Early Days with my Mac

On May 17, 2008, in Mac, by Anuj Gakhar

As stated in my earlier post, I have got myself a Mac recently. There was no real reason for me to do so, but I just wanted to go ahead and try it and I had also heard some good things about it from a few people, so I thought lets get one then! Before this, I never really worked on any OS other than Windows, which makes it a bit slow when it comes to getting my head around some of the stuff.

So far, I only have gotten as far as setting up Eclipse/ColdFusion on the machine, install some IM softwares, install FTP client, setup my email and I think thats about it. In general, things seem to be taking more time than normal. I will try and put some of my initial thoughts on some of the things I notice and I know I could be completely wrong because of my lack of awareness in the Mac world.

Things I don’t like :-

1) Nothing is without a cost! – That seems to be the norm in the Mac world. Every little utility you need e.g. Text editor , ftp clients etc are all with a price tag. I am not against paying for softwares but , to be honest, coming from Windows, I am not used to it. Again, I could be wrong but if thats the case I would like to be corrected.

2) Some very basic things like making hidden files visible and vice versa is not part of the OS or atleast that’s what I found out from my little search on the subject. I would have expected this to be a simple toggle on/off config in the Finder window. Cant think of a reason why its not there.

3) I am not sure if I am right or not but I could not find a way to eject a CD/DVD other than ejecting it from the context menu. I was expecting a hardware eject button (spent a fair amount of time looking for it actually and finally said to myself, “get over Windows” !!)

There are a few other minor things but it all comes down to getting used to it I guess.

Things I like :-

1) I love the dock and the way the whole thing works! The way the dock elements start jumping when an app needs attention is just awesome!

2) I love the fact that I dont really have to worry about viruses when I am on Mac. Getting an Antivirus up and making sure its always up-to-date and occassional cleanup/system checks were just so annoying in Windows.

3) I also like that Apache/PHP is all built in and no extra effort is required to get those things up and running.

I like it overall as a better system to work with, its more stable and reliable and I beleive I just need to give myself some time to get used to it.

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7 Responses to Early Days with my Mac

  1. Robert Burns says:

    Just thought I’d try and help.

    http://FTP...
    from Finder go up to the ‘Go’ context menu, and choose ‘Connect to Server’ and enter ftp://username:password@ftp.domain.com, this will just make the connection and it will be available from your finder window. For serious FTP work though I can’t say enough about Transmit from Panic.

    CD/DVD eject…
    Should be the button in the top-right corner of your keyboard. Up-arrow with a line below it.

    Text Editing…
    There are several built in, but I highly recommend TextMate.

    Hope this helps.

  2. Robert Burns says:

    The above post didn’t come out as expected. Just drop me a line and I will respond via email.

  3. TJ Downes says:

    “I love the fact that I dont really have to worry about viruses when I am on Mac. Getting an Antivirus up and making sure its always up-to-date and occassional cleanup/system checks were just so annoying in Windows.”

    I love that most Mac users think this way. One day I am going to have myself a huge laugh 😀

  4. Michael says:

    I use Cyberduck for FTP, it’s donationware. For a text editor you can get textwrangler free from http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/download.shtml

  5. Scott Stroz says:

    I have been usinf Filezilla for FTP and have not had any issues.

    I will also second Text Wrangler.

  6. Brad Roberts says:

    Dragging the CD icon on your desktop to the trash will eject the disc.

  7. Anuj Gakhar says:

    @Robert Burns : Thanks a lot. Those tips are definitely useful.

    @Michael, thanks. Will check CyberDuck and text Wrangler out.

    @Scott, I actually ended up using Filezilla myself as thats what I used to do on Windows as well. Thanks.

    @Brad Roberts :I managed to do that but I just was looking for a hardware key to do that and Robert just told me how to do that.

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