Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so it’s inevitable that I’d have this as a category.
Most of the computers in movies for several years have been Macintoshes, maybe because the Mac is the only computer that doesn’t look like every other computer and therefore benefits from product placement. But this is the first movie in which an entire iMac commercial runs on TV in the background of a shot.
How’s that for random trivia? Thanks to Roger Ebert’s review of Showtime for this little tidbit.
Unix Under the Desktop: A penguin’s eye look at Apple’s OS X, from Linux Journal.
Something for Casey — how to hack a half-price Apple Airport base station.
Hey — I’m famous! Or…something like that. See, I stumbled across a link earlier today that I thought might be of interest to my favorite Apple-flavored soap opera, As the Apple Turns — and they used it for one of their stories today! Too cool…check it out: Aqua in the candy dish!
Apple‘s got a great new iMac ad on the airwaves. Too cute!
MacWorld Expo SF is coming up next week, which normally has the various Mac rumor sites all a-tizzy trying to predict what may or may not appear. This time, around, however, Apple — rather than staying their characteristically silent self — is doing the online equivalent of tossing a goldfish into a pirahna tank, through the posting of oh-so-subtle headlines like ‘Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond.’ to their website. Now, now, shouldn’t tease the animals….
— AtAT’s take on Apple‘s apparent plans to make their most rabidly loyal followers’ heads implode.
[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.sys.mac.newuser-help Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]
Albert –
First off, I hope your experiences with OS X continue to improve, as you indicated they had started to in a followup post. Figured I could go ahead and jump in the fray, though… ;)
In article <asteg-5FD600.02164401012...@news.mindspring.com>, Albert Steg <as...@mindspring.com> wrote:
The installation process disbabled my Enternet software, crippling my internet access, and even when I got back to system 9 I found my internet aliases (eudora and netscape) hidden from my desktop and replaced with Explorer. Felt like a Microsoft ploy.
That’s something of a surprise. Each time I’ve done an OS X install (starting with the Public Beta), it’s gone smooth as silk. Really unsure as to what may have gone on to actually disable anything.
…and the interface is totally new, isn’t it?” Why is there no warning or explanation in the manual that this system represents a radical departure from the Apple of the past 15 years?
Well, it’s definitely a new system, but the manual I got – while really underwhelming – did at least have a cursory “this is what you’re gonna get” feel to it. Much as ‘puter people sterotypically go with a “install first, read later if something explodes” attitude, sometimes it can be helpful to at least flip through the documentation at least once first… ;)
I am, along with others, somewhat surprised that you were caught so completely off guard – wherever you’ve been, you must have been really out of touch. If you start poking around the web, though, there’s a lot of good information on all the various changes, both why they were done and what the various repercussions are. The OS X manual that Carl linked to (http://homepage.mac.com/rgriff/files/osxguide2.pdf) is a good start, I’d also recommend spending some time digging through Mac OS X Hints (http://www.macosxhints.com/), lots of good info on there.
Am I alone in being dismayeed and bewildered here? These huge Playskool-style icons,
These can be scaled up and down to your preferences…they are a wee bit on the big side by default.
the inability to open two windows at one time
You can have more than two open at once. Check your System Preferences and View Options (under the Finder’s View menu) for the various options there.
…the oily, gimmicky sluuuuurping of windows
Some people like the ‘genie’ effect, some don’t – I’ve switched it to the ‘scale’ effect, as it’s a bit less processor-intensive (and therefore a bit quicker on my machine).
down to the Windows-like “dock”
It takes some getting used to, but I’ve found the dock to be a very nice addition (though, I’ve gotta admit, I’ve liked certain aspects of the Windows taskbar too). I keep my dock devoid of any aliases, so that I don’t have to try to distinguish between icons of running aps and icons of apps that I can run if I want, and only use it for whatever’s running at the moment. For me it works much better as a application switcher than as a launcher, but different things work for different people…experiment with it a bit, after the initial shock, you may find it more to your liking.
instead of the crisp windowshade feature of previous systems….
As has been noted by a couple people, there is a shareware program that will bring windowshading back to OS X (though I don’t use it myself).
these are improvements?
Overall, yeah…just improvements with a bit more learning curve than has been necessary for past OS updates. But then, past OS updates didn’t completely rewrite the OS from the ground up, either…. :)
How about an explanation of the itools program, rather than just thrusting it at you in the config process?
Apple would do well to explain this a bit more. However, breifly, iTools isn’t so much a program as it is a set of services that Apple provides that you can use or ignore as you like. It includes free e-mail with a mac.com suffix, an online storage space (your iDisk), and some other features that can be explored in more depth on Apple’s iTools site (http://www.apple.com/itools/). You don’t have to use any of them, though, if you don’t want or need to.
Can I use Eudora instead of Itools. . .
Yup – I think there’s even an OS X version of Eudora out by now. Check VersionTracker (http://www.versiontracker/macosx/) to be sure.
or do I have to use Itools to access eudora now?
Nope, though you probably can use Eudora to access your iTools mac.com e-mail account if you’ve set one up (though I’m not 100% sure on that).
. . . granted I have to give it a chance, but I am not looking forward to this.
Well, go ahead and poke around, play for a while, and give it that chance. There’s some culture shock – especially since you apparently didn’t know what you were in for – but it’s not that bad once you get used to it.
The computing world needs an OS X ad blitz that would show people that Apple is alive and well in the OS business (and advertising would finally convince white people to relax around me, since they would then know that my wearing a T-shirt with a blue X on it doesn’t mean that I’m a Louis Farrakhan follower paying homage to Malcolm X, but, instead, I am a computer geek showing my OS partisanship).
— Rodney O. Lain, in his ‘iBrotha‘ column for MacObserver
The iPod certainly got a lot of attention when I showed it to people, including a Windows guy named Bill Gates. He spun the wheel, checked out the menus on the display screen and seemed to get it immediately. “It looks like a great product,” he said. And then he added, incredulous, “It’s only for Macintosh?”
— Steven Levy in Newsweek, commenting on Apple‘s new iPod mp3 player
Argh — I’m really starting to wonder if this whole site redesign was a bad idea. Between the fact that I’m learning how to correctly code CSS-based layout as I write this, and the bugginess in the current version of Internet Explorer (Exploder?) for Mac OS X, I’m never sure if something isn’t working because I screwed up, or because IE decided to tweak out on me again.
I think that I’ve got things so that they should be visible at the moment — at the very least, the page displays correctly under Opera for Mac OS X — but with IE crapping out every time I make a change, I’m not entirely sure. Keeping my fingers crossed, that’s for damn sure….
But, I’ll keep playing with it…hopefully I haven’t completely broken my site for anyone out there.
Yet.
Imagine the disincentive to software development if after months of work another company could come along and copy your work and market it under its own name…without legal restraints to such copying, companies like Apple could not afford to advance the state of the art.
— Bill Gates, 1983 (New York Times, 25 Sep 1983, pg. F2)