Daley Ponderings

I started a new IT job recently, and the majority of the people there have Macs, so I have been bringing one home in order to learn more about them.  They have come a long way in 20 years, when I used to play on a Macintosh SE (with three floppy drives, a nice bonus so you didn't have to switch floppies so much)

I like a lot of the interface things that they do - little tiny things really do make a big difference.  In Microsoft Windows, I always turn off all the silly animation things because they are annoying, make things run slower, and don't provide any benefits.  But, on the Mac, most of the things are  nice, and not annoying.  It definitely needs a right-mouse button - having to do control-click to get to what would normally be on the right-mouse-click menu is slower, but I suppose they won't ever add a second mouse button, or they would be accused of copying Windows or something.

It took a little while to get used to the Dashboard, but I now like it.  Installing applications is exactly how it should be - just drag stuff around, put it in the trash when you are done, you don't have to worry about registry settings, or uninstalling it correctly, etc.

The machine I spend the most time on is running OSX 10.4, which is a bunch better than OS 9 (though I only spent a little time with OS 9), I suppose mainly because I can open a Terminal window, and be into the Linux world that I already understand.

Ironically enough, a couple things were hard to find because I was thinking about it with a "Microsoft brain", and after five minutes, discovered that if I just thought, "How should this work?", I discovered that the easy way is how it does work.

In Core Fun House, an image manipulation application, it is missing one feature where I want to be able to drag items on the "effect" toolbar around, but other than that, it is quite easy to use, and easy to play around and explore.  I discovered it last night, and was playing around some while waiting for a SQL operation to complete, and showed Heather, and we laughed and laughed, though trying to be quiet, since the boys were sleeping.  I got it out again today, and Jonathan thought it was great, and although he had some trouble holding the mouse button down, while dragging the pointer with another finger, he did manage it some by himself, and some with me holding the button, and dragging the pointer himself. 

Here is what we were working on.  Jonathan did this one by himself.