could find, none of the available OS X compatible cad products approach Solid Edge in capability.
Which brings us to what comes next. I bought a copy of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. This product is a virtual machine emulator for the Mac. You run Parellels Desktop and install an operating system in the virtual machine, which thinks it is running stand-alone but is actually running inside the emulator on the Mac. So in the next few days I will be buying a copy of Windows Vista to install in Parallels Desktop on my Mac. I have used VMWare in the past on my desktop, so I have some idea of what I'm getting into. I'm hoping this Mac has enough horespower to make it practical, what with the dual processors and 3 GB of ram and everything.
Why am I doing this? Well, primarily for training - I want to learn the ins & outs of Vista because I usually wind up trying to help other people a lot, and the only way to know how is to go there first. Secondarily, I want to see if it's really a practical alternative for those programs mentioned above that won't run on the Mac. If I can run Solid Edge under Vista inside of OS X on a Mac with acceptable performance, that will really say something about the practicality of the transition to the Mac. If I can also run the company's (Day Job) accounting program as well, then there are no obstacles whatever to moving any user in our company to the Mac.
I'll let you know how it goes... See you next time!
-Pop
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